My Gaming Audio History: Ms. Pac-Man (1983)

For the last few days I've been taking in all that is Pac-Man.  My family didn't own the original, but when I listen to the music, I know I've played it.  However, Ms. Pac-Man, which we did own, is much more familiar-- I can sing the game start song from memory.  With more maze variety and random ghost movement, Ms. Pac-Man is considered superior to the original Pac-Man by many.  We probably owned it not because of these features, but because it targeted women and my mom wanted it.

Pac-Man was so popular in the US, it's kind of amazing.  In most games at this time, you were a dot, a spaceship, an unidentified FP tank, plane, etc, or perhaps a humanoid character.  In Pac-Man, inspired by a pizza with a slice eaten, you're something else-- a character made of video game dreams.  Who knows exactly why, but it caught on huge in America.  Pac-Man inspired a Hanna Barbara cartoon, which I dutifully watched an episode and a half of.  Here's Dick Clark hosting a Saturday Morning Pac Preview Party for the cartoon with kids literally screaming about Pac-Man.  The main theme of the Pac-Man Animated Series (which sounds to me like a version of Turkey in the Straw-- conjuring up memories of Steamboat Willie!) would become a part of the game PacLand.  Consider this: a video game, Pac-Man, inspired a cartoon, Pac-Man: The Animated Series, which then transformed back into a video game, Pac-Land.  The impact of Pac-Man can't be overstated: think about the Karen Collins essay collection I read last year entitled From Pac-Man to Pop Music; a title like that implies that Pac-Man is the beginning, and indeed it was the beginning of the video game phenomenon for many Americans.

Here's a commercial for the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man, clearly aimed at drawing in women players.  Love the belting Ms. Pac-Man at the end! Pac-Man inspired a cartoon, which I dutifully watched an episode and a half of.  The theme song for the cartoon became the song for the later game, PacLand.  While John Williams and Henry Mancini already had themes cross from movies and TV to video games, PacLand is unique in being a TV show created about a video game.  Pac-Man Fever, a song by Bruckner and Garcia, was #9 on Billboard in March 1982 (the month before I was born).  The album has a number of songs that I've given a listen to.  Many contain game sound effects and lyrics that players would've identified with.  If you're interested in historical footage, here's some video from Midway as Ms. Pac-Man arcades are assembled.

Pac-Man is credited with all kinds of things: the first cutscene in a video game, the first video game character, and I think I read somewhere, although I can't find it now, that Pac-Man is credited by some as having the first video game theme song.  Coming from an era when many games simply launched into gameplay once you pressed start and the audio experience of the game simply began, hearing a musical prelude to gameplay is pretty huge.  Is this the very first though?  Games released a few months later like Donkey Kong would have gameplay start sounds, and I'd have to do more research to definitively say, but I've not heard anything like this up to this point.

When you're dealing with a brand like Pac-Man that has so many releases, versions, spinoffs, etc the sound effects aren't going to be the same from one console to another simply based on differences in the audio capabilities.  Here's a video that shows several different versions of Ms. Pac-Man.  I played many of these!  Each version maintains the Ms. Pac-Man theme (some sounding more in tune than others), but the sound effects: eating power pills, the "waka" sound of moving along the screen, change notably between the games.

Who created the audio experience?  The original Pac-Man's short audio was created by Toshio Kai.  Ms. Pac-Man's audio by Naoki Nigashio.  It's hard to find out much about either of these men, but I'm hoping more will become available soon.  It's pretty safe to say that they didn't turn into prolific game composers or there would be more information about them.  That said, their audio did change the gaming world!

What's the audio experience?  Ms. Pac-Man has a number of sound effects, but also quite notably is the first game on my list that has a musical start up theme (E major).  It's also got music during the cutscenes as well.  The first and third cutscenes have short music (in G minor and A major, respectively), but the second cutscene has a longer rag (D major) reminiscent of a carnival, or just to invoke an earlier era representing the vaudeville like chase scene on screen.  Here's a video that transcribes "the chase" music into standard music notation.  This cutscene has some Mickey Mousing, particularly right at the end with the quick dashes across the screen that are timed precisely with the music.  Note: I'm jotting down the keys of these sound clips to see how quickly composers became interested in key relationships of the music in a game.

