Retro spotlight: Bit.Trip Beat

The first in what would become a series of games combining past and what was then present, and it's a good one.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Commander Video and the Runner series are pretty well-known at this point, but the origins of both go further back, and not within the platform genre at all. Bit.Trip Beat, styled as but not to be written as BIT.TRIP BEAT for the rest of this feature, is the genesis of Commander Video’s journey across time and genre. Unlike the series of platformers that Choice Provisions — formerly Gaijin Games — is best known for, Bit.Trip Beat is a paddle game. Like with the platformers, though, it’s also a rhythm game, with timed movements and button presses at the core of it all.

It’s like rhythm Pong, but only with the one paddle: the other side where you’d find an opposing paddle is instead throwing object after object at you in the hopes that you miss them with your paddle. There are boss fights, the stages are extremely lengthy, and you need to focus with both your eyes and ears in order to not just set a high score, but to complete each stage in the first place.

The story is that this is Commander Video’s journey through space, which is horizontally scrolling and for some reason involves a paddle. It was originally supposed to have an unmistakable Atari look and feel to it, with 8-bit and chiptune music to power the rhythm section of things, but as development moved along, some things changed. As programmer Chris Osborn told me back in 2009 in an interview, the studio looked backward at paddle games like Pong, but also to the present and more modern (at the time) games like Rez: so, while there is a much more basic form of Beat within this game, with grayscale and beeps and boops for sound effects, all sans music, Beat is primarily about bright colors, space-oriented effects that are meant to both draw the eye for admiration and also to distract you, and a soundtrack that is more influenced by the sounds of the past than being feeling like it’s from the time period it’s inspired by. It’s a blend of past and present, and one Choice Provisions pulled off.

While Beat originally released in 2009 on the Wii’s since-shut down downloadable service, WiiWare, it has shown up on a number of other platforms in between now and then. The Nintendo 3DS, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Playstation 4, the Switch… you can play Beat just about anywhere, sometimes as part of a collection that includes the whole rest of the Bit.Trip experience (so, six games, or, everything besides Runner2 and Runner3). While I have no problem with any of the other setups of the game, my preference is for the 3DS version (Bit.Trip Saga), and it’s due to the stylus controls.

The why of that will make sense momentarily — if you’ve played Beat before, you probably already know the answer, even. To replicate the control of classic paddle games that used inputs like a spinner, Beat was motion controlled by tilting the Wii Remote up or down. The system works, for sure, with all the kinds of positives and negatives that utilizing a spinner for controlling a paddle game would have in terms of sensitivity, with you maybe being under or overzealous in chasing the objects you’re supposed to be repelling. Using the stylus to drag the paddle to where it needs to go, however, is the control scheme with the most precision: and precision is vital in a game where, at times, your paddle is no larger than the pixel-sized objects you’re batting around.

Bit.Trip Beat is not an easy game. It isn’t meant to be. It has a very old-school design, in that there are just three levels, but they are lengthy ones, and they are going to take you multiple tries to finish, and even more to actually master in order to earn yourself a higher placement on the default high scores listing. When you fail, that’s it: you have to start the stage over. And you will fail.

“Beat” isn’t just the name of the game, but also central to how it plays. As said, it’s a rhythm game: each successful repel of an incoming “beat” will create a musical sound effect that enhances the stage’s soundtrack. This is why you need to use both your eyes and your ears in order to solve the puzzle that is Beat, as your vision of the beats might be obscured by the game’s backgrounds, or you might have to make a split-second decision between which of multiple beats is the one you’re going to need to repel next. The rhythm of the music can help you determine the correct answer in situations like that, and if you let yourself get swept up in how Beat sounds, you’ll find you’ll have an easier time of things.

