DESCRIPTION:
“Still Alive” from the game “Portal”, written by Jonathan Coulton, an acoustic cover by Mike Massé. Listen on Spotify: http://www.mikemasse.com/spotify Buy from iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/album/id1109552297
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Liner Notes: Mike lets his geek flag fly! :) Posted on my brother’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mark! The picture at the beginning of the video was taken a couple of years ago on his 40th in Seattle, at which his daughter Morgan and I performed “Still Alive”. Mark has always been a gamer, and now even works for Riot Games. He’s primarily responsible for getting me into PC gaming as an adult-—something I wish I still had time for now and then. :) Mark’s online alias is Beezer, a childhood family nickname. Mine is XanderHarris, my favorite character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fun fact: my first YouTube user name was XanderHarris, but I soon changed profiles to mikemassedotcom and re-uploaded the first half dozen videos or so. So Beezer first got me into Battlefield 1942, flying me around a deserted Wake Island map as a passenger in his plane. I was hooked. We played most of the early BF games, along with Call of Duty. And some fun RTS games (Dawn of War!). And of course, Portal. I have great memories of us playing through the co-op mode online together in Portal 2. Good times. A shout out to OF, KYB, =i=, RX, GoB and the rest! TMan hacks! If you’re a gamer and you think we played together online at some point, include your gamer name in your comment and say hi!

So about Portal: It’s a single-player puzzle-solving game, where you’re trying to make it out of the room you’re in (only to succeed and repeat the process with the next room). Each room is a different puzzle, and your primary tool is the portal gun, a gun that shoots two holes in the walls wherever you aim it, creating an entrance and an exit portal to facilitate your solving the puzzles. The puzzles are designed by GlaDOS, an artificial intelligence—and your nemesis. She claims to merely be testing you for “science” (but you figure out rather quickly—spoiler alert!—she’s trying to kill you). She constantly promises cake as a reward for your efforts, but never delivers. Some graffiti scrawled on the wall in an off-limits “backstage” area warns, “the cake is a lie”. GlaDOS is not to be trusted.

If you’ve played the game, you both know and love the song. (It’s a package deal.) For those who haven’t played the game, the song is sung by the same voice actress who voices GlaDOS in the game, Ellen McLain. Her performance throughout is hilarious and brilliant. In addition to being an excellent voice actress, she’s also a trained opera singer, so she completely nails this song. The song was written by Jonathan Coulton, a talented and prolific songwriter known for his humor. My brother Mark loves him. :) Jonathan performs the song solo acoustic sometimes, but does so in a much saner key. Here’s his lovely version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxNmeMklFk8

The song in the game: you’ve just beaten GlaDOS by physically destroying her (as she describes in detail in the lyrics), but she’s somehow still alive, trying to convince you that she’s a good sport in sort of a “I meant to do that” tone and yay team? The song is as clever as it is infectious. It gained an even wider audience when it was included as a free downloadable song in “Rock Band 3”.

I wanted to try this as a duo with myself, playing the guitar in different positions (open vs. capo), and singing that great harmony. Since there’s two of me already, I’d like to invite anyone out there who wants to play along on whatever instrument to make a video of yourself playing synced up to my audio/video. The tempo is 120, and I played to a click (you can see my IEMs if you look closely). If you do this, please send me the link! If it’s decent, I’ll happily share it on social media.

-Mike

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