Just a Game was a sample posted on WatZatSong by Gabor72, a prolific poster of AOR music. Out of 108 samples, this was the only sample that remained unsolved for a number of years, before becoming one of the larger FMM searches. 

HISTORY

The song started getting attention within the lostwave community in January 2024, easily winning the FMM new song channel poll and immediately getting placed in Main Unknowns. While the WatZatSong OP, Gabor72, had long since been dormant on WatZatSong – we had his 107 solved samples to go off of.

Early on, two major leads were investigated – the first being the idea that Just a Game could be from some sort of sporting goods commercial. A now deleted Redditor even found a record in the US Copyright Database titled Just a Game for a Nike commercial – but that was quickly ruled out. The other early lead was a song called Just a Game – released in Germany in 1985 by an artist named Der Gerd - after a few weeks, this was ruled out as well.

PersonOfDistraction contacted multiple AOR experts, including Frederic Slama, who is an AOR artist, Dan, owner of the website heavyharmonies.com, Strutter Magazine (an AOR magazine run by a man named Gabor), and many others. One such contact was Discogs user AORForever, who said he was certain the vocalist was German. 

We found that Gabor's WZS profile picture was taken from Facebook and statrted trying to see if we could find a way to find him online & contact him. 

PersonOfDisctraction heard back from YouTuber AOR Melodic Rock Rarities who said he believed he had JAG in his massive collection and that it sounded extremely familiar.

Then, we found the right Gabor on Facebook - only to learn he had recently passed away. Despite the fact that it is NOT ADVISED, we contacted Gabor's living family members. Luckily, this eventually led to Gabor's daughter, Dorka, being willing to help us. 

After waiting about a month due to a move, Dorka was able to find the full Just a Game on her father's computer, where it had incorrectly been labelled as being by Der Gerd.

After listening to the full song and looked at the full lyrics, user Cubing Crusader found a listing in GEMA for a song called Just a Game – with alternate titles that matched the lyrics we now had word for word – attributed to Christof Bachmeier. 

Funado found an artist with the same name and it seemed like he was a decent fit. But all we could find was instrumentals by him. Then, in going through an archived version of a website for a production studio Christof owned, PersonOfDistraction found that he had been a member of an AOR band named Zuckerband – and that album was on AOR Melodic Rock Rarities channel – who was the person who had previously said that JAG sounded very familiar to him. 

Kutsu got in contact with Christof Bachmeier, who eventually confirmed, he was the artist responsible for Just a Game, which had been recorded in 1988 under the band name “Change to Win” for a charity concert for children in Africa. Only 200 of 500 LPs were sold; Christof would later ship the rest to all lostwave community members that wonted one, asking for an optional donation to charity. 

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