Keeping Up with the MEGA65?
One dream. Many languages. One community.
How the rabbit hole began
One day, I asked ChatGPT a silly question: could it write some lyrics in the spirit of the old Keeping Up with the Commodore jingle from the 1980s Australian television commercial? It did a lovely job.
Another day, I asked what a music video for those lyrics might look like. Then I wondered how people actually used AI to make music, discovered Suno, fed the lyrics into it, and suddenly there was a catchy little song.
Then came another itch: could that song become a music video? I found Runway, fed it the script and music, and let it loose. The result had its share of AI hiccups, but also a charm of its own.
From there, the project escaped its original boundaries. ChatGPT helped make captions for many languages; then I wondered what it would sound like if those languages actually sang the song. Suno supplied the musical experiments, and before long a little Australian retro-computer jingle had wandered around the world.
There are now versions ranging from familiar languages to rather more eccentric destinations: Greek, Georgian, Mongolian, Farsi, Azeri, Klingon, Quenya-inspired Elvish, Borg, and many more.
Why I made it
For me, intent is the heart of this project. This wasn't conceived as a polished commercial exercise, or as an attempt to replace the creativity of musicians and artists. It began as a piece of old-fashioned nostalgia: remembering the excitement of first encountering computers, and trying to rebuild a little of that innocent wonder with the tools available today.
That nostalgia then became something I could share. The MEGA65 community has given me many memories, friendships, projects and conversations, so the lyrics that ChatGPT produced happened to resonate unusually strongly with me. Over time it had context about the things I build, the way I approach the MEGA65 community, and the sorts of memories that matter to me. When I asked, “Hey, can you write some lyrics?”, the result felt less like a random collection of words and more like a reflection of that accumulated context.
Then the languages changed the meaning again. A song that began as one person's nostalgic memory became an excuse to explore how the same feeling might sound in different places. I learned little pieces of vocabulary along the way, and the repeated phrases became surprisingly effective language-learning hooks.
Perhaps my favourite part is that my daughter has learned the song too. She can sing parts of it better than I can, and the Greek chorus in particular became something she genuinely enjoyed. It is now a small, warm memory for her. Maybe many years from now she will tell her own children about that silly song about a computer that her dad made with the AI tools of his time — and it will have become her own little piece of nostalgia.
That's really what I hoped this would be: not a claim that AI-made material is for everyone, but a harmless, joyful experiment in memory, language, music, technology and community.
32 languages. 1 song. Infinite passion.
Click a thumbnail to hear that version on Suno. Use the arrows to wander through the collection.
The little characters along the bottom are deliberately presented like a hand-stitched computer-age tapestry: a nod to the handmade spirit behind the project.
The original video
The "World Music" playlist
The full collection is hosted on Suno as an international playlist.
The "Synth Pop" playlist
Since the initial playlist has taken on a 'World Music' theme, I've made this playlist to preserve the prior 'Synth Pop' versions of the songs, in case anybody misses them.