Trombone Champ Is a Perfect Game

How I fell in love with the “big metal fart-maker”

A full English breakfast on display as you play "God Save The King" (Screenshot via Trombone Champ)

It’s late in the evening, and I am watching along on my computer as a jovial-looking cartoon man named Beezerly lives out many peoples’ worst nightmare, confidently honking for a crowd on a brass instrument he cannot play.

The moment the song picks up its tempo, Beezerly is outmatched. The bass marches in perfect time to relentless drums, inviting our young hero to toot out the intricate melody of “Hava Nagila” at lightning speed. What comes out of Beezerly’s golden instrument is an atonal buffet of flatulence-adjacent moaning. At one point, the cartoon musician triumphantly holds a note too long and nearly passes out. Visibly in pain, he gasps for air, leaving an awkward hole in the classic tune.

I can’t help but feel bad for Beezerly because I am Beezerly (or at least playing as him). His pain is my pain—quite literally, as my attempt to gamely honk out 20,000 musical notes in under three minutes has left a searing pain in my mouse-clicking hand and forearm. But, like Beezerly, I’m undeterred by the momentary pain and the embarrassment of getting a (frankly, overly generous) grade of C on my performance. If true mastery is forged in the fires of near-constant, ego-crushing failure, then Beezerly and I are on the same path toward personal growth. Plus, it’s a phenomenal way to kill 15 minutes while belly laughing at fart noises.

When gameplay videos from Trombone Champ—like Guitar Hero, only replace the guitars with trombones—went viral last Wednesday, I experienced the game as I assume its creators intended: I unknowingly clicked on the video at 8 a.m. with my computer’s speaker volume near its max and nearly ruptured an eardrum to the sound of a fake digital man bleating out Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while a scowling Beethoven looks on in the background. My dogs, also startled, began to howl wildly at this musical desecration. I started laughing so hard that tears welled up in my eyes. Within 11 seconds, Trombone Champ threw my entire house into disarray. 10/10. No notes. A perfect game.

In just a week, Trombone Champ has followed the usual path of something genuinely delightful that goes viral. You get the news articles with headlines like “The internet's new favorite video game,” and reporters track down the game’s makers, who respond with genuine, if cautious, enthusiasm and befuddlement over their creation finding a massive audience overnight. People start posting their own funny videos and scores on Twitch and YouTube, and you get a whole mess of random people and influencers playing the game and reacting.

But, man, I sure do like watching those clips of first-timers trying to play Trombone Champ. Without fail, nobody is prepared for how hard the game is and how slippery the controls feel. But this is a feature and not a bug, because that initial inability to produce a coherent melody gives way to all the sharp and flat bleets and blurts and toots. Because the player is human, and thus easily delighted by unexpected audio that sounds fart-like, they usually begin to chuckle. The effect becomes part of a rich history of gags where people surprise an audience with some purposely awful music, like Mozart’s composition “A Musical Joke” or this video of a symphony switching instruments and playing “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001: A Space Odyssey).”

There’s also another level to the subtle comedic genius of Trombone Champ, which is that the game works from the premise that the avatar you’re playing as has at least some understanding of their instrument. But, when the curtain comes up, the poor soul immediately finds themselves on the wrong stage. The game’s creator, Dan Vecchitto, acknowledged this much in The Washington Post, arguing that the game feeds off of “the loudness combined with the imprecision” and “steps up to the plate with extreme confidence.” It is a simulator for being in way over your head but just barreling onward and pretending that everything is normal, which is also a pretty accurate way to describe being alive in 2022.

This weekend I was reading through some YouTube comments on a Trombone Champ playthrough video. For YouTube comments, they were uncharacteristically joyful. One, from a person who identified themselves as a middle-school band director, caught my eye. “I've never seen a more accurate depiction of what goes through an 11 year old's head when you give them a trombone than this video,” they wrote. With a minimal amount of effort, I was able to learn that this person’s name is Curtis Wetzel (no relation, lol), and that he’s a band director at East Troy Middle School in East Troy, Wisconsin (his email signature also identifies him as a “Freelance Arranger and On-Call Sousaphonist”). I reached out to ask him what the game accurately captures about being thrust into a musical environment.