How does the audio experience draw the player more deeply into the game?  Of course, the sound effect of eating as you move around the board is classic.  On the Atari version I played, the sound after you eat a power pill conveys the timing of the pill's duration simply as the pitch gets higher, implying urgency, that combines with the ghosts flashing at the end of the time to let you know your power up is expiring.  The cutscenes are literally short films without dialogue whose music helps to create a more enriching experience.  Music was important in these cutscenes!  Many games in the arcade ran video of gameplay as a demo-- perhaps almost immediately after you died or won-- and the cutscene music helped to remind the player that the game was still active and progress was being made.  

I could go on about Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man... but those few games end my Atari childhood.  I'm off to a new platform: the NES.

My Gaming Audio History: Megamania (1982)

Activision's Megamania for the Atari is the third and final game on my list of games I played that shares my birth year, 1982.  I've got just one more Atari game that I played on my list, and then I'm moving on to the NES with a few PC and arcade games sprinkled in as I move into my gaming childhood.  This is a game I remember my mom playing a lot and being good at.  It's basically Space Invaders with different looking aliens (irons, cookies) onscreen.  Of course, who doesn't love the Star Trek like ship?  Though this game has no real ending, even if you reach 999,999 points, I remember being able to beat at least one screen of everything, and in my own mind, that constituted a win if I circled back to the first screen of enemies again.

This is also the second game on the list by Steve Cartwright.  Having a second game by the same creator made me think: I definitely expected game audio to evolve through time as the technologies do.  However, I think in large part I'd discounted the fact that composers also develop along their careers and also come into their own as well.  Here's a reading from the Digital Press Online that discusses the games Steve Cartwright created.  Really interesting to read how disappointed he was when a sound effect was left off of a Playstation release of Megamania.

Who created the audio experience?  Steve Cartwright.  Another of these games from the era where the game designer was responsible for everything.

What is the audio experience?  Again, this game begins with silence and ends the same way, usually when you die-- or apparently when the gamer reaches 999,999 points.  Otherwise, this game uses only sound effects, no music: there's the sound of your energy bar filling up, the sound of it depleting at the end of each screen as your score goes up, the sound of laser fire, the sound of your ship being incinerated, and the sound of destroying an enemy ship.  This is the first Atari game not to have that sort of "game on" droning loop in the background.  It does strike my ear as a bit odd that you can just be sitting in silence waiting for the opportunity to strike the enemy.  I pretty much just fired my laser constantly, so I really never heard silence except for when I was dead.

How does the audio experience draw the player more deeply into the game?  Since the game is silent without weapons fire, I think that's all the more incentive to fire your laser all the time!  Basically any audio sound other than your death has to start with you firing at the aliens, so it's all the more incentive to hear your laser firing non-stop.  I was surprised to remember that there's no sound for "game on" and feeling the effect that has on gameplay.

Watching several different playthroughs of the game reminded me that-- at least as far as a game audio scholar-- I need to see imperfect playthroughs.  There are plenty of playthroughs posted of games where gamers never die or make any wrong moves, sailing through the games perfectly.  This leaves out certain sounds and music that might only play when the gamer loses.  I encountered the same problem when I was studying what music I heard as I bred a Gold Chocobo in FF7.  Since I never lost a race as I played it researching for this blog, I didn't ever hear the Gold Saucer Tango of Tears.

Megamania is the first game on my list that I know of to use popular musicians to help promote it, as you can see in this commercial for it featuring The Tubes.  It's always interesting to think about synergy across music mediums, and this commercial shows what was happening in popular music in the early 80s: the start of MTV and music videos.  I love the way game sound effects are incorporated into the audio of the commercial!  I also have learned how Activision split with Atari in part because the game designers didn't feel they received enough credit for creating their games.  Thus, the shout out to Steve Cartwright in the commercial.

