Game Music Online: Audio Mentioned in G4 Top 100 Video Games of All Time: Part 4

Continuing my journey through G4's Top 100 Video Games of All Time whose audio was worthy of special highlighting in the series.  A best of the best list, if you will.  I'm having a blast getting to know these games, (re) experiencing their music, and thinking more about their soundtracks.  Hope you will too....


40 Space Invaders:  Tim Schafer: "I remember hearing... this thumping... strong bass sound.  You had this emotional reaction to it.  It was really the first to use audio in that way... to make you feel something."  Space Invaders is often cited for the first continuous soundtrack, as well as Schafer's credit for being the first game to use music to heighten the game play experience as the descending bass line and alien ship movements speed up.

37 Halo Combat Evolved.  Scott Porter  "There are certain songs you hear from games that just make you so happy or take you back to a time that was so awesome.  And every time I hear (sings the opening theme)...  the theme song is so incredible...."  Not a game I've played, but one whose music I'm currently listening to.

32 Mike Tyson's Punch Out.  "It was awesome watching him run along with his coach and that song..." (he sings the song) Danny Pudi.  I've been thinking about this cutscene music for a really long time and seeing this finally got me to look it up.  Of course the best one was the nighttime training-- love it!

I also watched this awesome video, a 40 min longplay of the Punch Out, to remind myself of the music experience.  When I hear this music, it strikes me as straddling the ear between arcade and home entertainment systems.  If it just played the transition music, start of the fight, winning fanfare, etc this game music could be for arcade.  However, once home entertainment systems started to become popular, game designers needed to create a more specific audio experience.  Presumably, a household only had a TV or two-- that's how ours was, at least-- and if someone were playing games in one room, it needed to create a continuous soundtrack with underscoring that builds tension and keeps players and observers engaged.

Also, I LOVE the classical music references: Glass Joe: La Marseillaise, Von Kaiser/ Super Macho Man: Ride of the Valkyries, Don Flaminco: Carmen Overture.  Is this kind of stuff happening in contemporary games, or have we lost these references?  Also read that Soda Popinski plays a Russian folk song-- wouldn't know it, but I do like how the music introduces each character.  I don't know if I recognized these musical themes as a kid, but much like the Looney Tunes episodes, I liked the music when I was a kid, and now, I get the musical references on a completely different level.


30 Super Street Fighter II Turbo.  "The best thing about Street Fighter II was all the sounds they made when you were fighting.  -Mo Mandel  I didn't play this Street Fighter, but I did play Street Fighter II on the SNES.  When my friends and I played together, we totally imitated these effects for our super powered punches and kicks.

Game Music Online: Audio mentioned in G4's Top 100 Video Games of All Time: Part 3

Continuing my journey through the G4 Top Video Games series, Part 3.   These are the best games whose audio was worthy of being highlighted in the show.  A best of the best list.


52 Rock Band 3  Scott Porter:  "Everybody wanted to have the keyboard.  I think it's the best instrument that lends itself to a music game that I've ever seen.  My dad's on the drums, my mom's on the mic, I'm on the guitar or the keys... it's really an amazing thing..."  My mind goes back to the 19th century when a family might get together and play through music together, each on a different instrument.  Is Rock Band 3 the 21st century version of chamber music?

It does me good to hear Chantal Claret say that she "failed Rock Band at her own song."  The couple of times that I've played this type of game, I'm not very good at it.  I always feel like the music and gameplay are ever so slightly out of sync.  As a classical pianist, I wonder if that may have to do with a difference in time of the mechanical action on my piano and the electronic sync up with game controllers?  I've certainly got rhythm...

47 Myst  Will Wright: (What made Myst successful was) "the connection between the high resolution graphics and the sound effects."  There was something about it that was enchanting in an almost musical hypnotic way.  -James Gunn  I played Myst just a little, but my mom played it for days, up all hours-- she was hooked.  I remember how shocked she was that the ending is right at the beginning.  I'm listening to the soundtrack-- it strikes me as being minimalist, unobtrusive music, that does indeed have a hypnotic effect.  Here's a little gameplay for you:

46 Red Dead Redemption:  "And in true Rockstar Games fashion the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack was a stand out on its own."  "All the music in the game is actual tracks from these old spaghetti western movies.  They did an amazing job putting this stuff together and really capturing that feeling."- James Gunn.  Not a game I know at all, or had ever heard of, but I've enjoyed hearing the soundtrack.  One of my favorite tracks is Ashtar Command's Deadman's Gun.  For an audio flavor of the game, here's the opening.  Love how communicative the music is at moments like 1:17.