“I work with students just beginning to navigate music and how instruments work,” Wetzel told me over email. “This game seems to capture the weird idiosyncrasies with using something outside your body to create what you hear in your head…It's like how your voice sounds so different when you hear it in a recording compared to how you hear it, except adding an instrument adds so many more speed bumps and complications.”

Wetzel also said that the YouTube videos of people starting to play Trombone Champ remind him of how his students confront a new instrument. “It's a lot of, How does this thing even work, why does this work this way, why can't I do this simple thing? With some laughter mixed in as well,” he told me. “In case you don't know, sound is produced by buzzing one's lips into the instrument. Usually, students will think of this as a farting sound, and sound like this their first few months. Needless to say—I was hooked on the big metal fart-maker (I play the tuba.)”

Trombone Champ’s genesis also shares a few parallels with that of Wordle, another simple game that went viral in the last year and (at least initially) was an almost universal crowd pleaser. Like Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, Vecchitto essentially made the game in his spare time and without much of an eye toward monetization or popularity. Also like Wardle, Vecchitto first built the game for his partner; while Vecchitto always planned to release Trombone Champ for a wider audience, he told the Washington Post that over its four-year development process, the game’s sole fans and testers were his close friends.

Both games also seem to be designed with an eye toward online sharing. Wordle’s rise was initially triggered by people using a widget to post their results on Twitter without revealing the word of the day. Although Vecchitto hasn’t built a sharing widget into Trombone Champ, he told the Post that he hoped it would “maybe generate some word-of-mouth buzz as players shared their ridiculous-sounding clips online.”

But despite their creators’ understanding of the evangelizing potential of online virality, both games seem to have broken through because they’re built first and foremost to delight. Neither game interrupts with push alerts or forces people to “play to earn,” or has paid tiers that lock the best features away. The games aren’t trying to capture every second of your attention; Wordle has its once-per-day restriction, and Trombone Champ is a game where one can be easily sated by a few minutes of gameplay.

Of course, the truth with viral games (or anything viral) is that theirs is not a sustainable type of success. The Twitter bot account WordleStats tracks Wordle posts to the platform, and, scrolling through, I’m pretty sure February 3 marked the peak for social sharing of game scores. (Although it’s worth pointing out that there’s good reason to believe people are still playing in large numbers, even if they’re not sharing.)

I’m extremely doubtful that a goofy game like Trombone Champ will have anywhere near the staying power of a blockbuster word puzzle. Most people who’ve shelled out for the new game already seem to recognize that, at $15, it’s a short-term investment in a few giggles. But I’m still hoping that the internet doesn’t chew up and spit out Trombone Champ as it does most viral hits. Vecchitto appears to be working on all kinds of new features for the game and may perhaps expand it to different platforms, and I hope there may eventually be some [Insert Brass Instrument] Champ extended universe that will let people around the world experience the thrill of playing a brass instrument poorly. Or maybe people will enjoy the original by building their own horrifying and delightful modifications.

I’m mostly just thrilled and grateful that Trombone Champ barged into our lives with extreme confidence. For a fleeting moment, we were all under the spell of the big metal fart-maker.


Two Requests for Readers

Before we go, I wanted to see if I could enlist your help in some reporting on two specific stories. First, I’m interested in hearing more from people about the post–Labor Day “return to office” experiences. I realize a lot of people have been back in the office for quite some time (and certainly some people hardly ever left!), but there are also a lot of companies that have made concerted efforts to try to bring workers back in early September. I’ve been looking at a lot of data about the last few months of in-person/remote/hybrid work, and I’m curious how it squares with peoples’ anecdotal experiences. So if you’ve come back to the office this month, I’d love to hear how it’s been. Does your employer have a solid plan? Has it been a nightmare commuting again? What has worked well and what hasn’t? What are the big misconceptions out there about work right now? What has coming back (fully or partially or not at all) taught you about how you work best? I’m happy to keep answers anonymous. If you have something to share, email galaxybrain@theatlantic.com

Second, I am obsessed with this story about American Airlines’ intercom system and the numerous accounts of someone/something hijacking the PA to make very weird moaning noises. Friend of the newsletter Andy Baio wrote a great explainer about it, and, quite weirdly, it seems nobody can figure out what is going on. I am positive that Galaxy Brain readers have enough niche expertise to offer up some compelling theories, and if you have any educated guesses or tips, I implore you to get in touch at galaxybrain@theatlantic.com. I’d love to go deep on this in a subsequent newsletter!


Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.