Once upon a time, Ruf Dug invited Watson to play some video game music with him at The Four Quarters in his "Arcade Fantasy" - The mix below is a 45 minute snippet of the night - filled with stone cold classic game soundtracks like Donkey Kong Country, Outrun and Streets of Rage via weird Commodore 64 ports and anime vaporwave.
We thought we'd catch up with Ruffy to ask him a bit about what he's been up to, Arcade Fantasy, and video games in general:
Alright Ruf, how are you? Been up to much lately?
Doing good ta, been in Copenhagen for a couple of weeks making a record with Dennis Bovell!
Woah! Anything you can tell us about the Copenhagen trip - what vibes came out of that?
It was fkin crazy - 2 weeks in a studio with a genuine living legend. Dennis is a one man hit machine with stories for days and a complete egoless approach to studio work. Inspirational.
In the spirit of the mix, let's talk games! What's your earliest gaming memory?
Oh man I don't properly remember any more... I can remember playing scramble on holiday in Spain once, fuck me it's still next to impossible. Oh yeah also I remember when some pals got an OG atari VCS and playing space invaders on it...
Earlier in the summer you hosted an arcade stage at Gottwood. Playing dope games while dope music is playing seems a no-brainer to us, but how did it come about?
I own a bunch of TV monitors and pitched the idea to the guys at Gottwood a while ago, we worked on it together with the Stamp The Wax guys and 'Ruffys Lab' was the result. I've dreamed of running my own video arcade ever since seeing Tron so u know it was a pretty special moment for me.
Do you see this party format growing with technology? Holo-raves perhaps?
Holoraves sound amazing. I'm immediately selling all my TVs and buying VR headsets.
XL
If there was a Ruf Kutz video game, what would it be like?
U would defo be able to change characters in the game and it would have music by the guys who did the old atari arcade machines (gauntlet, marble madness, xybots etc)
What are you into game-wise at the moment?
Right now I'm deep into a game called Psychic 5, it lets you change characters mid game (totally obsessed with this at moment)
Thanks again Ruffy!
www.rufkutz.net