Sburb OST certainly isn’t one of the most well-known Homestuck fan projects. But it’s one of the few to fully release and still be awesome to this day.
Fan projects usually fail. They’re usually not very well thought-out, being too ambitious or too unfocused. They invite way too many people onto the project, with way too many people who don’t actually have any inclination to contribute beyond “ideas” or whatever. I’ve personally been a part of multiple projects that have failed in exactly this way, including ones where I was one of the people who dropped off quickly as an “ideas” person.
Because of all of that, I continue to be extremely proud of what the Homestuck fandom was able to accomplish at its peak, especially in the fan music community, and there’s no better representative of that than Sburb OST, the coolest fan album to have ever been made.
If you haven’t read Homestuck, this will make like 20% sense at best, but Sburb OST is the fan-made soundtrack to the Sburb “video game,” to a generic fit-all Sburb session. It tried to take listeners through a typical Sburb session and all its aspects. It makes genericized versions of the Homestuck leitmotifs, and introduces entirely new ones, all of which pop up throughout the album. The song art even takes us through a sort of story that features the same characters (stand-ins for the musicians I believe).
It’s really ambitious, and better yet, it actually exists. It was actually completed, mastered, and released. There was a bit of drama throughout production, and it took over two years to complete, but it actually came out, and that’s what matters.
Also, the music is good. Take a listen:
For my complete counterpoint article, read my Super Mario Bros. Z article about fan projects that fail extremely slowly.
