Game music is one of the most unique applications of music out there. It needs to stand out but still be bearable in the background. It needs to loop indefinitely or do something else to take up unlimited time. It needed to work on limited sound chips and processors. It can adapt to the game as it is played, creating an experience like no other.
Today, let’s take a top-level look at video game music, the technology at its 80’s roots, and how it’s affected the music we hear in video games today. I’ll touch upon a tiny bit of technical theory stuff, but mostly I’ll just be talking about the direction game music has taken over the years. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
The Beginning
When third-generation consoles came about, such as the NES and Master System, video game music was long overdue. Short little loops played over arcade games, sure, but the consoles were the problem – expensive games marketed as grand adventures needed to have some sort of soundtrack.
The whole shtick of NES music is limitation – limited instruments and limited length. On the NES, you get two square channels, one triangle channel, and one noise channel (there’s also one more channel which is completely useless for our purposes, so let’s ignore it).
The square channels are well-suited for general melodies and arpeggios, while the triangle provides a softer sound which works well for a bass. The noise channel can serve as your percussion (or as explosion sounds), and makes for a really easy snare.
Take, for instance, “All that I Needed Was You” from MOTHER (Earthbound Zero), produced by the undisputed champ of chiptune, Chip Tanaka:
This is a great example because you can really hear all the different parts at play. You’ve got the noise channel creating an incredibly well-produced drum sound given the hardware. You’ve also got a very obvious triangle bassline, one square channel devoted to fleshing out background chord notes (typical for chiptune music), and one more square on the melody.
The other important factor of the NES era is forced repetition. Songs only have a limited amount of allocated memory space, so you’ve got to use lots of loops. This works nicely as a solution to the indefinite time someone might spend in any area of a game – by looping, the music will perpetually exist in the background.
If you talk to a scientist about what makes music catchy, they’ll probably tell you two things: simplicity and repetition. So, you take your simple melodies (necessitated by the low instrument count) and your repetitive songs (necessitated by the low memory), and you’ve got a whole generation of extremely catchy music. There’s a reason Nintendo still can’t get enough of repeating the same 40-year-old themes for all its franchises (this is a complaint in its own right, but that’s outside of the scope of this post).
One more limited feature of chiptune music is that it can mimic instruments (sometimes very impressively), though it still sounds very much like chiptune. The very best example of this concept can be seen in the “Ballad of the Windfish” from Link’s Awakening. Try and identify all the different instruments based on their chiptune sounds:
…which leads us into an important topic. Chiptune music is great, but even with slight timbre variations, it all sounds like, well, chiptune. What if the hardware got better, and we could mimic all sorts of different instruments? What if we entered…
The MIDI Era
Enter the fourth and fifth generations. Now we’ve got enough space to store unique instrument sounds. Finally, our grand Final Fantasies and Zeldas can have lush orchestrations behind them… right?
The thing about MIDI instruments (MIDI used colloquially here to mean computerized imitations of acoustic instruments) is that, in most music producers’ opinions, they sound fake and, well, bad.
But not in video games.
This here is my favorite thing about game soundtracks – it’s okay to use fake instruments, because this is a medium where we’ve been suspending our disbelief since day one. Many of my favorite super-duper-indie games have cobbled together fantastic soundtracks without worrying about the actual timbre of the instruments, instead fully embracing MIDI sounds (one of my favorites is the soundtrack of MOTHER: Cognitive Dissonance, as well as those of many other indie RPG-maker games).
Now, there’s still an art to properly using MIDI sounds. Step one is realizing that, ultimately, these are synths, and they are not able to perfectly mimic real instruments, and so you shouldn’t try and write music the way you’d write an orchestra, because that probably won’t work. So instead, you embrace your limitations.
A song like the Red Brinstar theme from Super Metroid uses its synth capabilities to extend beyond what the NES was able to do, but it still utilizes excellent production to create unparalleled atmosphere with a mixture of diverse sounds:
And even if you are going for an orchestrated sound, clever production can make anything sound good. In “Dancing Mad” (that one legendary 17-minute song from Final Fantasy VI), Nobuo Uematsu creates a full-on orchestral epic by making extensive use of symphonic prog rock synthesizers and well-made organs, allowing the typically bad-sounding MIDI strings and voices to have a solid driving backdrop and fit right into the general vibe.
Side note: Uematsu was heavily inspired by Japanese symphonic prog rock bands of the 70s and 80s. Go check out Ars Nova or Shingetsu for some fantastic entries into the genre, and expect some blog posts on the topic 😉
So, that’s all some great history. But what does this mean for today’s game soundtracks?
Modern Game Music
I initially started music with classical piano, and then transitioned to playing a lot of jazz. But, while I love both of those genres (seriously y’all, classical music is underrated!), my all-time favorite type of music to create is video game music.
First things first: chiptune. I invite all aspiring musicians, regardless of your interest in composing game music, to give chiptune music a shot. Its limitations force you to think up cool new ideas without getting bogged down, and if you’re successful you’ll have a bunch of new melodies at your disposal. Plus, it can be incredibly fun to remix non-chiptune songs in an 8bit style (be sure to stay faithful to the sound chip!).
Then, there’s the whole side of game music I haven’t even talked about: adaptive music.
A lot of people know what adaptive music is, but many aren’t aware of how deep it goes. Adaptive music can range from Super Mario Bros. 2 dropping out the square channels when paused, to Nier Automata using three-dimensional sound engineering techniques to filter and edit its own soundtrack in real time (think of a guy inside the computer, mixing the music in a DAW as it’s played to you). It can include fading in and out different instruments based on the status of the game, or producing new synthesized sounds when the player moves underwater. Adaptive music often gets more into the sound engineering field and certainly intersects heavily with programming, but if you’re into all that stuff at once, it can be a huge joy to lay out the sounds in your interactive games.
Lastly, video games have limitless potential for the storytelling composer’s greatest weapon: the leitmotif.
You may be tired of hearing it, but when it comes to leitmotifs in music, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything more impressive than Undertale, utilizing various remixes of its own music to evoke artistic connections with different characters and situations. To the podium I’d also like to nominate my beloved MOTHER 3, which does an astounding job of capturing its changing world through shifting renditions of common musical phrases.
When you create video game music, you get to do all these things at once. It’s a glorious concept album with interactivity attached, and there’s really no bar to clear when it comes to sample quality. You get to interpret game composition however you want.
My Thoughts
It’s probably no surprise, but my two favorite game soundtracks are those of Earthbound and MOTHER 3. Specifically, I love these two soundtracks because I find them to be complete opposites of one another: where Earthbound lays out a consistent vibe with its iconic soundfont and relaxed, warm style, MOTHER 3 smacks you across the head with genre shift after genre shift. With Earthbound as an exploratory adventure through a big wacky world and MOTHER 3 as a linear theatric experience of constant story twists and turns, both of these soundtracks fit these games perfectly… or maybe the games fit the soundtracks.
I’d like to close by talking about what I’d love to see more of in game soundtracks. I’d love to see more unique sounds and instruments (particularly vocals; we need more game soundtracks with vocals!). I’d also love to see, believe it or not, more exploration with adaptive soundtracks. Give me a game where the entire soundtrack adapts to exactly what I’m doing – not just swapping in and out different instruments, but actually changing up beats and rhythms.
I’m not concerned, though. The medium of video games is young, and we’ve got a limitless number of new experiences on the horizon. Take your time, play fun games, and, most importantly, make cool stuff.
May our soundtracks be unstoppable!