Correction: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the games for which Gordon McGladdery hired John Robert Matz to compose.

No one had ever commissioned Babbitt to write music, and he’d never collaborated with people who didn’t make music themselves. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. “It was like, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to write a couple pieces of music for this thing and get paid a bit of money? That sounds cool.’”

I first heard of Kentucky Route Zero because of Babbitt’s music. In 2014, I found his score for Act III while doing one of my regular Bandcamp searches for music tagged “Chicago.” (Babbitt lives in Los Angeles now, and Elliott is in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but Kemenczy—the only other employee of Cardboard Computer—remains based here.) I was smitten with the song “Too Late to Love You,” whose whale-call vocals undulate atop chintzy lounge-music claves and thin, crystalline synths. Babbitt is singing, but he’s processed his voice to sound feminine, alien, and a little robotic—the song is credited to a game character named Junebug.

Yetee Records has released more than 50 records and cassettes, including a seven-inch of music from Octodad sequel Dadliest Catch, a 12-inch of the score from 80s Konami arcade classic Gradius, and the soundtrack for TumbleSeed, a two-dimensional game in which a tottering seedling ascends a mountain pockmarked with holes and traps.

In 2007, Heinrich started making rudimentary compositions with free multitrack music software—especially one developed by Russian composer Shiru8bit, which emulated the sound of the Sega Genesis. It reminded Heinrich of the Yamaha YM2151 sound chip, which he particularly liked—it was used in many 80s arcade games, and Heinrich’s “ec2151” alias is in part a reference to it.

Chiptune pays tribute to the sounds of outmoded video games, whose technological limitations severely restricted their music but also forced a lot of make-do ingenuity. By the late 90s, when John Robert Matz was old enough to start taking inspiration from games, those limitations were long gone; Lennie Moore’s music for the 1999 intergalactic adventure Outcast involved a choir and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.