Video games are one of my favourite pastimes, and aside from the action or story on-screen, the musical score often contributes a huge amount to the varied emotions felt by the player. Video game music has come a long way, with more doors opening to the composer as technology progresses at a furious rate. My own earliest memories would be a game for Commodore 64 of which I've forgotten the name or even the content of the game, but still vividly remember it using Scott Joplin's The Entertainer in its soundtrack. This is surely testament to how powerful our 'musical memory' is, and how important the music is to support the visual aspect of any media.
1970's
In the 1970's, the first home video game consoles came to market. These first machines were silent, with no sound effects and certainly no music.
Pong was one of the earliest video games, and one of the first to reach mainstream popularity. A tennis type game, it's sound consisted of a sonar-blip type effect as the ball hit the players paddle.
In 1977, Atari released its Video Computer System, with several games available. The primitive sound effects in these games, such as Combat, were unlike anything to have previously come out of a TV set. To ears used to the lush orchestrated scores of today, the rumbling of the tanks can be very grating, but at the time really helped to enhance the action:
Towards the end of the 1970's, a further two games were released that innovated in sound design: Space Invaders, and Asteroids. Both games had a thumping mono-beat acting as music, which would speed up as the action on screen grew more intense, as if imitating the players heartbeat. This was the first time that sounds in video games had been used to enhance the interactive drama and tension. A further step forward before the close of the decade was the use of computer-generated voices, such as 'ball', 'strike' and 'out' in Major League Baseball for the Intellivision system.
1980's
In the 1980's, video games began to incorporate actual tunes as well as sound effects. Some notable titles include the hugely popular Pac-Man, with its short but memorable opening ditty. Donkey Kong features short musical fragments when the player character generates, and also a five-note repeating pattern during gameplay. During the next few years games started using better and better sound chips to produce more complex sound effects, with multiple 'voices' or channels. 1983's Dragon's Lair is notable for its use of the ancestor to our current optical media, called 'Laser-Disc' this allowed the game to use actual human voices, and stereo sound.
In the 1980's, video games began to incorporate actual tunes as well as sound effects. Some notable titles include the hugely popular Pac-Man, with its short but memorable opening ditty. Donkey Kong features short musical fragments when the player character generates, and also a five-note repeating pattern during gameplay. During the next few years games started using better and better sound chips to produce more complex sound effects, with multiple 'voices' or channels. 1983's Dragon's Lair is notable for its use of the ancestor to our current optical media, called 'Laser-Disc' this allowed the game to use actual human voices, and stereo sound.
Tetris, released on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had a Russian soundtrack of various speeds that accompanied this tricky puzzler. Around the same time, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. with a fantastic soundtrack by Japanese composer Shigeru Miyamoto. Even lots of non-gamers would recognise the famous theme tune from this game. The music also features shifts of mood and tone to help portray the action on-screen.
The late 1980's saw a plethora of hugely important games to come to market, with many franchises still going strong to this day. Musical highlights include Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy - the latter's franchise with its sweeping, evocative and symphonic scores is largely considered the best video game music ever made, and this year (2013) it reached number three in the Classic FM Hall of Fame.
1990's
A huge technical improvement over the NES was the Sega Megadrive (Genesis) in 1989. This console featured six-channel stereo sound with FM synthesis which was capable of more complex waveforms which enabled a bigger range of sounds and timbres.The early 1990's saw the release of Streets of Rage for the Genesis, with its moody techno score. Sonic The Hedgehog featured some incredibly memorable music for each stage of the game, and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker was notable for taking actual licensed pop music and adapting it to be playable on the Genesis.
In 1990 Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES. The sound capabilities weren't better or worse than the Sega Genesis, but they were very different. The SNES's audio was a huge leap forward from the NES, with the SNES able to utilize samples and make use of envelopes, filters and panning, affording different ways to affect the sound. Unlike the Genesis, it has no internal synthesiser, but the ability to use samples made up for this shortfall. In Final Fantasy VI (III outside Japan) Nobuo Uematsu reaches new heights with a eclectic and memorable score making use of character-specific leitmotifs. There were many other role-playing games around this time with fantastic soundtracks, such as Chrono Trigger which included some jazz influences.
1995 sees a technological breakthrough with Sony releasing its Playstation. It moves away from cartridges to become compact disc based and also has an integrated 24-channel sound chip, both features which allow for CD quality stereo sound and built in support for effects such as reverb and looping. Now games are able to include music with actual live recordings, with real voices, and real instruments playing the scores. Notable scores on this system include those for Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, Chrono Cross (particularly for its extended use of percussion), Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Parasite Eve. PaRappa the Rapper was an early rhythm game where the player has to press buttons in time to music.
Resident Evil and Silent Hill were two other key games in audio terms for the Sony Playstation as they makes extensive and effective use of ambient sound to create a high level of tension. Wipeout XL for the console featured a techno soundtrack by some well known musical artists outside of the video game sphere, such as The Chemical Brothers, and The Prodigy. The player could also choose the track they wanted to listen to for each race, which brought more emphasis to the musical aspect of the game.
In 1996, Nintendo release their N64. This machine, like the Playstation, was a huge step up from the SNES in terms of its technology and capabilities. With the N64 it was possible to use between 16 and 24 channels depending on the memory usage for other tasks at the time, and also featured CD-quality audio. The benefits of this were limited compared to the Playstation however, as the N64 retained the use of cartridges for its games, which could hold a maximum of 64mb of data; the Playstation's compact discs were able to store 650mb. Although the quality of the compositions on the N64 was high, the actual audio quality would often suffer due to the data limitations of the cartridge.
