Music is a wonderful thing, isn't it? As a psych major, it has fascinated me how the human mind can be molded like putty at the sound of it. It amazes me how music can add color, emotion, and feeling to just about anything. Think of how many cultures are defined by their music, such as the way latin culture is flavored with tango and salsa, or how Jamaican culture is defined through reggae. Music says so much about the people who created it, and even then, there is much more that music can do. Music can transform an experience, add levity or tension, promote good feelings or make you feel depressed.
It's no surprise then, that music has been a supremely important component of video game design. Companies hire orchestras to score their games, and some sound designers have become celebrities within the gaming community...and yet all of it started in such a humble way.
Let me take you on a little guided tour around some of the high water marks of music in the gaming industry...
You should recognize that song; almost everyone does! That song was designed by Nintendo's Koji Kondo, the man who designed music for the entire Mario franchise, from this game all the way up to the stellar Super Mario Galaxy 2, released just this year. His music is based off of simple melodies that loop endlessly, and yet can be listened to without tiring of them during gameplay. In fact, if you're interested in one of the other things that gives Kondo-san's music that "secret spice", take a look at this link. It talks about the "Golden Ratio" that is present in much of Kondo's Mario music, one of the things that makes the music so appealing to our minds in the first place.
One of the things I can't get over with this game, however, is that the entirety of the original Super Mario Bros. is around 41 kb, if you can believe that. Granted, the music within Super Mario Bros. was simply a series of instructions to be fed to a sound processor within the NES console itself, but even so it's amazing to think that all of that music fit within such a small space, to say nothing of the other 8 unique worlds that made up the rest of the game.
Can you imagine Super Mario Bros. without that song? I sure can't. The music is inextricably tied into what made Super Mario Bros. the great game that it is; take it away, and you've robbed the game of its soul.
The Legend of Zelda, another classic by Nintendo, was also scored by Kondo-san. This is another great display of Kondo-san's music being the driving force behind what kept players in the game; the main theme of the original Zelda title was a permeating force that drove you towards adventure! It gave the player all the reason in the world to keep pushing forward, through all the puzzles and perils, to rescue the princess and save the day. Epic little song, isn't it? Epic, but pure classic.
Like all things with video games, technological advances allowed for greater innovation. The limits of what sound designers could do was expanded upon with the release of each successive console generation, and for a time, sound enhancements were reason enough to get excited over the newest gaming console, since the hardware was improved right alongside the graphics hardware. Better graphics, better sound, better games!
The SNES, released in 1991, heralded with it what some consider the very best game soundtracks to have ever been made. It was as if the sound designers, constrained for years and years having to work with 8-bit hardware, were finally free to let their imaginations run wild; they ended up prodicing some truly fantastic, iconic melodies to accompany their games.
Take the music for Donkey Kong Country, composed by David Wise, formerly of the (then) superstar SNES second party developer Rare. The song above was written for the underwater sections of Donkey Kong Country, and surprised gamers with its serene and subtle beauty that, until that point, had been nigh unheard of from within a video game soundtrack. Consider that just scant years before this game was released, the best we had heard were the harsh and bare chiptunes that were generated by the NES sound board. Although the music from some NES games is truly great, the complexity and quality jump from NES to SNES is truly something for the ears to behold.
While David Wise did not gather the rabid following of some of the SNES's other great composers, his music is still considered by many gamers today to be some of the best that has ever been written for the console. While the SNES was certainly not the only machine to be putting out quality music around the time, the Sega Genesis is not looked on quite as fondly due to the machine's rough, jagged sound quality. The SNES, to be blunt, had a far superior sound processor, and so is home to the most memorable music of the era.
The SNES continued to generate a collection of stellar tunes, and no discussion on SNES-era music would be complete without mentioning the musical tour de force that was SquareSoft's Chrono Trigger, released in 1995.
Chrono Trigger is a role playing game about a group of friends who, by a series of strange accidents and coincidences, wind up traveling through time. Through their travels, they discover that in the distant past, a creature from another world burrowed deep into their planet, and in the far future, this creature would rise from below, and bring about the end of the world. Through their travels, they come across the world of 12,000 BC, a time in which magic existed. Those who could practice it lived on floating continents in the clouds, high above the non-magic users, who lived on the ground in the middle of a full-scale ice age. This song, Corridors of Time, is the theme of those cloud-dwelling magic users. It was written for Chrono Trigger as a part of the "Dream Team" of developers, that included Nobuo Uematsu (Famous for his work as composer for the Final Fantasy series) and Yasunori Mitsuda, who had gotten his start in the world of video game composing with this game. The entire soundtrack, top to bottom, is packed to the rafters with memorable tunes that encapsulate every emotion from panic to sorrow, and lend a real feeling to each character in the story, since each character had their own theme song.
By no means did video game music stop at that point, however; a further evolution in the complexity and sophistication of video game music would come chiefly from the new contender in the video game console war; the Sony PlayStation. While Nintendo went on to create plenty of industry-defining video game experiences with the N64 (Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time chief among those), game companies like SquareSoft felt their creativity was stifled by Nintendo's decision to stick with the lower-capacity (And more expensive!) cartridge format for their 64-bit system. The PlayStation may have been a less-powerful 32-bit console, but its CD-based storage medium offered game designers, and by extension sound designers, a hugely expanded capability to deliver higher-quality experiences to their customers.
