Ten Barber
Some More Obscure Video Game Music Landmarks
The gestation of the video game library music is a particularly interesting site of innovation. Outsiders are often quick to criticise the early video game for featuring simplistic chip tunes. But with these limited resources, the skilled composers of the more significant titles often came up with quite catchy melodies. The Master System loving households of Japan, Brazil and Europe will be humming the theme to ‘Alex Kidd In Miracle World’ until the widely disputed apocalypse of 2012 (the events may be connected). There is an enthusiast scene dedicated to wiring old console chips up to make music with such sounds, and the techniques are common in modern games that pay homage to the era. Though they tend to eskew the single-layered simplicity of 80s and early 90s tunes, games like ‘Super Meat Boy’ feature many of these old sounds in multi-layered soundtracks.
The noughties are widely recognised as the point at which proper audio fidelity was achieved in games, but the nineties featured many notable landmarks. The PC was the site of the greatest share of innovation. Whilst incumbent consoles languished with midi-style chips and low quality audio, the sound card market was booming and moving into DVD quality surround sound systems. One of the boldest and earliest endeavours was the dynamic music Lucasarts put into popular point and click adventure ‘Monkey Island 2′. Triggered by the player changing scene or actions withing the seen, Lucasarts’ system could neatly segue between songs. Later in the decade, tracks that were composed in much the same way to electronica production musicwere widely used. Unreal engine games (‘Unreal’, ‘Deus Ex’) were particularly renowned for their sample sequenced music.
Music from this period became a lot less about making defining themes and melodies, and some artists became more experimental. The soundtrack to PC strategy title ‘Homeworld’ featured a number of tracks that were best described as ‘Industrial Arabic’ due to its use of ethnic wails and instruments. ‘Homeworld’ was also somewhat innovative for using both a choir (‘Agnus Dei’, ‘Adagio for Strings’ in vocal form) and a guest artist (Yes) on the soundtrack. All this is remarkable when you consider that the games of just ten years previous didn’t have enough audio bandwidth for both the music and the sound effects.
Patricia Barber – Invitation
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