SG Bumper Cars
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The Soundtrack
One island, one tired car, one certificate of entitlement expiring at midnight. Ten tracks written around that night: the anthem, the game over song, the taxi uncle's own radio station, the run across the Causeway, and the quiet one at the end that means it.
These are not the songs you hear while you drive. The game has no recorded soundtrack at all: a sequencer in the code performs it live, three selectable soundtracks of seven moods each, and it is written up on the making of page. These ten are songs about the game, written to be listened to on their own. The words were written here, in the same room as the game's dialogue and by the same rules, and the recordings were generated with a music model on a paid commercial plan.
All ten are on the channel now, and every cover here is the play button for its own song. Nothing on this page loads anything from YouTube until you press one: the covers are ours, inked in the same kit as the store art, and the player is only built when you ask for it. Press a cover and the track plays where it sits, without leaving the page.
In the order they were written, which is roughly the order of the night.
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Eleven o'clock in Yishun, the gantry lifts, and there is one night left on a certificate of entitlement that expires at midnight. So he drives the whole island: the CTE at midnight, which is a carpark with a name, Orchard in a downpour, Newton smelling of satay, and sixty thousand people all trying to leave Kallang at once. Signals, he explains, are decoration. The chorus is not so much a chorus as a breathing exercise.
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Level nineteen. Three seconds from the checkpoint, paint on the wall, again. It is two in the morning, the coffee is cold, the phone is at nine percent, and an auntie in the inbox has beaten the time by a hundred points. The gap was definitely there. The car simply declined. Nobody has ever put it better than the chorus does: I know how this ends and I still press R.
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A radio show with twenty four hours of airtime and exactly one topic: your driving. The uncle takes calls, dedicates a number to the fella doing sixty in the middle lane with his hazards on and no hazard anywhere, warns the PMD rider on the pavement that he will be on Stomp by morning, and delivers a traffic report that is largely the word red. Then, briefly, he goes soft for the one driver still signalling properly. Nobody else see you, but I see you.
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Woodlands at eleven, the queue is one long snake, three quarter tank in the tank or the officer makes you wait, passport in the teeth. Then the border clears and it stops being a song about queueing: potholes the size of a decision, eight thousand ringgit if you feel like arguing with the system, banana cake making its own way down the dashboard. Somewhere in the middle a car pulls level, and it has your face in it.
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Three instructions, shouted at you until they work: read the road, thread the gap, stay alive. Lorry left, bus right, do not brake, do not blink. There is a verse in there somewhere, but mostly this is the sound of a man declining, on principle, to lift off the accelerator.
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Two people who will not let it go. A young driver sends a dare, screenshots his time and notes that he did at least try. An auntie replies that she has been driving this island since before he was born, that her streak is twelve days and her hand has never once shaken, and that she set his best time while holding her groceries. Whoever cleans the run gets a well done. Then they run it back.
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Somebody has left the light above the door on for you, the same as every other night. This is the one that says the quiet part out loud: the game is loud and you can crash it twenty times and set it right back to one, but out here there is no board, no coin and no second try. Just a table set for you, and someone keeping time.
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Six forty-five, the kettle is already screaming, and the only radio station on the island that cares exclusively about your driving is on the air. The traffic report is the word red. Somewhere in the middle the uncle stops the music to point out that a signal is free, that the gap in front of you is not storage space, and that the lorry cannot see you if you cannot see his mirror. Then he goes straight back to the horns. The one that happens in daylight.
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It used to be a tab you left open at your desk. Now the same twenty eight nights ride around in your jacket, and the queue for the kopi is eleven people deep, which is about three levels. A song about a game being small enough to carry and free enough not to think about, on whichever screen you happen to open it on.
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Not the fastest on the road and never claimed to be. Read it, leave the gap, and everybody gets to go home. Two minutes of chant for the driver who lost the leaderboard and is fine about it until tomorrow, and the closing track for the same reason the uncle uses the phrase: steady lah is a compliment, an acknowledgement and a goodbye at the same time.
They are written to the same house rules as everything else in the game, which is what stops ten tracks in eight genres sounding like ten different projects.
Two of them are already load bearing: Siao Traffic is the music under the launch trailer and JB Run is what plays across the Causeway. The rest sit on the channel next to the films, and the ones with a hook that survives a phone speaker end up under the vertical cuts.
They are free to listen to, and they always will be. If you want to do something in return, the useful thing is to play the game, tell one person about it, and get home safe.