Videogame Music Needs to Go Back to the Future

If you’ve been following my articles here on Bitmob, you might have noticed that I have a bit of an obsession with videogame music. Not only did it lead me to advocate that some of the better tunes out there should be included in modern music games, it’s also indirectly responsible for me becoming a Twin Galaxies world record holder.

I’ve also become a regular contributor to fellow game music fanatic James DeRosa’s excellent Bitmob Community Jukebox, as not only do I get to suggest some of my all-time favorites, I get to hear some other fantastic tunes from some of the games that have unfortunately passed me by over the years.

Still, though, even the combined efforts of 11 Jukeboxes are not enough to get me through the workweek, so I’ve found other ways to satisfy my jones. I spent a couple weeks draining Galbadia Hotel dry, grabbed a couple of soundtracks from random Google searches, and even discovered how to download the audio tracks off of videos that people have uploaded to Youtube.

The result of all this is that I’ve been listening to original game soundtracks an awful lot lately, and in that time I’ve noticed an interesting trend:

Game music is getting worse.

Now, before some poor game composer comes in and rips me a new one, allow me to explain myself: I in no way am saying that the quality of game music is decreasing – far from it. It’s more that the style of game music has changed, in a way that I find lacking when compared to the old days.

See, back in the day, composers were very limited in the tools at their disposal. The NES, for example, was only capable of five-channel sound – four for audio and one channel for voice samples/percussion – and because of the limited memory of the cartridge format, composers also had to keep the size of their music programs down.

As a result, NES-era game music was characterized by two attributes: repetition and strong, simple melodies. Check out this list of 10 of the NES’ most well-known tracks and how long it takes for those tracks to repeat:

On average, these numbers mean that back when you were playing an NES game, the repetition time for the background music was just under a minute.

Think about what that means for a second. A first playthrough for most NES games was probably about 10 hours, on average — that means that your average player would have heard the themes for the different stages repeated six hundred times over the course of play.

Is it any wonder, then, that composers ensured that their melodies were catchy enough to be listened to on endless repeat?

Another point regarding older game music is that it had to be strong enough to stand on its own as a major component of the game. As I’ve pointed out in the past, videogame graphics used to be horrible – and since games are an audio as well as a visual medium, the music had to pull its weight in order to complete the whole package.

So – I’ve made my point about why I think the earlier eras of game music were so good. By now, I bet you’re wondering “Well that’s all well and good, Brian, but what makes today’s game music so bad?” (I’m getting to that, but thanks for asking.)

My example for how I feel today’s game music is dropping the ball is none other than Sucker Punch’s excellent inFAMOUS, which I recently completed for the first time. Don’t get me wrong now, I enjoyed inFAMOUS immensely and thought just about everything about it was fantastic…but when I found the Youtube playlist for the soundtrack the other day and started listening to it, I found that I didn’t recognize any of it.

I’ll admit: composers Amon Tobin, James Dooley, Mel Wesson, and Martin Tillman did an amazing job of making the music of inFAMOUS complement the cinematics and on-screen action. The soundtrack is a collection of frenetic, gritty, and almost crunchy tunes, played on such unique “instruments” as bungee cords and shakers filled with broken glass.

Here’s the problem: the soundtrack may be perfect when listened to in the context of the game, but when taken outside the game it just doesn’t have the same punch. Unlike game music of old, there were no immediately recognizable melodies or phrases that had burned their way into my subconscious by dint of relentless repetition; the only thing that even came close was the riff repeated three or four times in the track “Anything For Trish” (which, if I had to guess, was only played once in the game itself during the mission of the same name).

I have no desire to single out inFAMOUS, by the way – there are plenty of other modern-style soundtracks that lack the same memorability. The Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge soundtrack is a movie-style collection of big-band tunes that I can’t tell apart; when Video Games Live performed a BioShock montage to honor 2K Boston at the Wang Theater, I had no idea if the music was actually from the game or not; and I’m not even sure that I’d recognize the bland offerings of the original compositions from Fallout 3, despite hearing them for over 200 hours.

In my opinion, as graphics have improved and games have become more and more cinematic, game music has gone from being a component of the game to a complement.

At this point in the article, the question of course becomes, “Can anything be done?” Big-budget games are cinematic now – there is, of course, the thriving downloadable/indie game community, where games like Castle Crashers can still have excellent, catchy, repetitive soundtracks – so what’s the answer?

I, for one, would love to see more game composers make full use of “leitmotifs.” A leitmotif, for those who don’t know, is defined as “a melodic phrase that accompanies the reappearance of a person or situation.”

Gaming has its share of leitmotifs, of course – the “found item” fanfares from the Zelda and Metroid series, the “Prelude” and “Prologue” themes that made their way through a decade’s worth of Final Fantasies, and of course, the Metal Gear Solid main theme.

The problem that I have with these prior examples is that games rarely seem to make use of these leitmotifs during actual gameplay, choosing instead to put their iconic themes in cutscenes and credit rolls. (An excellent exception, of course, is the Boss fight in Metal Gear Solid 3, where the accompaniment is the title theme “Snake Eater” playing in the background as it also functioned as a countdown timer. I loved that.)

What I’d like to see more of in big-budget game soundtracks, actually, is something akin to what Alan Silvestri managed to masterfully accomplish in his soundtrack for the Back To The Future trilogy (by far the best thing to come out of the 80’s, by the way).

If you’ve seen the BTTF movies – and if you haven’t, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS WRONG WITH YOU??? – you’re probably already singing the main theme, right? Are you seeing the scene in your mind’s eye, Marty tearing down Hill Valley’s main drag in the DeLorean as Doc Brown frantically tries to get the cable reconnected, and smiling at your recollection of it?

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zSw2V_vW0Y 100×100]

If you are, you want to know why? Because Silvestri pounded the main theme into your brain, that’s why! The “suspense” phrase, as I’ll call it (:28 to :38 in the linked video) and the “fanfare” (from :50 to :56), are repeated over and over and over through all three movies in every possible situation – suspense, joy, struggle, farewell, you name it, those themes play during it – and it works every single time.

As a result, not only is the BTTF theme inextricably linked to those emotions, it never fails to bring them all storming to the surface every time you hear it – the connection between your feelings when you first heard it and your feelings when you hear it every time after that is stronger than you probably think it is.

And if you ever wanted to understand why I love videogame music so much? There it is, right there in a nutshell.

If the music is familiar enough so that my brain remembers it, it immediately pulls the emotions of how I felt back to the surface, so it feels like I’m playing it all over again (which comes in handy while I’m at work, let me tell you) – which is why I get so disappointed that modern soundtracks don’t have the same penetration into my subconscious like they used to.

Games have been getting consistently better for the last 40 years – I’d like to be able to vicariously relive more than just the first 20.