Recently, I've been using a google alert to keep me up to date with the latest online with video game music. Not exactly sure how it works yet, how it decides what's worthy of mention and what's not, but it's opening my eyes to some of the current activity online with game music. Here are 9 highlights from the past two weeks:
1- One of my best finds of the week, Hugo Aranzaes' blog entry about the Power of Video Game Music written for The Punk Effect, is a worthwhile read. A psychologist by training, Hugo studies and writes about video games. He also actually researches and uses sources. Pretty awesome and too rare, it seems, in a lot of writing. If you like this kind of reading, you might also read this post about the role of sound in immersing players in video games.
2- From this article, I learned much more about a rapper, Mega Ran, who definitely has some cool remixes, like Black Materia, which I've already discussed on the blog. I didn't know much about his history, the way he worked, or that he'd made other albums. A fan of Mega Man? Give this awesomeness a listen.
3- Jake Kaufman, whose music I first encountered in his work with DuckTales Remastered, began something called "Fusion Challenge," where he takes requests to make mash-ups of video game tracks with another genre of music. Follow this link to hear the first result of this challenge, Ace Attorney with 80s synth rock.
4- It's a little mystery to me about why Harmonix would want to fund via crowdsourcing, considering their track record with games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but they're doing it nonetheless. They describe this game as being a project dear to their heart but not with major financial backers. If you might be interested in contributing or learning more, here's a link to their Kickstarter page about a new Amplitude if you want to help fund that project. Side note: I'm eager for their upcoming release of Fantasia. Sounds amazing. Can't wait to try it.
5- Playstation also posted a video to its YouTube channel of an interview with composer Keiichi Okabe discussing music for Drakengard 3. It's crazy to me that Okabe doesn't consider himself to be an artist because the music he writes is not absolute. In other words, music just for the sake of music. He seems to think that music composed to accompany visuals or a storyline is a second tier of composition. I couldn't disagree with him more-- he's clearly an artist!-- but fascinating to see that this is a view of someone in the field. More composer interviews please!
6- A composer interview was published with Jeff Broadbent talking about his work on EA's Dawngate. Again, haven't played Dawngate-- don't know anything about it. Love the composer interviews, though, keep 'em coming!
7- David Buckley also has a short interview with CraveOnline about writing for Arkham Knight. Love to see that he admires classical western music composers. Great questions here about source material and how he works. Although short, awesome.
8- Here, GameCentral readers name their favorite video game soundtracks of all time. I love the reader participation in this discussion. My favorite part of this page, though, is the admission that the writers needed a fast, easily relatable topic because of a holiday cutting into the normal time for discussion. The result: "one of their busiest Hot Topics in months." That's the power of game music.
9- A news story from KSDK in St. Louis, with a video that discusses a bit about video game music, chats with a game music composer, Jim Calahan, and discusses some of the progress of game music, including Journey's 2012 Grammy nomination. The way these anchors discuss game music shows how out of touch they are with it, yet they're potentially bringing the subject to non-gamers, so I have to give them props for that.
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