Collins Audio Supplement Supplement 2-1: Beginnings of Home Console Audio History

Continuing to listen to the audio of the games in Collins' Game Sound to make sure I've really heard the progression of audio gaming history.  Here are the links I've been exploring recently.

Pong for the Atari.  Very primitive, but iconic, sounds....

Space Invaders for Atari.  I think I've mentioned this before on the blog, but comparing the original arcade sound against the Atari sound below shows the big contrast in the audio capabilities of the different mediums.

Tapeworm for Atari.  Here she's pointing out how bizarre the theme song is at the beginning of game play, based on the limitations of the Atari tuning.

Burger Time for Atari.  Collin's contrast here is how the two audio channels available with the TIA chip for the Atari VCS didn't allow the bass and the treble voices to sound in the same key.  Again compare the arcade version and hear the missing bass line-- the second channel is used instead for sound effects.  This game definitely doesn't have the same harmonic unity that would arise later.

Up 'N Down for Atari.  Wow.  Collins explains that the music is "changed from a bluesy F-sharp minor groove to a very unsettling version based in C minor with a flattened melodic second."  That's basically a music scholarly way of saying it sounds like shit.  This is quite possible the worst game audio I've ever heard.  The port of this music is incredibly dissonant and shows very little care for being a positive audio experience for the player.  Was there QC with this game audio?  Give a listen to the arcade version to clear this from your ears and I hope you won't ever hear the Atari version again.  I warned you:

Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out for NES.  I've featured both of these on the blog before, so I'll skip posting videos on the page, but these games and their music are dear to me.  The NES audio setup with five channels, two pulse waves, one square, a noise, and a sample channel possible (but rarely used) were classic.  MTPO made use of the sampler channel for the scratchy sounding speech.  Gauntlet 2 used this feature a bit more successfully, although I'm still not able to understand what is said very easily.  Not a game I know, it's interesting to me that there's really only music at the beginning of each level.

Ultima (III) for NES.  Here's an early RPG I don't know.  Collins points out how in the battle music, all three channels of the NES sound were used to create chords.  Definitely a different compositional approach since all the voices sound in homorhythm.  Contrast this with the counterpoint in the overworld music.

Castlevania for NES.  Castlevania's battle music uses the bass voice as the melody and arpeggiation in one of the square wave voices to fill out the harmonies.  Again, I've already featured this game on the blog I'll skip posting a video about it here, but here's a link to gameplay.

Metroid is a game I never played but definitely want to.  One of my good friends in undergrad would always go on about how great the music to Metroid was.  I watched a longplay of the game about a month ago and definitely was impressed with the audio experience.  Collins includes an excerpt of this longer interview between Alexander Brandon and Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka.  If you watch a longplay of Metroid, notice that there's not really a melody until you beat the game... that's by design, of course.  Give a listen to any portion of the gameplay, and then switch over to around 50:25 to hear the contrast. I also learned from this interview that the Famicom had an additional audio channel from what the NES did, so the music sounds slightly different on that system.  Compare the end of Metroid on the Famicom with the below NES video to hear what I mean.

Manic Mansion for NES.  This is an incredible game that I was terrible at but loved.  Hope to play it again soon.  Here Collins is pointing out uses of the noise channel.  Here it is radio static and a skipping record.

Journey to Silius for NES.  Collins says that this is an "example of samples taking on the role of bass, such as in Journey to Silius (in which the triangle channel is used like Linn drum toms.)"  I don't know this game well at all, but below is some gameplay and here's a link to the soundtrack.

Contra for NES.  Uses sample channel as percussion.  I've featured this game before, so I'm going to leave it at that with a link to gameplay if you want.

Crystalis for NES.  This also uses the sample channel as percussion.  This isn't a game I know at all, so I'll have to give it a more thorough listen soon.  For now, here's a link to the soundtrack and some gameplay below.