Up next...  My last Atari game.... and one that changed gaming history.

My Gaming Audio History: Barnstorming (1982)

A game my mother really enjoyed playing was Activision's Barnstorming.  Created by Steve Cartwright, this game was his first.  I didn't ever think about Barnstorming as a live activity with a history outside of this game.  But, of course, that's one of the coolest things about this project-- my study of video game music reaches out in many branches.  It is, in some ways, a study of American history.

Who created the audio experience?  All these Atari games hail from an era where the game designer was responsible for creating basically all of the aspects of the game, so Steve Cartwright would have created the audio here.

What's the audio experience?  There's the sound of the plane running.  This seems to be a typical theme with these Atari games so far: a "game on drone" has been a part of all the Atari games I've investigated so far.  There's also the sound of hitting a bar/windmill, bumping into a bird, the sound of flying over the windmills, and the reduction of sound when you go through a barn.  There's no victory sound or really any kind of marker that you've finished a course, instead the sound just fades out and the next level begins.  Compared against the other Atari games I played, I think this game has the least "musical" aspect to its audio.

How does the audio experience draw the player into the game?  The Doppler effect of the plane going over windmills gives a sense of plane motion.  Also, the plane drone audio diminishes when the player is flying through the barn-- almost as if the barn partially obstructs the engine sound from the player.  A nice detail!

I've also been reading about the Atari 2600 audio specifications.  As you know from the blog, I'm a Karen Collins fan, and she has an excellent article, Fine Tuning the Terrible Twos, that explains more how the audio process worked for the Atari 2600, the TIA chip, and a bit about the programming process, explaining why the VCS sounds out of tune.  Of most interest to me is that the Atari had two channels (voices) of sound that could be produced at a time, 4 bit volume control (16 volume possibilities) and 4 bit waveform control (16 sound possibilities, although several sounded very similar to each other).  She lists basically four useful melodic voices and then some noise possibilities for percussion/effects.  Other info I've seen seems to concur, only about eight or so of the sound possibilities were really useful and unique.

A fan of the Atari Video Computing System?  You can hear more of its sounds here on this quiz I've been playing with via splotchy.com.  I love stuff like this!  It gives me the idea to have a listening test in my game music class!  In all honesty, with these old games, I either have immediate, strong recognition, or none at all.  I can only recognize Combat, MegaMania, Pitfall, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and though I didn't play it, of course, I can tell Star Wars by the John Williams theme.  If you listen to all of these sounds, you'll start to hear the similarities between sounds that Collins is talking about from game to game.  Some of that may be that games had the same designers, and others could just be that those were sounds that worked well, gamers/designers used and played with.  It's fascinating.  The sounds to SuperMan sound kind of like dialing up to the internet or a series of digital glitches.  Wow!

My Gaming Audio History: Kaboom (1981)

Kaboom! is an Activision game for the Atari that, like Combat, has no continuous music, just sound effects.  One of the things I remember most is that you played with this paddle controller that I absolutely sucked at using.

Who created the audio?  Larry Kaplan, who was the game designer.  Here's a link to a Digital Press interview with Larry Kaplan where he recounts creating the game.  He doesn't really discuss the audio creation, but does mention an awards ceremony where Kaboom! won best audio.  Wow, we've come a long way!

What's the audio experience?  There's the sound of the bombs being lit, the sound of them going into your water, the sound of them exploding, and a celebratory sound when you reach thresholds of points/bombs (1000, 2000, 3000, etc-- I never heard this sound when I played).  The sound as you extinguish the bombs has a musical pitch that rises in a somewhat chromatic scale fashion similar to the sound of your bouncing shot in Combat Pong.  I really quite like the 1000 point sound-- the way it glisses up from low to high definitely feels like a huge accomplishment!