Hey You, Pikachu! was an important game technologically speaking as it allowed the player to control the on-screen character with only voice commands using a microphone plugged into the controller. It was one of only two games that made use of the N64's Voice Recognition Unit (VRU). Platform game Banjo-Kazooie's score was essentially a large theme and variations, with seamless transitions between themes depending on which 'world' the character was currently inhabiting. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, was the first title where there are musical tasks in a game where music is not the main focus.
2000's
In the year 2000, the Sony Playstation 2 ushered in the new millennium and marked the arrival of the next generation of consoles. This machine had an integrated DVD drive which gave more memory capacity resulting in better sound. The PS2 also featured 48 channels of audio, and could output in surround sound but unfortunately only for DVD movie playback; games couldn't take advantage of it. The console also featured a separate audio processing unit called the SPU2, and the Emotion Engine, functioning mainly as the machines CPU which helped with audio related tasks as well as video. Crucially, the PS2 also featured 2MB RAM dedicated just for streaming sounds, contrary to previous consoles where the audio in a game would usually lose out in the development stage to the graphics and AI when allocating resources. Titles notable for their soundtracks and sound effects include Okami, Final Fantasy X - XII, Kingdom Hearts, Persona 4 and God of War. This latter title used large, looping tracks of dramatic music, especially in boss battles, to enhance the experience and give a more 'epic' feel.
The Nintendo Gamecube arrived in 2001, featuring 64 channels of sound and 16-bit resolution, and audio has a seperate processor called Flipper Chip. The Gamecube didn't have a proprietary file type for sound, probably to capitalise on the negative response to Sony's use of proprietary sound format. For the Gamecube, Nintendo provided sound developers with middleware (a kit that exists for all aspects of the game, including animation, art etc), which made it much easier for sound designers and composers to put their sounds into the game, and for the programmers to integrate that audio into the game's code. The benefits of middleware were to give more control to the audio developer. Whereas before you would give the sound files to the programmers and hope they understand your instructions, now you were afforded much more personal control in the early stages of the process. Titles notable for their scores on the platform include Baten Kaitos, F0GX (with its catchy, techno and rock style character themes), Metroid Prime and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles which used medieval instruments in a modern context.
The Nintendo Wii, released in 2006, was a very modest improvement over the Gamecube, but it did offer increased sample rate, the ability to output to either stereo or (simulated) surround surround, had a small speaker built into the controller, and was able to do more DSP on the fly than the Gamecube. Games for the platform that featured excellent musical scores include Super Smash Bro's Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy (with its own dedicated orchestra), Little Kings Story (which adapted and used exclusively public domain music such as Bizet's Carmen, Holst's Mars, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue), Xeno Blade Chronicles and The Last Story (scored by Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu).
The Playstation 3 was released in the same year as the Nintendo Wii, and includes for the first time a dedicated software based audio processor which means it can be updated after the system has been released. It has a massive 512 channels, no proprietary format for audio and includes a softsynth inside the console to generate music on the fly. Heavy Rain's dark but beautiful score is a particular highlight, as is Uncharted and God of War 3. Journey, an independent game released on the Playstation store for digital download was the first game to have a soundtrack nominated in the Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media at the Grammy awards, and in 2013 won a BAFTA for best original music in a video game.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 in 2005 was a big improvement over the original Xbox; it now has 256 channels, a higher sample rate, 16-bit resolution and the Xbox Audio Creation Tool (XACT) making audio implementation much easier. Like the PS3 it has a software based audio processor. Notable titles in audio terms include Halo, Bioshock and Mass Effect.
The latest console offering at time of writing is 2012's Nintendo Wii-U. Little is known about the technical aspects of this machine, and not many titles have yet been released as it's so new, but we do know it now features true surround output. Nintendo Land, a minigame collection shipped with console, includes rearranged classic tracks from popular franchises on previous consoles.
In Conclusion
Skilled video game composers always existed, but were limited to the capabilities of the consoles of the given time. As technology rapidly progressed, particular innovations were pivotal to giving composers a freer hand: better sound chips, offering more channels and special effects, moving from cartridges to optical drives giving capacity for CD quality audio, and the ability to output in surround sound. In the early days when data capacity and channels were severely limited, graphics were given much precedence over the audio and particularly the music; sound effects were assigned greater importance.
A game which had only a brief mention above, but which was one of the first that really got me thinking about video game music, was Akira Yamaoka's score for the Silent Hill series. This is a great example of
a game that is heavily dependent on it's score and sound effects, and Yamaoka does a great job of putting the player on edge and making your skin crawl in anticipation of what could happen, when nothing is actually happening at the time on screen. The music ranges from downtempo electronica, to rock and industrial, to piano based scores.
Lots of excellent pieces of music from video games have been transcribed from their original form to solo piano, sometimes officially such as the Final Fantasy series and Okami, which had CD's and sheet music released, but also by musically-inclined game fans, who put their offerings, often with sheet music included, on video-sharing websites such as YouTube.
Glossary of Terms
bit-depth - (digital audio) - the number of bits recorded per sample. 16-bit refers to CD quality audio.
sample - a digital representation of a analogue signal. The higher the sample rate, the better the quality.
channel - the number of voices (sounds) that can be heard simultaneously.
reverb - a sound effect with a slight echo, such as when inside a tunnel.
loop - a seamlessly repeating pattern of music.
DSP (Digital Signal Processing) - various techniques for mathematically improving the accuracy and reliability of digital communications.
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