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Some Landmarks In Video Game Music
The development history of the video game music library is a particularly interesting site of innovation. To the uninitiated, the chip tunes of the 80s and early 90s video game were ear-bleeding nonsense. But with these limited resources, the skilled composers of the more significant titles often came up with quite catchy melodies. Anyone who has ever had a NES in the house knows the Mario tune and probably those for Zelda and Final Fantasy too. Many enthusiasts now strive to emulate this sound and in an impressive array of retro-styled games, the grating electronic sound of the early consoles is alive and well. Though they tend to eskew the single-layered simplicity of 80s and early 90s tunes, games like ‘Super Meat Boy’ feature many of these old sounds in multi-layered soundtracks.
The noughties are widely recognised as the point at which proper audio fidelity was achieved in games, but the nineties featured many notable landmarks. The home computer, always one step ahead of the curve, was creating sophisticated tracks well before the consoles, which were limited for a long time to instruments in their MIDI tables. Even before the innovations in the late 90s, later SCUMMVM titles like ‘Monkey Island 2′ pushed the proverbial envelope with intriguing dynamic music systems. The instruments in Lucasarts’ midi system were capable of seguing neatly between scenes and other actions on screen without the need to pause. Later in the decade, tracks that were composed in much the same way to electronica production musicwere common. Unreal engine games (‘Unreal’, ‘Deus Ex’) were particularly renowned for their sample sequenced music.
This period also saw the video game musician becoming more experimental and sophisticated. The soundtrack to PC strategy title ‘Homeworld’ featured a number of tracks that were best described as ‘Industrial Arabic’ due to its use of ethnic wails and instruments. ‘Homeworld’ was also somewhat innovative for using both a choir (‘Agnus Dei’, ‘Adagio for Strings’ in vocal form) and a guest artist (Yes) on the soundtrack. Just ten years before, many home computers were choosing between the music or the sound effects.
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