The result...is this.
This is "One Winged Angel", the final boss theme song for the game that turned the tide of the console war, and put Sony in a position of market dominance that lasted until the release of the PS3 in 2006. The music for Final Fantasy VII, like all Final Fantasy games before it and many of them since, was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu-san is perhaps one of the most famous of video game composers, his music being featured in concert halls around the globe and featured in countless fan remix and cover albums. I myself had the honor to meet the man, albeit briefly, during his visit to Chicago in May 2006. I still have the signed copy of Final Fantasy VII's disc 3 hanging, framed, on my wall as proof!
As iconic as the soundtracks for the Final Fantasy games are, Uematsu-san's work on the PlayStation was eclipsed almost completely by the stunning quality of by his other, lesser-known contemporary, Yasunori Mitsuda. Mitsuda-san had worked first on Chrono Trigger, but the work to have come from him on the 1999 SquareSoft hit and Chrono Trigger sequel, Chrono Cross, is utterly phenomenal. The whole soundtrack feels like a lucid celtic tropical dream, a perfect compliment to the game's tale of two alternate universes, one in which the main character Serge had died, and one in which he had lived. Which is the real universe, and why is Serge able to traverse these two parallel universes? Many gamers never found out, too busy listening to this soundtrack to keep playing. If you are looking for what truly is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful soundtracks to have ever accompanied a video game, look no further than Chrono Cross.
That was 1999, though. Time continued, and the hardware continued to grow, and by this point the quality and beauty of a video game's audio was no longer constrained by hardware; the hardware was powerful enough to generate any kind of sound imaginable. Music in video games became less about pushing out the most from a game's hardware, and more about being creative with how the music is used while playing the game. You may have noticed the strange change in quality from the "One Winged Angel" song in FFVII to the beautiful "Time's Scar" from Chrono Cross. This is because the PlayStation was sat in that awkward middle space between the consoles that used a sound chip inside the console to generate music, and the consoles that contained all of the sound data purely on the disc, composed elsewhere by more powerful hardware and merely played by the console like an MP3 would be on a computer. Final Fantasy VII's music was generated, for the most part, by the PlayStation via MIDI files synthesized by the PlayStation's sound chip, but Chrono Cross's music was composed separately, using more powerful hardware to create the music.
From that point forward, it became difficult to tell if music was synthesized by the console's sound processor, or if it was recorded elsewhere. The highest-quality music was recorded specially, and so became part of the signature of a well-designed game. But with the increase in power of the consoles came an increase in the consoles' ability to use sound to create a finely-tuned experience.
This is where some of my favorite sound design comes into play, with the creative sound use of games like Silent Hill 2, released for the PlayStation 2 in 2002. I have gone in detail with the way this game uses sound before, but the significance to the game industry's usage of sound is an extremely important one; it personifies the usage of ambient sound, of white noise, and of silence in video games as a tool to be used in creating a mood. The game can literally scare you by draining the sound completely out of a scene, leaving nothing but the subtle hissing of a TV, or the empty sounds of hollow footsteps creaking over strained wood...
For this, we have Konami's Team Silent sound developer, Akira Yamaoka. Yamaoka-san has become synonymous with the Silent Hill series, to the point that many fans will not accept a game as a Silent Hill game unless he is behind the music. Sadly, however, he left Konami in early 2010, only to team up with Grasshopper Manufacture (Headed up by the eccentrically-named Suda 51, and responsible for games like No More Heroes and Killer 7).
Video game music has undergone further evolutions, as the industry has generated more and more money. Popular games these days include actual licensed music (Such as the Rock Band or Guitar Hero series), and the ones that don't include licensed music have even gone to the trouble of commissioning entire orchestras to provide the music for their games.
Developers of current-generation games have pulled out all the stops to bring to our video games the quality and production values of a Hollywood blockbuster. Men like Harry-Gregson Williams (Responsible for scoring the Shrek series, Enemy of the State, Armageddon, The Rock, and 2010's Unstoppable) currently compose the score for video games like Metal Gear Solid 4.
The Metal Gear Solid series has always had a stable of utterly incredible music, and may be among the very first examples of this truly cinematic quality brought to live on the screens of video game players around the world. Just listen to this jaw-dropping example of celtic beauty first heard during the end credits for Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation 1 in 1998, and brought back for a gut-wrenching moment of frosty nostalgia ten years later in 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4..."The Best Is Yet To Come".
I can only smile at the song's self-aware title, as the best truly was yet to come. It always is, when you're discussing the video game industry.
Video game music only continues to improve, to become more cinematic, more relevant and beautiful....and I'm proud to say that a song from a video game has finally be recognized by a crowd that is potentially much bigger than the gaming industry.
A song from the video game Civilization IV has been nominated for a Grammy, just recently. If you listen to any song from this post, I urge you to listen the most to this one. This is the opening cinematic of Civilization IV with the song "Baba Yetu". Watch as a single video game song attempts, along with the imagery, to showcase the entire path of human civilization.
Beautiful.
Man, I love being a gamer.
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