Once again I greet you, friends. Perhaps I will not be mistaken if I say that each of you is interested in music to one degree or another. Some people just absorb the products of other people’s creativity, some create it with their own hands, some cannot imagine a day without the sound of their favorite artist in their ears, and some listen to it from time to time. But despite the great variety of genres, music often brings people together. And since you are looking at this article, most likely you and I are united by our passion for computer games. That’s why I want to draw your attention to the music that sounded in games and was something more than just a background for gameplay. And also tell you about interesting moments in the history of this phenomenon, and perhaps introduce you to those representatives whom you might have missed.
Part I. Brief history.
It all started at a time when none of the authors of this site were yet alive and only the Spirit of StopGame was flying over the expanses of the world.
In 1972, an arcade machine with the game Pong was born, marking the beginning of the path that the gaming industry has gone through to date. And, of course, in this game there were some sounds. They were carried out by amplifying the natural sound frequency of the device’s operating microcircuit.
In those days, sound was recorded on media such as records, reels and cassettes. Unfortunately, they were quite fragile and wore out quickly with frequent use.
It is for this reason that their use in arcade machines was immediately abandoned. But the issue of sound did not go away and ultimately led to the creation of a method for converting program code into sound, which made it possible to include music in the machines using special sound chips. It was monophonic and played only at the beginning of the game or when moving to a new level; also, as an option, it was repeated in a loop. Nevertheless, it was already at least something.
An example is the cult game Pac-man (1980)
We owe the sounds for this game to no one but a real composer – Toshio Kai.
Several similar chips were already built into subsequent machines, which did not affect the sound quality in any way, but increased its variety.
In the early 1980s, the first attempts to digitize sound begin (that is, the music is first written by a composer, and then programmers translate it into code, or one person does both of these things). Thanks to the new processors, the Famicom console (in America, better known as the NES, and in our country, its pirated copies – Dendy and Subor) are becoming dominant. It had 5 channels for sound reproduction, which made it possible to make more or less high-quality and varied music. Towards the end of the Famicom era of popularity, additional sound cards were installed on some cartridges, which made it possible to increase the number of playback channels.
In the mid-eighties, composers writing music for video games began to gain their first fame.
Koji Kondo–Super Mario Bros
Kochi Sugiyama–Dragon Quest
Rob Haggard –Monty On The Run
Hirokazu Tanaka — Metroid
And Kid Icarus
Martin Galway — Times of Lore
Hiroshi Miyauchi — Out Run
Nobuo Uematsu — Final Fantasy
Yuzo Koshiro — Ys
In the mid-80s, attempts began to digitize sounds and music in sampling format. Sample – usually a short digitized sound fragment. The first home computer to actively use this technology was the Commodore Amiga. In it, when playing sound from memory, short sound fragments were read, which made it possible to create the sounds of musical instruments and any others with greater accuracy than in eight-bit set-top boxes. Since the Commodore Amiga had no competitors on this front, it became the first platform that allowed experimentation with music generated by a sequence of code commands.
Despite the fact that sampling turned out to be convenient and made it possible to obtain higher quality sound, the technology was in no hurry to spread widely. This was mainly due to the high cost of memory media. Therefore, games used either the same sound generation from program code, or combining it with a small number of samples.
Home-grown and not so composers wrote music on something similar.
In 1988, the Sega Genesis marked the birth of the fourth generation of video game consoles. The difference from the NES was stereo sound and 10 sound channels versus 6 on the NES, one of which could play eight-bit samples.
Writing music still presented challenges for composers accustomed to working with conventional instruments, forcing them to come up with innovative techniques for using frequency modulation to create music that was pleasing to the ear.
To the delight of composers, the price of magnetic memory in the form of floppy disks gradually fell, which made it possible to abandon frequency modulation and switch to supporting musical accompaniment on consoles through one or another type of sampling.
With the release of Sound Tracker for the Amiga computer in 1987, music creation became even easier. This event began the era of the MOD format, which allowed people to use other programs – trackers – to record music using a set of digitized samples. In the 90s, this method of creating music was transferred to personal computers. Examples of games with a soundtrack in a similar format include the notorious
Around the same time, Richard Josev gave his creative voice with the opening theme for the game
It’s notable for us because it used long vocal samples, which is a bit of an advance.