I also found an incredible short documentary with a behind the scenes of the Red Dead Redemption Soundtrack.  This makes me wonder if Gunn's statement above was just referencing a feeling of old Westerns.  Also, I learned from this that the music has a layering effect where jumping on a horse causes a bass line to come in.  Clearly, I need to play this game to fully appreciate its musical cleverness.

Game Music Online: Audio mentioned in G4's Top 100 Video Games Part 2

Continuing the journey through G4's Top 100 Video Games of All Time whose audio was worthy of highlighting as one of the most awesome things.  Part 2:

# 78 Spy Hunter: The music changes when you go on the weapons truck, into Henry Mancini's theme from Peter Gunn.

#77 Excitebike:  Blair Herter: "What made this game so much fun was the sound design.  If you play the motorcycle sound in Excitebike to anybody my age, they can immediately tell you what video game that came from."  I remember playing this at a friend's house growing up, and designing courses.  Interesting that the music is such a small part of a game like this... I forget how much audio has progressed since the first NES games of my childhood.

#74 Star Fox 64:  "If you had an N64, you had this game.  You know why?  Because the characters talked!"  - Morgan Webb.  The transition from printed text to spoken audio to a game is a huge difference to the gameplay experiences.  As a kid, I used to support the amount of times I spent playing games by the fact that I was reading when I was playing RPGs.  In '97, spoken audio was not the norm, especially the amount that Star Fox 64 has!  And what a huge improvement over the speech in the SNES Star Fox where I was always disappointed after the opening audio samples.  One major thing I notice: once the gameplay starts in earnest at 1:56, there's a lot of background noise from the ship flying and frequent dialogue, which push the game's music out of the forefront of the audio experience.  

 

#73 Mega Man 2:  "Mega Man 2 is one of my all time favorite games as well.  I still have my ringtone as the Mega Man 2 theme song."  -Jonah Ray.  I did love the audio to this game.  When reading an interview with the sound team, they credit the popularity of the music with the popularity of the game and  the enjoyability of the gameplay experience.  I loved the different feel that each world had, largely imparted by the different tunes for each level.

#72 Mortal Kombat.  "Finish Him!"  What an iconic sound clip!  Although it doesn't have great music, my friends and I would yell this line as we pretended to be zap each other with our super powers.  Give this gameplay a watch: despite being continuous, the audio is actually pretty bland, other than the terrific fighting/ speech sounds.  This is from the arcade version, although I was usually playing the less graphic SNES version.

#64: NBA Jam.  "You're on fire!"  "Boom Shaka Laka!" NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, and other arcade games aren't so notable for their music, which in the noisy arcade environment was more less critical than it is in home console games.  As I'm considering these examples that the show highlighted, I'm noticing that arcade games are more memorable for having spoken audio and better effects than home console games did in the mid 90s.

Game Music Online: Audio mentioned in G4's Top 100 Video Games Part 1

While watching G4's recent five part series of the Top 100 Video Games of All Time, I kept track of all the games whose audio is highlighted in commentary.  This documentary series has amazing audio editing, often introducing a game by playing its theme, or having a cut away to an iconic phrase in the game audio, either spoken and musical.  As I watched, I was surprised by the number of people interviewed who sang the theme song or audio effect when describing a game.  Seeing this made me realize that game music has a way of connecting with its listeners, and becoming a powerful association with players.  It's a part of our culture.

This list is cool to me because I've been trying to decide what game music might be considered "important."  What music might be in a standard canon of game music?  In other words-- there are so many great games with great music, but what are the best of the best that a person who wants to be a master of this subject should know?  How can one decide that?  By popularity?  Or games notorious for good music?  Is there a way to bridge the two?  Which games should a player go about exploring not just for the sake of great gameplay, but also to hear great music?  Thus, in a way, this is a "best of the best" list.  The best games of all time, whose audio was worthy of mention as to why this game was one of the best on G4's Top 100 Video Games of All Time.

# 98 Pitfall:  The yodeling "scream" sound effect as you swing on the vine.  The death sound effect is also classic-- Roszo/Schumann Killers/Dragnet.  Pitfall harkens from the early 80s where continuous music was not yet standard.  However, memorable sound effects depicting various gameplay events are already becoming iconic.

