In 2008 Dylan Fitterer released Audiosurf on Steam, a game which I'd describe as a puzzle game wearing a rhythm game disguise. I liken it to games like Guitar Hero in the sense that the music that you choose to play would fly towards you in the form of beats arranged on a positional grid, but rather than hitting all those notes with precise timing, the goal is to fill up a puzzle grid by matching, shoving, or avoiding the oncoming music notes.
The other significant difference was that rather than shipping with hand-tuned tracks of curated music, Audiosurf worked with whatever music files you had on your computer. It easily became one of my most beloved games, not just because I could play my personal music library, but because it had competitive online scoreboards for each song.
The online scoreboards weren't perfect. The tracks were generated procedurally and deterministically, which is good when you're trying to perfect a song. But the track was generated for the particular music file you used, so two different encodings of the same tune might have the same twists and turns and hills on the tracks, but have different clusters of notes to hit. So you were never exactly sure whether your track had the same scoring potential as the track played by the stranger who you've been trading first place with back and forth for the past week.
The game also emailed you when you were dethroned, just to rub it in. I still have them all, archived away in my moldering Gmail.
I mostly remember Audiosurf as a destroyer of mouse buttons. Twice I had to unscrew my mouse's plastic case and apply epoxy where the post descending from the left mouse button had gouged a divot into the actual clicky actuator below (causing frustrating clicks that wouldn't register, or worse, register extra phantom clicks).
It didn't help much; the epoxy paste I used turned out to be softer than the plastic, womp womp.
The Contest
This is all relevant because I was poking around the lesser played corners of my music library a few days ago, and I stumbled across a few tunes that I would never have heard, had it not been for Audiosurf.
See, in 2009 I issued a challenge on the messageboard of a Team Fortress 2 community that I was a part of: an Audiosurf high score competition, consisting of two or three songs to compete over per week, with the playlist sourced by the participants themselves.
All in all, I ended up compiling a playlist of about a dozen tunes. I know the playlist, even though the messageboard is long gone, because I can see the little cluster of music files with a January 2009 timestamp on it, which is when I asked for music submissions. (Sadly I can't remember what music I contributed.) And also, the year 2009 is on the cheesy poster I made for it.
Erm, the title was a play on the inside meme "Helicopter: The Flying".
The competition turned out to be my favorite way of getting music recommendations, and so I would return the favor in the spirit of 2009 music libraries: sharing the literal music files themselves. (Streaming? Never heard of her. Actually that's a lie. Bill Priddle's website at one point streamed his album The Priddle Concern.)
The Playlist
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Thervold, KrewL_RaiN, if you're around, <3 u