In 1990, the Super Famicom (SNES) appeared, which had a chip on board that allowed it to both play sounds and process digital signals in hardware. Simply put, thanks to its content, developers were able to experiment with the sound environment: music, spatial, directional, as well as architectural and environmental acoustics were used for games. Additionally, the SNES’s ability to handle high-quality samples was widely used.
With the advent of the fifth generation of consoles, in particular the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn, a movement began towards streaming audio, that is, playing samples without any conversion. Thanks to the spread of this approach, musicians were not required to know programming or the architecture of the game itself; they were able to create compositions independently. This flexibility has been exploited by some popular artists who have used their talents directly to write game music. And since we still, by and large, live in the era of streaming audio, and media are changing only in the direction of increasing the volume of information that can be recorded on them, it makes sense to complete the historical excursion. Next, we will turn our gaze to the iconic representatives of the music front of the gaming industry.
Part II. Best representatives.
Before talking about the best representatives, let me remind you of the subjectivity of the author’s view. At the same time, reminders of any cool music that the author managed to miss are strongly welcome. The main thing is to remember that we are talking about original soundtracks, and not about compositions purchased from various popular artists. We’ll probably start our musical excursion from the era of streaming audio that took hold in games in the 90s.
The nineties, in addition to giving life to the bulk of the Stopgame audience.ru, turned out to be significant for game music. It was during this period that such talented people as Howard Drossin, Akira Yamaoka, Robert Prince, Glenn Stafford, Rob King and Stephen Rippy gained popularity in the industry.
Silent Hill
Doom and Doom 2
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Age of Empires 2
The beginning of the new millennium brought a dozen more names of talented composers to the industry. And since the developers wanted to make their creations unique and recognizable, they simply needed music that was firmly associated with their creation. It is this kind of music that the representatives below refer to:.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War
Shogun Total War
Icewind Dale
American McGee’s Alice https://klirrcasino.co.uk/mobile-app/
Red Alert 2
Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption
This year has been quite busy for the industry, but in terms of original music we can remember the following representatives:. Their authors took special care to convey the gloom and melancholy atmosphere of the works for which the music was written, without going beyond the specific mood for each of the games.
Silent Hill 2
Clive Barker’s Undying
This year brought for listeners both new discoveries and works of experienced professionals who, nevertheless, did not rest on their laurels, but improved their skills. An example of such “veteran works” is the music for Heroes IV and Age of Mythology by Rob King and Stephen Rippy, respectively. Also, Inon Zur, who gave us the music for Icewind Dale 2, showed himself in all his glory in this area.
Icewind Dale 2
Heroes of Might and Magic IV
Max Payne 2
Age of Mythology
Year 3 can rightfully be considered the year of Jeremy Soule’s music, with his soundtracks to KotOR and HP:QWP. At the same time, gamers discovered the musical talent of Stuart Chatwood.
Rise of nations
Prince of Persia: Sands of time
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup
With the release of the iconic Half Life 2, games began to move towards greater cinematography and, as a result, requests for music changed. But all this changed later, and this year once again people were delighted by the music from Total war and Prince of Persia. Well, the Poles showed that it’s time for “Polish shooters” to become quality games, using the example of their Painkiller(a)
Half Life 2
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Rome: Total War
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
It was still quite simple here – Stephen Rippy, Jeremy Soule and Rob King did their jobs well. But the Japanese pleased us with music that skillfully conveys the national flavor, but does not sound archaic.
Age of Empires 3
Heroes of Might and Magic V
Samurai warriors 2
Games that gave us wonderful trilogies in the future, this year also delighted us with music.
Mass Effect
It was a rather poor year for proper games, but even in it there was a couple that could evoke a response in your soul with their music that was opposite to each other in mood.
Alone in the Dark
Little big planet
The 9th year was marked by both good music for blockbuster games and warm soundtracks for small and soulful.
Mirror’s Edge
Uncharted 2
Assasin’s creed 2
Dragon Age origins
Machinarium
A year of epic works and epic music at its best. As well as atmospheric music of the wild west and distant corners of the milky way.
God of War 3
Red Dead Redemption
Mass Effect 2
But the very next year, small projects, noir blues and Jeremy Soul took the musical banner into their own hands.
To the Moon
The end of the world has once again postponed its performance date, and we were able to enjoy the dark and crazy music of this year.
