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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

My first encounter with Popcorn was via the computer game named Digger. This game plays a variant of the Popcorn instrumental as the background music. Here is an audio/video capture of the game: https://susam.net/files/blog/dosbox-digger.mp4

The original PC booter version of the game can be played here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Digger_1983_1983

There used to be a website dedicated to this instrumental. That website is now gone but there is an archived copy of the website available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202102000/http://www.popcor...

And here is a direct link to an MP3 on that archived website: https://web.archive.org/web/20000903025158/http://www.popcor...

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Same here! I played many hours of Digger.

See also the Muppets' interpretation, "Pöpcørn": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UmUX68KtE

I was gonna post the Muppets version too.

For more fun turn on the closed captions!

Same for me, it will always be "the digger song". It was one of the three games I initially had, pirated, like everything except for that mouse driver disc that I dared not touch because it had a printed label (how can you trust a disk without a hand-written label, so confusing!). I wonder if I'd love the Hot Butter version even remotely as much as I do if I had never played digger?

Surprisingly, despite having been a bit of a synth nerd for a few years I never consciously heard that Gershon King version. Hearing it for the first time now it was a bit disappointing compared to the Hot Butter, quite a few weak parts that I feel tempted to call beginner mistakes in terms of arrangement/mix. But then they were all beginners at the time, adds an interesting "relatable" angle to the whole thing. And then in the finale, the perhaps (or seemingly!) naive "maximalism" just works, totally blown away!

Interesting. Apparently Digger was 1983. I first heard it on another DOS game, Popcorn, a 1988 French clone of Breakout/Arkanoid. https://dosgames.com/game/popcorn/#dosbox-div Anyway, RIP that guy! His version has a lot more going on than most of the latter electronic versions, one could say it was perhaps more modern, pre-empting a more complex / orchestral era of electronica. Another influential German Jew who wound up in the US.

For me it was Trollie Wallie on the C64, watching my dad play: https://youtu.be/wUYFslnvT6k?t=162

It was also the background music of the Sega arcade game "Pengo": https://youtu.be/6q3bNHvj92c?t=126

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