Trombone Champ

About

Trombone Champ is a rhythm video game developed by Holy Wow in the vein of games like Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution, only instead of imitating songs on the guitar or voice, players imitate songs on the trombone. The game began generating buzz shortly after its release due to videos of humorously poor gameplay circulating on social media, wherein people would wind up "playing" the songs out of rhythm and off-key.

History

Trombone Champ was developed and published by Holy Wow. The game was announced on August 28th, 2020 (announcement trailer shown below) and released on Steam on September 15th, 2022.^[1]

In Trombone Champ players attempt to "play" classical and well-known songs in the public domain by moving their mouse to reach lines moving right-to-left on the screen and clicking a button when the line hits the appropriate portion of the screen. The game's controls may be intentionally difficult to wrangle, as the resulting sounds the player makes can easily be out of tune and rhythm for comedic effect. Comedic animations also play on screen as players try to complete songs.^[2]

Online Presence

The game quickly developed an online presence in the weeks before its release. On August 4th, 2022, roughly six weeks before release, xQc streamed himself playing the game (shown below, left). On August 1st, 2022, Lirik streamed himself playing the game (shown below, right).

After the game's September 15th release, several videos of gameplay racked up thousands of retweets and likes on Twitter. For example, a post by @TheKamdyman gained over 930 retweets and 3,600 likes (shown below, top). The game attracted significantly more attention after PC Gamer tweeted about it along with a video of gameplay. Their post gained over 10,000 retweets and 50,000 likes in one day (shown below, bottom).

PC Gamer's tweet linked to a review^[2] in which journalist Christopher Livingston called it a "serious game of the year contender," praising the comedic result of the gameplay and other comedy elements in the game.

Search Interest

External References