# 96 Guitar Hero 2: This is the first "music" video game to make the list.  Jenna Marbles says:  "The wide appeal of Guitar Hero 2 is that not everybody can play guitar, it's hard... but four or five buttons?  I can handle this.  I'm rocking out."  It gains music celebrities appreciation as well, my favorite of which point its historical passing down of music and ability to make players hear music more specifically.   David Ellefson (Megadeth): "It's introduced our music to another younger generation that probably forgot there were guitar solos." Dee Snider (Twisted Sister): "It breaks the music down and forces people to appreciate why it's so cool."  

I like the relation of music and image, where this game assumes a sort of "driving" through music view, as rhythmic button combinations approach the player as if on a conveyer belt of time.  

# 88 Double Dribble: One of the early games to use actual speech, "Double Dribble!" on the title screen.  Theo Von: the sound effects seems to be from a war game.  Every three point shot has an explosion (~1:14).

#81 Resident Evil: Haven't played this game, but interesting to learn that at one point you have to play the Moonlight Sonata to open a secret room.  Apparently, one of the characters is skilled at the piano, one can't play at all, and one has to practice to be able to unlock the room.  Clever!

Analysis: Listening to game music while playing

I've been playing around with Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13 recently to see the audio progression from some of the earlier games to the current ones.  When I study the music, often I just listen to the game soundtracks-- I'm not always playing the game again (for the 300th time).  However, in picking up the controller and playing these games, I've had some interesting revelations:

Final Fantasy 13:  There's a LOT of background noise in this game, gunfire/military fighting related sounds in many portions of the game.  Even in some of the more secluded areas, there's just a background audio white noise that comes on-- for instance in the Vile Peaks.  Furthermore, the spoken audio is really loud in relation to the music.  When I listen to game audio from the soundtracks, I listen to it way louder than I could ever turn the game audio up on my home stereo system: the vocals and effects just make the audio experience way too loud before the music is overpowering.

Final Fantasy 7: This got me thinking back to my playthrough of FF7, and I thought about how I hear the music when I'm playing the game versus how I hear the music when studying it.  Do these tracks play in entirety and repeat, or do I just hear the same beginning section of them over and over?  Of course, this will differ from game to game, but I still have a couple old post-its from my Final Fantasy 7 playthrough, and one of them, an audio journal of my quest to get a Gold Chocobo, will help answer my query.

Late in my FF7 playthrough, I took notes on all the audio I heard as I got a Gold Chocobo.  This process took 7 hours and I heard the following music.  If I consistently heard way less than the whole track, I noted the length of time I heard the music:

The Great Northern Cave (now Overworld Theme)
Farm Boy
Fighting (Battle Theme)
Electric de Chocobo (Choco Battle ~:60)
Cinco de Choco
Highwind Takes to the Skies
Costa del Sole (I bought the Villa and rested here as needed ~:10)
Good Night Until Tomorrow
North Corel (Mining Town ~:15 secs)
Gold Saucer (~:30)
Choco Races- Place Your Bets!
Fiddle de Chocobo
A Great Success  (~:15 also could have heard Tango of Tears, but not this playthrough!)

Some of this music I heard many times by the nature of the quest (Choco Races, Fiddle de Chocobo, A Great Success, etc) and other tracks I heard many times because I left the TV running while I stopped to look something up, for instance, what battle combination gave a Great Chocobo (Overworld Theme, Farm Boy, Highwind Takes to the Skies).  Only the Good Night Until Tomorrow I'm certain that I heard all the way through.  And, I was shocked to realize that I could have never heard an audio track at all if this had been my only playthrough-- Tango of Tears-- which only plays if you lose a Chocobo Race.  After years of practice, that finally didn't happen!

When you think about it, I didn't really hear a lot of music in the seven hours, just 14 tracks, probably around 20 minutes of music total that I could have heard, and much of it I never heard in entirety.  The longest themes are the Battle music and the Northern Cave, each around 3 minutes.  Even though several of these are longer than I noted, I certainly didn't hear them because of the short time I was on the screen where they play.  For instance, in the battles to capture the Chocobos, if you're too slow, the birds run away, so it's nearly impossible to hear more than a minute of music in the battle and be successful.