How does the audio draw the player more deeply into the game?  The sound of the lit fuse is one that I think simply we grow up hearing when we use sparklers, hear bombs on cartoons, etc, and simply know and react to with urgency and care.  Also, the raising in pitch when you catch more of the bombs mirrors the Mad Bomber's increased speed and undoubtedly raises the intensity the player feels.

It's been interesting for me to hear how these Atari sound effects aren't really in tune as we would consider the modern musical scale.  I've read about the Atari tuning problems in books, but it's very interesting to actually hear it as I listen to these sound effects.

If you're feeling retro, I've also been checking out how these games were marketed.  Here's a link to a TV commercial for Kaboom!

While it's not a game we owned or I really played, I've got to mention that between Combat and Kaboom! came one of the most famous game audio sounds of all time: Space Invaders.  I've featured the four note pattern that speeds up with the alien ships earlier in the blog.  It seems that different versions of the game played these notes in different ways and the Atari 2600 version sounds so percussive, it's hard for me to hear a descending pitch with the thumping, not even really sounding much like the arcade game.  Compared with Combat and Kaboom!, I can see what made Space Invaders audio groundbreaking...  first, it does have sound going on continuously during gameplay, and even more importantly, the sound is tied so perfectly and emotionally into the visual experience.  It just hadn't been done before!  Still, though, I've yet to hear something on the Atari that is really what I think of as game music, but it's cool as I work on this to hear the beginnings and understand where we've come from.

My Gaming Audio History: Combat (1977)

As early as I can remember, in my family we owned an Atari VCS 2600.  I remember playing it simultaneously with the NES, which we got when I was 3 or 4, but since I'm making this list chronological, I'm starting with a focus on the older Atari and the games I played.  We had the six switch 2600 model, which goes well with my parents recollection that they bought it about a year or two after Atari came out.   As a young kid, I've got to confess, sometimes I just pretended the Atari was a helm for a space ship and that flipping the switches, which made a wonderfully satisfying sound, helped me pilot around.  The wood veneer matched well with our southern decor and the Atari 2600 was released with the game Combat.

Combat (Oct 1977)

This game, like Super Mario/Duck Hunt for the NES, came with the Atari system purchase.  My parents think they got one a little after they first came out, which makes sense with the fact that we had a second generation six switch version.  I actually really liked Combat, and played it with my brother and dad a lot.

Who created the audio?  This game is of the era where programmers were responsible for the audio, so it would've been created by the game designers and likely was a last addition, limited by space necessary for the game to play.  As a group project it's hard for me to know exactly who on the team worked on audio, or if they all contributed to it.  Designers: Steve Mayer, Joe Decuir, Larry Kaplan, and Larry Wagner.  I'd love to learn more about the specifics of the game audio development.

So what's the audio experience?  I'd forgotten, but there's no music-- at least not as we think of music.  There's a looping ambient sound in each world, what I think of as a "game on drone."  The sound of tanks (or planes) moving, gun fire, and a connecting shot are the major audio experiences of the game and I remember them well!  The most tonal audio is no doubt a result of playing Combat Pong (around 2:36), where each shot ricochet moves up a sort of chromatic scale.  All sounds simply cease when the game timer ends.

How does the audio experience draw the player more deeply into the game?  As crude as the graphics are, the audio helps my eye sort out what's happening on screen.  Where are my bullets bouncing?  Have I hit something?  Etc.

I'm just watching a video of game play with the planes on YouTube, and I noticed a comment about love of the jet sound.  It's amazing that these drones and noises can have such memory and connection!  Actually, if you consider the audio experience from once you decided to play your Atari, these bullet hit sounds and airplane drones weren't too far from the white noise you'd just heard from the TV static as you were connecting/setting up your Atari.

I forget that these games had silent title screens-- if they were screens at all-- sometimes the games just played.  This system literally brought the arcade experience into the home.  Combat took two players, so it was meant to be a multi-person experience, and aside from the looping drone of the game being in progress, the audio was cheering, talking, or just a silent concentration between the players.  If you're into it, check out the code with commentary.