EMERGE wasn't able to attend this year's Blipfestival over the weekend due to the mundanities of being overextended and not home enough weekends to do like normal people do.

That said, the three day event held at the very cool Tank venue downtown, brought together some of the finest talents in the hardcore 8bit world, which involves some very inventive and nerdy folks doing unspeakably cool things with really out of date computers such as the Amiga as well as more prosaic technology such as the Nintendo Game Boy.

Featuring some of the big guns of this small scene, including Mark Denardo, EMERGE fave Cory Arcangel and the Japanese pop group YMCK as well as many other notables from this burgeoning underground community, the Blipfestival proves that 8bit is about far more than simple nostalgia for the simple joys of childhood. These guys and gals are pushing the limits technologically to create some truly remarkable work, from eerily beautiful music to mindbending visual installations.

Though we couldn't be there to witness it on a big screen, EMERGE poked around online and found a way to check out Arcangel's Mario Movie. If you want to check this fifteen minute masterpiece of 8bit music and video, go to Cory's website and download the ROM. You'll need a NES emulator to view it (we got ours for Macintosh here. Sorting out the installation took all of five minutes, which will be amortized nicely over the 15 minutes of Arcangel's film (and the hours of Super Mario Brothers in our future).

So if you didn't catch Blipfestival this year and want a taste, or if you just want to know what the hell 8bit means, do like EMERGE and check out Arcangel's film. A concerted browse through the links off of the Blipfestival homepage can make a newbie sound like they've been down with the scene since the NES was fresh in minutes. And if you really want to go like a pro, check out Tree Wave, a band featured in the documentary 8Bit (which screened at Blipfestival) that makes incredible music using things like an old 486 laptop and a dot matrix printer. The site is appropriately lo fi and pretty irritating to read (white links, bright blue text and bright red background) but this takes you straight to their absolutely killer song "Sleep."

It appears you don't have Flash installed.