Spec Ops The line
Hotline Miami
The 13th, despite the sad fame of this number in our culture, brought not only pain and suffering, but also a diverse musical trio.
Brothers – A tale of two sons
Perhaps the most “turkey” year of the previous ones, which was reflected in the chosen music (personally, I’m still sad that SG didn’t give the best OST of this year to Child of Light.)
Crypt of the Necrodancer
This War of Mine
Wolfenstein
Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Divinity: Original Sin
Child of Light
Here we have good sequels of successful series, and it was quite obvious that the music there would reach a new level. The music from Ori was a pleasant surprise. Which is more deceitful, because in style it was reminiscent of Child of Light and from a similar fairy-tale atmosphere one expected a soundtrack at least somewhat similar in quality.
Ori and the Blind Forest
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
Last year was not very rich in musical terms, but the quality cannot be taken away from the chosen trio.
This is where we end this modest musical excursion. To those who read and listened to the recordings that caught his attention – thank you. I hope you found this format interesting. See you soon on the blogs.
Best comments
I remember Loom from 1990, into which they managed to squeeze Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” into the soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJXzRHUIqdM
And for me, the best game music is music from the first Witcher. In second place is King’s Bounty from Katauri.
Well, by the way, all of my favorite soundtracks are on the list (except, of course, for the OST from NieR: Automata, which I’ve been listening to continuously for two weeks now)
That’s it, I’ll say it. Could add Darksiders 2 to the list with Jesper Kyd’s epic performance.
Overall blog very good. As an independent playlist for the road too. Catch the plus sign.
For Fury in 2016, my biggest plus, although it’s strange not to see any thoughts there.)
Very good post and high-quality selection, some of my favorite sounds are missing, but it’s impossible to fit everything in.)
Beyond good, evil and my musical taste.)
That is, the ambient music is, of course, suitable, but apart from the game it’s not particularly listenable.
By the way, I’m damn offended for the 4th part of the heroes, such music, such an atmosphere of adventure, these descriptions of items, all the leveling up and new mechanics, all this was interesting and allowed my imagination to run wild, and coupled with the map editor and the simplicity of the tools allowed my 8-year-old brain to create maps, quests and stories (I remember, at that age I didn’t know the concept of the word triger, but I could easily make it with the help of those tools) but the hamsters just needed a beautiful 3 part and don’t take a step to the side and these fuckers just drowned it in shit, because we don’t care about roleplay, we sit and jerk off to a PERFECTLY BALANCED GAME and what is not it, we drown it in shit, well, congratulations, I can’t remember a SINGLE MELODY from the sixth part, and after the beta test of the seventh, I completely gave up and I’ve already buried this series for myself.
I haven’t forgotten mine (To the Moon). I only disagree with 2016. The year was top: the brutal Doom, the epic Dark Souls III, the fantastic No Man’s Sky, IMHO, in vain they were ignored.
With the new doom, unfortunately or fortunately, I have the same story as with Devil May Cry 3. That is, there are several good tracks during battle moments, but the rest is somehow unimpressive.
Sorry for the question, but this is a personal musical set of what the author played? I just don’t argue with the first part of the article, but watching part 2 I get this feeling, although I don’t agree with some. The article is a well-deserved plus.
Guy, that’s not the only problem. There were a lot of problems with the development process of Heroes 4 (as well as with Heroes 6). Whether we should make a turn-based game or go in a different direction. Plus the lack of normal funding, lack of time, since 3DO were on the verge of bankruptcy since the beginning of 2000 and it was important for them to release the game as quickly as possible, like a hundred other games in the Might and Magic universe, which is why the final campaign and other things, such as normal sprites, were not completed. And I wildly disagree about the music in Heroes 6. Paul Romero and Rob King, unfortunately, did more of a degree of arrangement of their old tunes than full-fledged new compositions, although there were new ones. The main music for part 6 was written by Jason Graves, who worked on Devil May Cry (restart), Far Cry Primal, all parts of Dead Space and other games. I still listen to what he wrote for part 6 along with the Celtic music from part 4. And Ancient Storm are Rising and “The Last Battle from Pavel Gryphon” from Tom Selta are simply the height of epicness. The soundtrack of part 7, if it consists of new melodies, they do not sound in tune, except for the theme of the city of orcs. It feels like Paul Romero wrote the music for the entire game a year before development, took the money and left.