The answer? A song. In 1989, the British developer Ocean created a tie-in video game for the movie Robocop. The game was released on many platforms and featured an eerie yet serene theme song totally unlike the Basil Poledouris theme featured in the movie.
Fast forward a few years: The washing machine brand Ariston needed a song for a commercial in the UK. In a weird turn of events, they chose… the Gameboy version of Ocean’s Robocop to help them sell their appliances.
If it had ended there, that would have been weird enough. But years later, Internet artist and indie game designer ‘Chef Boyardee’, composed a cover of the song for a surreal animated short “Dilbert 3”. In the short, Dilbert enters into a murder-suicide pact with his co-worker Wally, bursting into the office and murdering his co workers. The short is done entirely in a creepy MS Paint-meets-Dr-Katz style. The original has since been taken down from YouTube, but has also been re-uploaded by other users (NSFW, incidentally).
But wait! It gets even weirder: Last month, rapper Lil B (AKA Based God), released a mix tape called “White Flame”. One of the songs, ‘In Down Bad’, samples Chef Boyardee’s cover of the Johnathan Dunn’s Robocop theme.
And that’s how this obscure piece of video game music sold washing machines, became the theme for one artist’s gory Dilbert slash fiction, and eventually got sampled by Lil B.
Check out the video below to see them all.
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