i've been playing fuser and having a blast

in 2017 Harmonix, the rock band/guitar hero/frequency/amplitude studio, made DropMix, a game i had a lot of fun with. you could create mashups on the fly, whenever you wanted, splitting songs into component parts and exchanging them. it would automatically change the songs you played's keys so no matter what you did it sounded good- or at least okay. it required a big plastic thing, and an app, and then was a collectible card game on top of that. okay, so it wasn't all that great. but the potential was there.

DropMix. notice the phone app you need to have to make it work. bad idea imo!

i simply saw DropMix as something that seemed cool but was too rich for my blood until 2018, when Toys R Us closed its doors and every location had massive closeout sales. suddenly all of my friends had deeply discounted Fuser sets, as did i. i would buy as many booster packs as i could- packs that weren't random, so at the very least you always knew what you were getting. it was fun! i spent a little time playing it but much more time thinking about it. it was obviously a financial fiasco. no one wanted to pay as much money as it cost for it, and the people who bought it certainly weren't running around buying booster packs at full price. i loved the thing and even i never did that.

DropMix was a financial failure- its last cards came out in 2018, and the app was delisted in 2022, making the entire thing a paperweight now. but the idea, and Harmonix's technical aptitude, was still strong. DropMix was dead, but it was just the beginning- an even bigger successor was on its way. a successor that would, uh, also fail and be delisted. such is life.

Fuser, released on November 10, 2020, took everything that ruled about DropMix- making fun mashups between different parts of extremely copyrighted songs- and got rid of what didn't work- reliance on an app, the need to buy cards, the fact that making it a collectible card game attached to a Skylanders-style thing was a bad idea. Fuser was great! it had every feature from DropMix and a bunch more, with effects, instruments, and a much wider number of songs, including a bunch of decently-priced DLC. i immediately had a ton of fun with it, making frankly ludicrous DJ mixes.

Look at Fuser! It looks flashy!

Fuser was a beautiful baby bird, which meant it, too, was a financial disappointment. maybe? i can't find much said about it, but it was delisted on December 19, 2022, its online store and features shut down. i'm sure music licensing for this sort of thing is extremely expensive, and if a game isn't a Rock Band-sized hit it's financially untenable. Harmonix got bought by Epic Games, essentially making versions of Rock Band and Fuser inside of Fortnite, which are... fine, for what they are. if you want to play Fuser nowadays, you can't. it's over.

or is it?

since Fuser is delisted, it's abandonware, meaning pretty much no one would care if you, say, downloaded the version of Fuser on the Internet Archive, which features all of its DLC and has been modified to work without the online connection. Fuser is back, babey! it never left!

and even better than that, people have made a ton of custom content for it, available on a handy website. making a custom song is involved- you need either its component stems, which are hard to get your hands of, or some recreation of them. and you also need to modify major key songs to work in minor keys and vice versa, which... we don't need to get into that, but that's really tough. but tons of people have done it!

the best thing about the Fuser Customs site is it's extremely searchable, allowing you to a range of BPMs and keys, allowing you to instantly get a wide selection of songs that are guaranteed to sound good together no matter what you do with them. so that's what i've been doing! i've been doing that!

DJing has long been like fourth or fifth on my list of things i want to get into, and it's great to be able to play around with it without having to... actually learn, which is good, because DJing seems hard, and, you know, fourth or fifth.

Fuser! it's fun! i've been having fun playing it! if you're interested, you can play it too!