What I realized from this experience is how differently I hear the music when I'm playing the games versus when I'm studying them.  Sound effects, vocal levels, mixing, and interactivity of game play all effect how the player hears the audio and even the duration of and possible audio tracks that can be heard.  Every game player has experienced this, though.  Imagine the original Super Mario Bros-- do you really recognize that theme very well past the opening minute or so?  I don't, because I was always dead by then or had gone down a pipe and reset the music!

Surveying Literature: Final Fantasy Advent Children

Over the holiday, I watched my Blu-Ray of Final Fantasy Advent Children.  I've also just finishing up a play of Final Fantasy VII, so I've got its music on my mind.  Decided to let the weapons live.... for now.  I'm wondering how game music is used in Advent Children... here are my thoughts, jotted down as I watch the movie.  Many paths to follow in future blogs.

I'm struck by how similarly the movie starts as the game.  This is an idea I encountered in film music class as a DMA student years ago: producers want something just different enough that it's interesting, but similar enough that it feels familiar and comfortable.  The movie starts with the same opening music, starting up high and then panning down to the planet, cut screens from at a distance to something close up.  Yet, Red's running shots and Midgar overgrown with nature tells us we're at the end of the FF VII world.

I knew that they'd use many familiar musical themes, but its very interesting to see how much of it is the same... I'd guess 60-70% of the music is the same.

As the FF7 background story is told, the music sounds like Gregorian chant.  Recalling something older, ancient, holy... this music elevates the story and gives it a "passed down through generations feel."

Credits start like Jaws: a similar foreboding two note motive in the bass that underscores this entire scene.

Bike ride:  Graphics look like FF13.  The music has a feel of a battle in Final Fantasy, but isn't a recognizable theme to me.  The rhythm and repetition makes it feel-- to an avid FF player-- like a battle.  While they could have used any music they wanted from the game, perhaps the "sound-a-like" music was used to better match with the battle details.

As Cloud goes in to meet Rufus, I've already been struck twice by the amount of silence in the film.  Maybe because I've been watching various Star Trek episodes recently, known for their heavy underscoring, but these pauses and background silences are LONG.

Church scene plays the first totally familiar theme, Tifa's Theme.  This recording is from the Final Fantasy Piano collection-- this is undisguised marketing, for both the recording and the sheet music.  Example of cross media marketing.

Scene with Rufus and Kadaj.  I'm struck by the minimalist and repetitive nature of this music.  It's got me thinking about how video game music has changed to a style of looping and building the music by adding and removing layers.  Wondering when that divide occurred in game composition history.

Tifa vs. Loz:  The battle music from FF7 arranged for piano.  Again, this is selling the piano music-- I remember hearing this for the first time and thinking: how can I get my hands on this music?!  Cell phone ring is my favorite audio moment in the film-- certainly cracks up all FF7 lovers on first hearing.  As well as clever marketing for a different audio genre: ring tones.

The Bahamut summon again has choir singing, brass, sounds like a very dramatic scene from Sparticus or Ben-Hur.  Barrett, Yuffie, Red fight with Bahamut...  music sounds grundge, rock and roll...  Reminds me of what my techno friends listened to in the late 90s.  How do popular music tastes drive game audio?

At the very end...  a variety of themes comes back, just as in the final scene of FFVII.  Provides an emotion recap of the movie/game.

Also watched the special features.  Weird to see FF13 as a preview.

I found a wiki article about the music of all things Final Fantasy VII.  This would be a good place to noodle around through footnotes and whatnot to learn more.  Specifics are often lacking in this sort of analysis, though.  If you're interested to see the movie, you can watch it online now... please post any reactions to the music in the comments!

Surveying Literature: Game on! and Video Games Behind the Fun

Over the holiday, I watched two video game documentaries available through Netflix streaming services.  Neither, of course, had its focus as video game music, but both made points that were interesting to studying game audio.

History Channel's documentary Video Games: Behind the Fun

I hadn't thought about the increasing demand to have stars provide voices in video games.  Of course, when you play Star Trek: A Final Unity, you expect to hear Patrick Stewart as Picard, etc... but there's also a push to have stars from TV and movies provide audio as well as an expectation to hear certain voices that've become established in genres: for instance, Cain in Diablo III.

I think I've heard before that Space Invaders caused a coin shortage in Japan... and wondered, is this the modern equivalent of the game website crashing with so many users trying to play?  Also interesting to think about the arcades as having better graphics and sound-- and they did!  I still remember playing TMNT: The Arcade Game in the Putt-Putt arcade in my hometown; it was so much better than the NES version!

