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Atari (well, the company that bought its name anyway) was in the news recently about a contest for software developers to do a remake of Pong. First thing that came to mind was, well, Bit.Trip already did it.

Bit.Trip is a series of 6 games that mix both old-school video games in a retro style with music and rythm gaming where you need to perform certain actions in synch with the music. They were first released as downloadable titles for the Nintendo Wii, but eventually was released as a game disc compilation for both the Wii and 3DS.

The game a quite challenging to say the least. Each time you miss a beat the “Nether” bar fills up until you pass from “Hyper” mode to the “Nether” where the games falls back to black and white. On the other hand, if you don’t miss beats long enough the bar of the higher more, be it back to “Hyper” or “Mega”, increases until you increase to the next mode. “Mega” is the same, but more colorful and with potential for score multipliers.

This basic principle applies to all 6 games. The first (Beat) is a single-player Pong game, using the controller’s orientation in your hands. In the second (Core), you intercept beats up, downleft or right from the center. The third (Void), you use the joystick to move an ever-increasing circle.

As you can notice, there’s a pattern of “gaming evolution” from one game to another. There is a simple story, shown through narration-less cutscenes starring a rectangular character called “Commander Video” (a throwback to Capcom’s “Captain Commander”, I guess), growing up by discovering the world around him, like a kid. By the third game of what seemed like a simple trilogy, Commander Video runs away with a rainbow trailing him, à la Commodore 64 box art. And the unexpected fourth game blew me away.