Ten years ago, a Philly emcee who had been juggling two names, Random and Mega Ran, teamed up with D.C. producer and former Panacea member K-Murdock to create a hip hop ode to Nintendo, Forever Famicom. Now, to celebrate that anniversary, they’ve gone back to make a special edition of the album, Forever Famicom: Diamond Edition.

We don’t revisit to many re-releases at Scratched Vinyl, but Mega Ran and K-Murdock put some extra special care into this re-release that made it worth revisiting. That’s because not only did they go back and mix and master the album all over again, they Rob “8bits” Kovacs to go through and painstakingly replay all of the in-game samples. Now that the album has this nice new fresh coat of paint on it, how does it sound? Fantastic. This album was a game changer in a lot of ways for nerdcore, showing that an ambitious project like this with a specific focus on Nintendo as source material could still function as a dope hip hop album with good storytelling and fun rhymes and beats that bump. This isn’t to say that they were the first to ever do something like this, but the scale and pedigree to which it was done played a big role in the crossover appeal and the blurring of lines between nerdcore fans and the rest of hip hop fans. Revisiting the album, you see not only what talent Mega Ran and K-Murdock have as individual artists, but how great their chemistry is together as well. It’s also a testament to this album that you’ll recognize mainstays in Mega Ran’s sets to this day, such as “Dream Master” or “For the Gamers.”

Forever Famicom: Diamond Edition sounds great in it’s newly tuned up and repolished version. Now to the matter of bugging these two to finally make that Sega album they talked about all those years ago…