Todd Rundgren is not really a household name. In the US he scored one top ten hit in 1973, with a couple of other minor hits in the seventies and eighties. In Australia, Canada, and the UK he also caused a few blimps on the charts, but nothing more. And if you’re from continental Europe, you have almost certainly never heard of the guy. Unless, that is, you are particularly interested in music industry innovations. Back in 2004, he predicted Spotify. 1 In the late nineties, he was already distributing his music online. In 1994, he released a CD-I. And in 1991, he made a music video generated on an Amiga home computer, from what I can tell.
It’s for a song called Change myself, which is remarkably unremarkable. The music video is, apart from its novelty, not very remarkable either, but it does feature a chessboard. Sort of.
It’s a twelve-by-twelve board, but the pieces are definitely chess pieces and at least h1 is a white square:2
It seems like there has been a big bang in the chessboard and now it is expanding everywhere all at once. But it may have started as a reasonably normal position. Black has set up a battery on the h-file, but the knight and pawn are covering the most strategic points.
And then the pieces start moving. There don’t seem to be any players, but there are moves. White goes i6, black plays Qd11+, white blocks the check with Bd6, black attacks the bishop with Ne8 and that’s as far as we get. Here, the pieces start dripping through the chessboard and fall as droplets into the infinite abyss, probably from sheer embarrassment.
Frankly, I’d do the same.
Realism: 0/5 Not even the Dozenal Society of America wants chess on a twelve-by-twelve board.
Probable winner: I really don’t know. I can’t even ask the fish, because it’s a goddamn twelve-by-twelve board. Maybe I’d prefer white in the final position, mainly because of the Qxl10+3 possibility.
1. [Which is the process of domesticating a wolf to a dalmatian.] ↩
2. [And at least there is a diagram editor that can do twelve-by-twelve diagrams.] ↩
3. [With that, this sequence of character has been used for the first time outside of auto generated passwords.] ↩