Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Behind the scenes: searching the web for game music

Tonight I've been sifting through a little of the mammoth amount of video game music online.  I just sifted through a ton of Google results when I searched "Video Game Music."  Here's one of the videos I found from the results that I really enjoyed!  (From penny-arcade.com)



Much of what comes up is discussion of the best and the worst game music, sites devoted to covers or remixes of game music, sites devoted to anything except covers/remixes, and websites that are most interested in a certain era of gaming music.  Whether game music is improving or headed down the tubes seems to be a question of regular debate.  I also encountered a little bit of academic info for video game courses.  Video game music has also made it into the mainstream news with discussions of its evolution and its performance in symphony halls.

What surprises me is that most of these first links that comes up aren't what I expected to find.  There are scholarly papers, websites that present information about how to learn more, interviews with composers, discussions of game music methods/theory, etc, but these aren't in the top hits of a google search.  Now, don't get me wrong, I'm definitely excited about following up on many of the links I did find.

Looking at all this also reminded me of the focus of my own blog.  Unlike websites that have a narrow focus, I'm trying to keep a broad focus about a narrow genre.  Part of what I'm seeing is that the popularity of gaming and love of game music drive entire communities to discuss it-- which is awesome!   In fact, that interactive discussion is part of the reason why I created the blog-- to have the chance to interact with others who love game music.  That plus most of the information about game music is online, although there always new information coming out in print now too.  I feel the tide is growing for game music in almost every way.

Bearing in mind what I was looking for, these are the two sites I saw today that I'm planning to noodle around on quite a bit more in the future:

-GamesSound.com-- this is Karen Collins site, and as you know, I'm a huge fan!
-vgmusic.com-- I've found a numerous articles that are exactly what I'm looking for here in the past, and bookmarked even more today!

And, frankly, following up with some of the footnotes of wikipedia's entries about game music always takes me to interesting places.

What are your favorite sites for game music?  Let me know what I shouldn't miss!

2 comments:

  1. Great Site! Hope to see more of your posts!
    would love to chat sometime.

    Brian Schmidt
    GameSoundCon

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  2. Brian, I'm absolutely honored that you found my blog! I'm hoping I can get to a game music conference sometime in the next year-- perhaps GameSoundCon, depending on when it is and how that fits with my University schedule. I'm hoping to do some Skype interviews with a few game composers as a part of my game music class, so I definitely hope we either met in person or virtually soon. Thanks for reaching out to me!

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