Video game music is any of the musical pieces or soundtracks found in video games. It can range from a primitive synthesizer tune to an orchestral piece, usually such that the older the game, the simpler the music. In recent times, many games have had complex soundtracks similar to those of movies. It is also much more common for video game soundtracks to be commercially sold or even be performed in concerts that focus on video game music. Music can also be an important gameplay element in certain types of video games.
History
Early video game technology and computer chip music
At the time video games emerged as a form of entertainment in the 1970s (the first generation), music was stored on physical medium in analog waveforms such as compact cassettes and phonograph records. Such components were expensive and prone to breakage under heavy use making them less than ideal for use in an arcade cabinet, though in rare cases, they were used ( Journey ). A more affordable method of having music in a video game was to use digital means, where a specific computer chip would change electrical impulses from computer code into analog sound waves on the fly for output on a speaker. Sound effects for the games were also generated in this fashion.
While this allowed for inclusion of music of arcade games in the 1970s, it was usually monophonic, looped or used sparingly between stages or at the start of a new game, such as Pac Man or Pole Position . The decision to include any music into a video game meant that at some point it would have to be transcribed into computer code by a programmer, whether or not the programmer had musical experience. Some music was original, some was public domain music such as folk songs. The popular Atari 2600 home system, for example, was capable of generating only two tones, or "notes", at a time. Some exceptions, such as arcade games developed by Exidy, took steps toward digitized, or "sampled", sounds.
This approach in game development carried on into the 1980s. As advances in silicon and cost of technology fell, a definitively new generation of arcade machines and home consoles allowed for great changes in accompanying music. In arcades, machines based on the Motorola 68000 CPU and Yamaha YM chips for sound generators allowed for several more tones or "channels" of sound, sometimes eight or more. Home console systems also had a comparable upgrade in sound ability beginning with the ColecoVision in 1982 capable of four channels. However, more notable was the Japanese release of the Famicom in 1983 which was later released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It was capable of five channels, one being capable of simple PCM sampled sound. The home computer Commodore 64 released in 1982 was capable of early forms of filtering effects, different types of waveforms and eventually the ability to play 4-bit samples on a fourth sound channel. Its comparatively low cost made it a popular alternative to other home computers, as well as its ability to use a TV for an affordable display monitor.
Approach to game music development in this time period usually involved using simple tone generation and/or frequency modulation synthesis to simulate instruments for melodies, and use of a "noise channel" for simulating percussive noises. Early use of PCM samples in this era was limited to sound bites ( Monopoly ), or as an alternate for percussion sounds ( Super Mario Bros 3 ). The music on home consoles often had to share the available channels with other sound effects. For example, if a laser beam was fired by a spaceship, and the laser used a 1400 Hz tone, then whichever channel was in use by music would stop playing music and start playing the sound effect.
The mid-to-late 1980s software releases for these platforms had music developed by more people with greater musical experience than before. Quality of composition improved noticeably, and evidence of the popularity of music of this time period remains even today. Composers who made a name for themselves with their software include Nobuo Uematsu ( Final Fantasy ), Kōji Kondō ( Super Mario Bros. , The Legend of Zelda ), Kōichi Sugiyama ( Dragon Quest ), Rob Hubbard ( Monty On the Run ), Hirokazu Tanaka ( Metroid , Kid Icarus , EarthBound ), Martin Galway ( Times of Lore ), Hiroshi Miyauchi ( Out Run ), and Yūzō Koshiro ( Ys ). Toward the end of the life of the Famicom, some cartridge games were custom manufactured with additional tone generating chips built into them at the developer's expense, further expanding to the number of channels for composition. NES games had many different ways of being composed. One for example, is DragonStrike's music, which was composed on the Commodore Amiga's program 'Dr. T' and was ported onto the NES according to video game musician Frank Klepacki.
The oncoming generation of arcade, home consoles, and home computers would reshape the approach to music in video games.
Early digital synthesis and sampling
The first home computer to make use of digital signal processing in the form of sampling was the Commodore Amiga in 1985. The computer's sound chip featured four independent 8-bit digital-to-analog converters. Instead of simply generating a waveform that sounded like a simplistic "beep", such as FM synthesis, this technique allowed short samples of pre-recorded sound waves to be played back through the computer's sound chip from memory. It allowed a developer to take a "sample" of a real instrument or sound they wanted at a significantly higher quality and fidelity than was previously available or would come to be available on home computing for several years. This was an early development example of what would later be called wavetables and soundfonts. For its role in being first and affordable, the Amiga would remain a staple tool of early sequenced music composing, especially in Europe.
The Amiga's main rival, the Atari ST, used the Yamaha YM2149 Programmable Sound Generator (PSG), which was limited compared to the Commodore 64's SID chip and thus digitized sound was heard on Atari ST only through certain programming tricks that consumed processor time making it impractical for games. Since it had in-built MIDI ports, the Atari ST was instead used by many professional musicians as a MIDI programming device.
IBM PC clones in 1985 would not see any significant development in multimedia abilities for a few more years, and sampling would not become popular in other video game systems for several years. Though sampling had the potential to produce much more realistic sounds, each sample required much more data in memory. This was at a time when all memory, solid state (cartridge), magnetic (floppy disk) or otherwise was still very costly per kilobyte. Sequenced soundchip generated music on the other hand was generated with a few lines of comparatively simple code and took up far less precious memory.
The previously mentioned hybrid approach (sampled and tone) to music composing in the third generation of consoles continued to the fourth generation, or 16-bit era, of home game consoles with the Sega Mega Drive in 1988. The Mega Drive, (Sega Genesis in the US) offered advanced graphics over the NES and improved sound synthesis, but largely held the same approach to sound design. Ten channels in total for tone generation with one for PCM samples were available in stereo instead of the NES's five channels in mono, one for PCM. As before, it was often used for percussion samples, or "drum kits" ( Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ). The 16-bit Sega referred to was the CPU and should not be confused with 16-bit sound samples. The Genesis did not support 16-bit sampled sounds. Despite the additional tone channels, writing music still posed a challenge to traditional composers and it forced much more imaginative use of the FM synthesizer to create an enjoyable listening experience.
As cost of magnetic memory declined in the form of diskettes, the evolution of video game music on the Amiga, and some years later game music development in general, shifted to sampling in some form. It took some years before Amiga game designers learned to wholly use digitized sound effects in music (an early exception case was the title music of text adventure game The Pawn , 1986). By this time, computer and game music had already begun to form its own identity, and thus many music makers intentionally tried to produce music that sounded like that heard on the Commodore 64, which resulted in the chiptune genre.
The release of a freely-distributed Amiga program named Sound Tracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987 started the era of MOD-format which made it easy for anyone to produce music based on digitized samples. MOD-files were made with programs called "tracker"s after Obarski's Sound Tracker . This MOD/tracker tradition continued with PC computers in 1990s. Examples of Amiga games using digitized instrument samples include David Whittaker's soundtrack for Shadow of the Beast , Chris Hülsbeck's soundtrack for Turrican 2 and Matt Furniss's tunes for Laser Squad . Richard Joseph also composed some theme songs featuring vocals and lyrics for games by Sensible Software most famous being Cannon Fodder (1993) with a song "War Has Never Been So Much Fun" and Sensible World of Soccer (1994) with a song "Goal Scoring Superstar Hero". These songs used long vocal samples.
Similar to the Amiga, this approach to sound and music developments in arcades began to appear in certain specialized arcade system board revisions. In 1991, games like Street Fighter II
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