A few years ago my friends at thetriforce.com launched a get-rich-quick scheme offering £10 shares to 100 of their forum members. The idea was that the money generated by the forum would be invested in some sort of project – either for fun or profit but ideally a bit of both – the nature of which would be voted on by the shareholders themselves.

There were many suggestions for how best to use the money. How about a totally sweet party with a hefty tab behind the bar? Or, perhaps, a more prudent investment that could increase the value of the shares but not provide quite the firework display of fun that a blurry night out would. Some suggested we bet on horses, others still that we buy a stake in the football managerial career of one of the forumites.

Some years passed. The shareholders were, predictably, unable to come to a consensus on what exactly to spend the money on.

One evening I was at the penultimate Aereogramme gig with Ste, one of the three owners of The Triforce, owner/presenter of One Life Left, Europe’s leading/ only videogame-themed FM radio show and an accomplished delegator.

After the band had played I turned to Ste and said: “You know, I think we should put together a compilation record of tracks you’ve played on the radio show and release them on a CD. One Life Left records! It’ll help the show and it’ll help the artists. Everybody wins, right?”

“Yes! You should totally put that together,” he answered. Ste’s an accomplished delegator.

So we approached the Trifoum shareholders with the idea. The concept grew in discussion. Instead of releasing a compilation of songs previously played on One life Left, why not approach the artists and see if they’d be willing to record a track specifically for the record? And, to stay on message, why not ask them to theme the music around videogames or, better still, create it using videogame hardware?

Within a few months we’d managed to secure a decent line-up of artists willing to get involved and, unexpectedly, most of them went on to deliver tracks to us gratis. There were a even number of coups, in music terms, such as the chiptune version of Heathens by Bracken/ Hood, the awesomely-named track Materia Girl (about Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith, natch) from Projeckt A-Ko and all new tracks from Copy and Mark Denardo. One of the forum members designed the artwork for the record and another handled the duplication and thus Music to Play Games By was born.

So yeah, the Internet came together and made something awesome happen. I guess it had to happen some time.

It’s taken a while to work out what happens next but at last we’ve settled on a launch event. On Saturday week there will be a live One Life Left recording, a sweet party and copies of the CD will be available to buy for the first time. It promises to be a glorious celebration. You should come. Tell your friends.

Here’s Copy’s track, Playered, to get you in the mood and the full details are on the flyer at the top of the post.

Visit One life Left’s Music section in a couple of weeks if you can’t make the night but would like to order a copy of the CD anyway.