The beats move in different fashions. Some will just come right at your side of the screen slowly, giving you plenty of time to send them back from whence they came. Some will require you hit them multiple times, and they’ll take little looping paths that force you to repel them in a different place the second time than you did the first time. Some will line up on screen and wait, and wait, and wait, with other beats being sent your way until you forget which line of currently inactive beats showed up first and will then be moving and need to be blocked first. Some will come in groups you need to line up to hit all of at once; some will come in staggered groupings that require you slide your paddle up or down at the appropriate pace in order to keep any from getting by you. You will have to be on your toes at all times, basically, especially because things can ramp up in a hurry even if they seem to be in a bit of a lull.

Compare what failure looks like in Bit.Trip Beat to what the rest of the game is designed like. Image credit: Giant Bomb

There are multiple phases within a stage, and they are all based on how well or poorly you’re playing. You start in “Hyper” mode, but continually and successfully repelling beats will bring you up to “Mega” mode, which will bring with it much more complicated backgrounds and distracting flashing lights. Why would you want to be there instead of in the safety of Hyper? Two reasons: another successful string of repelled beats while in Mega will fill up the same meter, but this time, it will bump up your score multiplier, and you can do that again and again to really make that score climb. Conversely, if you miss enough beats, you’ll be downgraded from Mega to Hyper, and from Hyper to Nether. Nether is the monochrome background lacking music, with the sound reduced to simple beeps and boops. If you continue to falter in Nether, then you will lose. So, the distracting backgrounds are there to try to mess up your game, sure, but if you’re in a place where you can even have that happen to you, then you’re in a relatively safe position.

The soundtrack is excellent, which is necessary for a rhythm game, sure, but it’s still worth pointing out that the chiptune-influenced tunes, composed by Bit Shifter [Edit: Matt Harwood apparently composed the stage themes, but no one knew that when the game released. Thanks to Chariblaze for pointing that out to me.] successfully pulled off what they needed to. There isn’t a ton of music in the game, given it has just the three levels, but it’s all a reason to play, for sure:

When Bit.Trip Beat released in 2009, we already had a few years of successful downloadable game projects behind us, but this still felt different and new all the same. It was such a well-executed and well-constructed idea, this blending of past and (then) present, and as something of an experiment itself at the time, a downloadable space at a low price point was a perfect way to release it. Sure, Geometry Wars was already a few years into their whole thing by then, but those games were retro-style games using modern technology to blow the distant past out of the water from a technical standpoint. The Bit.Trip games were very much a synthesis of past and present, a tribute to what was and a sign of what could be, with genres you didn’t typically see together colliding in the process. And all of it powered by retro-inspired rhythm and music, with distinctly retro gameplay and retro looks.

Bit.Trip, as a series, did well enough that it eventually landed physical compilations — this is kind of a standard practice these days, especially with companies like Limited run Games out there, but it was no sure thing in the aughts even after the initial success of the Bit.Trip games. And, as mentioned, its games are still re-released on consoles to this day, but it also helped usher into an era of retro, but new, one we’re still seeing thrive in 2022. This was a group effort, mind you, and not solely because of the games or decisions of Choice Provisions, but still, they had a hand in shaping the video game industry into what it is today. All of it feels obvious and like it’s always been there 13 years later, but it wasn’t: downloadable games like this were still very much an experiment in 2009, to the point that consoles and handhelds, at that stage, didn’t even necessarily make their physical releases available digitally. WiiWare wasn’t quite one full year old when Bit.Trip Beat released on the service in March of 2009. The Playstation Store, despite being on a system with much more internal storage, was just over two years old. Hell, Steam, which is all-encompassing today to the point that it’s difficult to remember the time before it existed, wasn’t even a full six years old when Bit.Trip first hit the Wii. It was truly a different time.

You can nab Bit.Trip Beat by itself for $5 on systems like the Switch, or you can find compilations like Bit.Trip Saga for somewhere around $15-20 as a used physical copy, for $15 on the 3DS eShop, or for all of $10 on the Playstation 4 (where the compilation is known as The Bit.Trip). Beat by itself is worth the $5, but the other games are good ones, too, so you won’t regret spending the extra $5-10 to just get them all in one go.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.