Well, that's a tough question. I'm not sure of the answer, yet. My earliest memories are of myself as an avid gamer. From my parents Atari, through Nintendo, Game Boy, SNES, Playstation, and to the DS, PS3, and Wii, and some PC games along the way. My friends in school called me a nerd for playing so many hours of the games, but I can't help myself! I've always loved gaming and loved the music, and I'm shocked by how slow scholars have been to pay attention to it and likewise how many musicians dismiss game music as lesser.
My goal at this point is like V'ger, to learn everything learnable-- and to add my own contributions to the musical analysis side of everything. I'm trying to put my quest to learn about video game music into a format I can look back, follow through, remember, and understand. Hopefully, someone who is either a game lover or a music lover can follow along and go from a lover of one of these things to a knowledgeable expert about both of them. It's a bibliography, a progression of recordings, writings, and other reactions to video game music.
Why a blog? In honor of the electronic genre-- all the music is available online and getting the rights to publish a book with musical examples would be a tremendous challenge. Even more, this is an attempt to get a dialogue going with similarly minded individuals. This blog is an attempt to reach out to you and get you listening to, thinking about, and deepening your enjoyment of video game music. It's likewise a project for me to further my own understanding of the genre by chronicling my own studies of it. It's a documentation of sources that one might consult and digest on the topic. It's a forum for us game music lovers to start a conversation.
Welcome!
Over the years, video games have developed into a multi-billion dollar industry. Today's games involve millions of hours of work and take years to produce. The music contained in these games, as well as older games, is an equal work of art that is often overlooked. Whereas movie soundtracks have been praised for years, until 2005 video game music was largely a curiosity outside Japan. It is only recently that concerts consisting solely of video game music, such as Play! A Video Game Symphony and Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy, have sold thousands of tickets around the world.
ReplyDeleteSome games today are even marketed on the strength of their soundtracks' primary composers. For example, the 2008 Xbox 360 game Lost Odyssey advertised in its pre-release commercials that its music was composed by legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Unfortunately, however, many game music composers and artists remain underappreciated compared to those involved with movie soundtracks.
PC Games Lover
Hey Jacob! Thanks for writing! I totally agree with you that the music and sound in games are art and are equal with consideration of movies or television. Yet the interactivity of their application makes them belong to unique category that I hope will only become more explored in the future.
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