From Midi to Symphony
Guest Article by Jonny Lupsha
Video game music has seen a thirty-year transition from silence to orchestrated scores by modern classical composers that was so smooth, it's hard to imagine how it all happened.
Any gamer worth his or her salt remembers what they heard the first time they flipped on the NES and prepared for the quest to slay Ganon, Bowser, Dracula or Mother Brain. My brother and I would run from the other end of the house every time we heard my dad throwing his first punches in Kung Fu. Little eight-minute MIDI symphonies seemed as good as it could get and, many would argue, still are.
The next logical step was the analog keyboard version of Alice in Chains' "Angry Chair" in Doom II, which might as well have been my CD collection in a video game.
Trent Reznor's score for Id’s Quake was, to me, mind-blowing. The eerie industrial-ambient drones – complete with embedded grenade-bouncing sounds in one of the tracks – chilled me to the bone. I had a running conspiracy theory that violence-inducing soundwaves were hidden in that album and experimented on it for months on end. Years later, Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill scores paralleled Reznor's Quake score for the survival horror series.
Around the turn of the millennium, Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's N64 allowed for more licensed music to appear in games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater boasted audio – and video on most versions – of The Dead Kennedys and Primus, to name two, and of course the Final Fantasy series has always dressed to impress with original symphonic compositions.
I feel like somewhere between Britney's Dance Beat and the second American Idol game, something went wrong. I can't jump aboard this doo-wop redux screamo bandwagon, so the Burnout soundtracks are completely lost on me. I loved playing Frequency and Amplitude but fail to see what Weezer's "Dope Nose" has to do with electronica/dance music.
I can thank developers Harmonix for introducing me to Freezepop, Made in Mexico and That Handsome Devil, but can’t help but wonder if the Guitar Hero series and the Wii-mote are a plea from game developers to remember to do something else with our lives from time to time.
And of course, just as video game soundtracks enter their full-fledged stages of risks and genius, like the "living environment" ambience of Doom 3, Microsoft offers full custom soundtrack capability on the Xbox 360. Now instead of having to hear some like, old people's classical music, you can totally listen to your favorite Dave Matthews tribute band while you play Oblivion!
As the world of video gaming becomes oversaturated with licensing, what was once a cool gimmick of hearing Top 40 bands while cruising in a Crazy Taxi is now at risk of pummeling us in our collective face. Def Jam: Icon features dozens of rappers, but as we all learned from Marvel Nemesis – Rise of the Imperfects, there can be too much of a good thing if the focus isn't kept on the gameplay.
Harmonix is letting Neversoft develop the next Guitar Hero / Guitar Villain game while they work on something that they claim is much bigger than anything they’ve done. Are we working our way towards a PS2 home studio with full-band games like Rock Hero?
Wii Music is expected to allow users to conduct virtual orchestras, as Shigeru Miyamoto showed at Wii's E3 2006 jaw-dropping debut. This will finally put my air drumming skills – yes, that's right – to use. Meanwhile, Skinny Puppy and Beck have both expressed their interest in interactive music projects – the former actually released an double-disc enhanced CD in 1996 with video and audio clips accessible through a 360-degree rotating first-person room on each disc.
The future of video game music is uncertain at best, but like HBO and Adult Swim before them, let's hope video game composers put a little more faith in their audiences than most producers do.
What say you?!