Collins audio supplement: An arcade audio history

Today I've been watching game play videos of some classic arcade games as I re-read the opening chapters of Collins Game Sound.  I'm marveling in how the internet makes it so easy right now to conduct this kind of research!  Thank goodness!-- the availability of this information is incredible!  I'm doing this in part because I plan to use Game Sound as my course text book and I want to be able to easily find links to these videos-- and also to make sure I've heard and fully understood the history of game audio as she presents it.  I can't find a couple of the gameplay videos so far and I probably won't link to footage from every example, but I will in most cases.  Other videos won't embed here, so I've posted links.  These videos correspond with the beginning of many of the examples in Chapter 2 of Game Sound.  The games here start with sound effects only and progress to having music at the beginning/ end of games, and then finally to having fairly continuous music and sound effects.

Computer Space (1971)-- first mass produced arcade game.  Advertising boasted interactive space battle sounds.

Pong (1972)-- first arcade hit.  Interesting to think Nolan Bushnell was asking for cheering and hissing of a crowd audience as you played.  Yet all that was possible were those iconic blooping and bleeping sounds.

Collins notes a drive toward realism in game audio throughout game audio history, as well as several examples early in the advertising of games.  Here in this video for Man Eater (1975), you can hear the "screams" of the swimmers as they're eaten.  

Space Invaders (1978)-- first continuous music that speeds up as gameplay progresses.  

Asteroids (1979)-- music here also speeds up, but as I play this game, I feel a disconnect between the music and the gameplay that I don't with Space Invaders.  Whereas Space Invaders' music gets faster at the same time the gameplay gets harder, there's a point in Asteroids toward the end of each screen where the music is very quick-- which I experience as trying to keep me agitated-- and the gameplay is actually getting simpler, since almost all the asteroids are destroyed.  

Rally X (1980) -- one of the earliest games using looping music.  A simple 6 bar loop, 4 in I (Bb as it plays here) and 2 bars in vi (G minor).  That movement from tonic down a third strikes me as a fairly common progression that would later occur in several games (Castlevania and Punch-Out, for instance).  

Carnival (1980)-- uses Juventino Rosas's "Over the Waves." (if you're impatient, go to :46 for the start of the tune).  I always think of this song in connection with Mary Poppins when Bert is acting out being on a tight rope (2:23) and also recently encountered this tune as I was doing some research on the cutscenes in Number Munchers.  I love how the music rises a half-step with each iteration and speeds up!  This must be one of the first uses of classical music in a game.

Frogger (1981)-- an early game to incorporate "dynamic music." Used at least 11 different gameplay songs.  Really cool to re-read this after having forgotten it and then discovering Frogger on my own a few weeks ago via my Buckner and Garcia research.   The music here doesn't loop-- it appears that the tracks play and simply switch to another track if you've not gotten your frog to safety by the end of the track.  When you get your frog to safety, this also launches a new track.  Unquestionably groundbreaking, interesting game audio.  

Gyruss (1983)-- continuing with the classical music in games, Gyruss makes extensive use of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue.  The music here, like Frogger, strikes me as sounding pretty incredible...  

Collins draws a distinction between games that have non-looping audio in '82 -'83 like Tutankhamun, Miner 2049er, Jungle Hunt, Dig Dug, and Congo Bongo and games in '84 whose audio primarily loops.  (Although Collins says these don't loop, several of these seem to loop to me-- Jungle Hunt for sure, Dig Dug only plays music when you move-- so if you move for long enough, it will loop-- and Congo Bongo, though mostly silent has looping percussion.  Maybe we heard different versions, which have totally different audio.)  '84 looping audio games: Gyruss, Sewer Sam, Tarzan, Burger Time, Antarctic Adventure, and Up N Down.  Collins: Hardware was mostly the same, thus this was an aesthetic choice.  

Finally, Star Wars (1983) was a fairly good incorporation of spoken word from sampled speech chips as well as music from the movie.  In fact, in the commercial for this game, the recognizable Williams' themes are one of the first selling points!