If you’re a retro video game geek, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got some old cartridges lying around. And if you also happen to be a musician (or you casually dabble), you may be familiar with chiptune — a form of electronic music that uses repurposed game cartridge sound chips as the primary instrument. Now, those two worlds are colliding more simply and conveniently than ever before with the Korg Gadget 3.0 synthesizer.
In collaboration with Taito and SEGA, essentially this device is a standalone 16-bit drum machine complete with 12 individual pads and simple slider controls. But what makes it interesting is the onboard sampler. You see, while the Korg Gadget 3.0 is pre-loaded with plenty of samples and sounds, it’s also offered with a series of video game-style cartridges that plug into the device as an ad-hoc program and load it with sounds borrowed from some of your favorite old-school games — including the likes of Space Harrier, Out Run, Golden Axe, and Fantasy Zone (amongst others). Best of all, the Genesis-inspired system is compatible with the Nintendo Switch. If you’ve ever wanted to make music inspired by your favorite ’80s Sega games, you can pick up this device starting July 11th of 2020 on the Nintendo eShop.
