This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Editor’s Note: Personally, I’m of the opinion that we remember 8-bit music (and 16-bit tunes, for that matter), because they focused completely on the melody. Not to disparage modern game music, but it can be a lot more involved and complex, so we don’t really focus on one thing when listening to it. But back in the ’80s and ’90s, due to technical limitations, there was only one thing for composers to focus on! And thus, only one thing for the player to focus on as well. -Fitch
It’s hard to believe that after more than 20 years, I’m still listening to the music from the games I played as a kid. I guess it helps that the electronic buzzes and whirrs of the 8-bit systems have been translated into so many forms. A quick YouTube search for “Super Mario Theme” yields almost half of a million results. People play the song on instruments ranging from theramin to kazoos . And naturally someone got it playing on a set of Tesla coils (gotta have Tesla coils).
But why are some of us still so in love with the music from the games of our youth? Nostalgia? Is it a generational cycle? Kids born today will be humming the title theme to Halo while walking down to the space mailbox on Mars in 2030? You take the aspects of things you love as a child and reconstitute it as an adult for enjoyment, right? Maybe…but there doesn’t seem to be much of a memorable tune in the theme to Gears of War. The answer has to do with the essential things that make good music the world over.
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The NES was a sophisticated/profitable enough machine to allow game makers to hire composers, unlike the programmers who added the cursory audio cues to the games of the previous years. This brought the ability to add music that was more than short introductory fanfares at the beginning of the game or the insulting “Game Over” raspberry. It’s no coincidence that some of the big names of game music today are the same folks who began in the days of yore (Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo and Yasuaki Fujita to name a few). The only thing that hampered the effect of the score was the medium through which it came. In the early 1980’s there were only 4 “instruments” available to play music in Nintendo games. Most of the classic themes from the NES were only modified mixes of frequencies. There were no discernible instruments in the piece, just pitched up and pitched down electronic hums. The composers were restricted to a very minimal set of tools, but what came from the stripped down process was a focus on the fundamentals and a mastering of the two most important musical elements: pitch and timing.
From those roots, the only place to go was up. The knowledge of composers like Koji Kondo was used to provided solid frameworks of music for early Nintendo games. The capacity of the platforms was advanced so that more and more channels were added to flesh out the skeletons of the songs. As familiarity with the technology inreased sounds could be used to approximate actual instruments and then entire orchestras. The decade between 1980 and 1990 is the time when music really developed from a castoff feature into one of the integral parts of the game.
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I love to set up long YouTube playlists of piano covers from games like Kid Icarus, Mega Man 3 and even DuckTales (does it get any better than the Moon song?). That sounds deeply nerdy, but these are songs that don’t need the novelty of being from video games in order for people to enjoy them. The rich tones can be appreciated by anyone, and especially by people who first learned to sing them as children.