Watching this made me think again: how did the venue of gameplay affect the audio experience.  This topic warrants an entire blog, but the audio progression of listening venue was: Garages/Labs, Arcades, Home consoles, portable games, PCs, now consoles as entertainment units.  Arcades and portable games have an interesting quality for better or worse: fixed audio specifications.

CNBC's Documentary: Game On

This documentary drove home for me changes that have taken place in game audio development.  What one person was in charge of creating right at the end of the game experience has now become an entire audio team, each with specific development jobs.

I'm constantly bumping into popular songs about video games, in this documentary, I encountered Pac-Man Fever.  I'd be interested to try to make a list of as many of these popular songs about video games as I can find-- maybe there already is such a list?

Game On focuses a lot on the business and financial aspects of video games, often detailing units sold and profits.  For instance, the multimedia connections between the ET movie franchise and the game developed for Atari.

Finally, Game On introduced me to Wii Music, a game I didn't know but would like to check out.

Surveying Literature: A Classical Musician's Game Theory

One of the perks of my starting to mention to many of my friends, colleagues, and students that I'm interested in video game music is that people are telling me when they encounter something to do with game audio.  I had three different people mention to me that they heard a story on NPR about game audio a few weeks ago and I've been hunting around for the article.  I finally found it!

The article is short, although the audio clip interview is much more thorough, and also there are links to music from Tetris and Halo 3 on the page.  This interview is more or less a promotion for Angèle Dubeau and the La Pieta string quartet's new album of video game music, Game Music.

One of the things that immediately caught my ear was when Robert Siegel says that much of this music is written "to hear as you kill things."  I was particularly attuned to his comment because of the recent Sandy Hook shootings and my hearing that the killer played violent first person shooter games, although now I'm not sure this was true!  While Siegel is correct that many video games have plenty of violence, of course, not all games are based on killing things.  Even when the game does revolve around killing, I started wondering about how different settings make the violence come across differently...  For instance, how violent is it for Mario to jump on goombas and turtles with the lighthearted music in the background?  Or what of Link killing enemies with his sword-- certainly more violent, but still somehow cartoony and not too serious.  Then, of course, there are first person shooter games modeled after military training games.   In the Jørgensen article I just read and mentioned, a player describes the music of Hitman Contracts as feeling "chaotic" and adding to the frenzy of the game.  When the audio was turned off, another player mentioned that gun scenes "don't work right... it's just two animated figures standing there shooting each other."

I'm not advocating these games as being good or bad, but all of this did get me thinking about how games are perceived as being violent (and thus, the music being composed "for killing things") as well as how the music of games emphasizes the mood and adds to the setting to make a more or less serious atmosphere.

Surveying Literature: From Pac-Man to Pop Music

I finished reading From Pac-Man to Pop Music today on my flight back from my dad's 60th birthday.  It's a great collection of essays, but I found some of them to be much more applicable to game sound, and particularly the areas of game music study that I'm interested in than others.  While all the essays are interesting, a few stood out to me.  Here are my immediate reaction to my favorite top two essays, followed by a brief mention of the other major features of the collection:

Left in the Dark: playing computer games with the sound turned off.  

This essay by Kristine Jørgensen is easily my favorite in the book.  She's compiled quantitative data from game players to study their reaction to playing games with the sound on and off.  I'm super interested in how game music draws the player deeper into the game and these are the first research oriented pages I've read about that, beyond the opinion Whalen has in his article.  I've got up next on my reading table Jørgensen's A comprehensive study of sound in computer games: how audio affects player action, which will quite likely be similar.  

Music Theory in Music Games

Peter Shultz's essay was probably my second favorite in the collection.  I like the way he describes music games and their representation of pitch and time in non-standard ways.  I'm contemplating an upcoming blog entry to show concrete examples of these descriptions.  

I also quite liked Rob Bridgett's Dynamic Range: subtlety and silence in video game sounds for describing the process of building game audio to climatic events.  And, even though I mentioned Antti-Ville Kärjä's Marketing Music Through Computer Games: the case of Poets of the Fall and Max Payne 2 in a previous blog, it's still of great interest to me because it's the only discussion I know of that directly correlates music marketing and game audio.  One of the other great features of the book is the selected annotated bibliography.  This will provide me several directions of study to follow, and I'm thrilled to see a list, albeit short, of online resources that music scholars have deemed important.