{"id":79759,"date":"2022-09-27T15:56:03","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T15:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/trombone-champ-is-a-perfect-game\/"},"modified":"2022-09-27T15:56:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T15:56:03","slug":"trombone-champ-is-a-perfect-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/trombone-champ-is-a-perfect-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Trombone Champ Is a Perfect Game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s late in the evening, and I am watching along on my computer as a jovial-looking cartoon man named Beezerly lives out many people’ worst nightmare, confidently honking for a crowd on a brass instrument he cannot play. <\/p>\n

The moment the song picks up its tempo, Beezerly is outmatched. The bass marches in perfect time to relentless drums, inviting our young hero to toot out the intricate melody of \u201cHava Nagila\u201d at lightning speed. What comes out of Beezerly’s golden instrument is an atonal buffet of flatulence-adjacent moaning. At one point, the cartoon musician triumphantly holds a note too long and nearly passes out. Visibly in pain, he gasps for air, leaving an awkward hole in the classic tune. <\/p>\n

I can’t help but feel bad for Beezerly because I am Beezerly (or at least playing as him). His pain is my pain\u2014quite literally, as my attempt to gamely honk out 20,000 musical notes in under three minutes has left a searing pain in my mouse-clicking hand and forearm. But, like Beezerly, I’m undeterred by the momentary pain and the embarrassment of getting a (frankly, overly generous) grade of C on my performance. If true mastery is forged in the fires of near-constant, ego-crushing failure, then Beezerly and I are on the same path toward personal growth. Plus, it’s a phenomenal way to kill 15 minutes while belly laughing at fart noises. <\/p>\n

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Trombone Champ is the best game ever made pic.twitter.com\/GH58eHGXHV<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jacob DeRose (@JacobDJAtkinson) September 21, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

When gameplay videos from Trombone Champ\u2014like Guitar Hero, only replace the guitars with trombones\u2014went viral last Wednesday, I experienced the game as I assume its creators intended: I unknowingly clicked on the video at 8 am with my computer’s speaker volume near its max and nearly ruptured an eardrum to the sound of a fake digital man bleating out Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while a scowling Beethoven looks on in the background. My dogs, also started, began to howl wildly at this musical desecration. I started laughing so hard that tears welled up in my eyes. Within 11 seconds, Trombone Champ threw my entire house into disarray. 10\/10. No notes. A perfect game.<\/p>\n

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the steam reviews are also a DELIGHT pic.twitter.com\/phNH8W6PUR<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) September 21, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

In just a week, Trombone Champ has followed the usual path of something genuinely delightful that goes viral. You get the news articles with headlines like \u201cThe internet’s new favorite video game,\u201d and reporters track down the game’s makers, who respond with genuine, if cautious, enthusiasm and befuddlement over their creation finding a massive audience overnight. People start posting their own funny videos and scores on Twitch and YouTube, and you get a whole mess of random people and influencers playing the game and reacting. <\/p>\n

But, man, I sure do like watching those clips of first-timers trying to play Trombone Champ. Without fail, nobody is prepared for how hard the game is and how slippery the controls feel. But this is a feature and not a bug, because that initial inability to produce a coherent melody gives way to all the sharp and flat bleets and blurts and toots. Because the player is human, and thus easily delighted by unexpected audio that sounds fart-like, they usually begin to chuckle. The effect becomes part of a rich history of gags where people surprise an audience with some purposely awful music, like Mozart’s composition \u201cA Musical Joke\u201d or this video of a symphony switching instruments and playing \u201cAlso Sprach Zarathustra (2001: A Space Odyssey) \u201d<\/p>\n

There’s also another level to the subtle comedic genius of Trombone Champ, which is that the game works from the premise that the avatar you’re playing as has at least some understanding of their instrument. But, when the curtain comes up, the poor soul immediately finds themselves on the wrong stage. The game’s creator, Dan Vecchitto, acknowledged this much in the<\/em> Washington Post<\/em>, arguing that the game feeds off of \u201cthe loudness combined with the imprecision\u201d and \u201csteps up to the plate with extreme confidence.\u201d It is a simulator for being in way over your head but just barreling onward and pretending that everything is normal, which is also a pretty accurate way to describe being alive in 2022.<\/p>\n

This weekend I was reading through some YouTube comments on a Trombone Champ playthrough video. For YouTube comments, they were uncharacteristically joyful. One, from a person who identified themselves as a middle-school band director, caught my eye. \u201cI’ve never seen a more accurate depiction of what goes through an 11 year old’s head when you give them a trombone than this video,\u201d they wrote. With a minimal amount of effort, I was able to learn that this person’s name is Curtis Wetzel (no relation, lol), and that he’s a band director at East Troy Middle School in East Troy, Wisconsin (his email signature also identifies him as a \u201cFreelance Arranger and On-Call Sousaphonist\u201d). I reached out to ask him what the game accurately captures about being thrust into a musical environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI work with students just beginning to navigate music and how instruments work,\u201d Wetzel told me over email. \u201cThis game seems to capture the weird idiosyncrasies with using something outside your body to create what you hear in your head\u2026It’s like how your voice sounds so different when you hear it in a recording compared to how you hear it, except adding an instrument adds so many more speed bumps and complications.\u201d <\/p>\n

Wetzel also said that the YouTube videos of people starting to play Trombone Champ remind him of how his students confront a new instrument. \u201cIt’s a lot of How does this thing even work, why does this work this way, why can’t I do this simple thing?<\/em> With some laughter mixed in as well,\u201d he told me. \u201cIn case you don’t know, sound is produced by buzzing one’s lips into the instrument. Usually, students will think of this as a farting sound, and sound like this their first few months. Needless to say\u2014I was hooked on the big metal fart-maker (I play the tuba.)\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n