Games - Video game music

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	Games - Video game music

Video game music is any of the musical pieces or soundtracks from computer and video games.

Early history and the age of 8-bit machines

Arcade games in the 1970s often contained music of some sort, but it was typically monotonous and so indistinct that it was easily dismissed and parodied. Often this music was simply folk songs which were transcribed by the programmers, who might have known little about music. This trend continued in arcade games well into the 1980s, and in early home consoles and computers until the release of the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Previous game systems and home computers had for the most part continued the beeps and boops of early arcade games (except for the Magnavox Odyssey, which was silent). There were some exceptions however, and arcades often generally led the industry in technological innovation. For example some early games played fully sampled soundtracks from tapes, and many games by Exidy featured fully sampled digitized soundtracks.

The capabilities of the Commodore 64 and NES (not to mention numerous other 8-bit gaming computers and consoles of 1980s) were not up to what most people today would ever consider listening to, but the ability to play multiple tones simultaneously (effectively multiple instruments) at higher quality than had usually been possible before allowed composers to be much more creative with their music.

On the Commodore 64 it was composers such as Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway who started to compose video game music with catchy and profound melodies. Some people consider Hubbard's wildly spirited music for Monty on the Run (1985) as a beginning of profound computer game music. Martin Galway's music for Rambo II (1986) is another early milestone that relies on a strong melody. The C64's SID chip was highly advanced when the computer was released in 1982 and it took years before programmers (such as Hubbard and Galway) learned to fully utilize its capabilities.

Many melodies originally composed for the NES have become classics, notably music from the Super Mario Bros. (1985), Legend of Zelda (1986), Dragon Quest
(1986), Castlevania
(1986), Mega Man
(1987), DuckTales (1989), Fire Emblem
(1990) and the Final Fantasy
series (1987). One of the most important NES-composers was Koji Kondo, who wrote themes for Mario and Zelda.

In the field of arcade games that were often played in noisy atmosphere, the quality of music got less attention with some notable exceptions like music by composer Hiroshi Miyauchi who wrote soundtracks for Out Run and Afterburner.

One notable case during this period was Atari's POKEY
sound chip, which was used in 8-bit Atari computers such as the Atari 800 since 1979. The chip was highly advanced -excelling in the playback of digital samples in comparison to the SID, but no game composers tried to utilize its potential and the music of 8-bit Atari computers remained of low quality while able composers concentrated on the Commodore 64. The chip remained unused until the 1990s, when amateur composers started to explore the possibilities of the Pokey chip and compose music for it.

The Nintendo music as a genre

The many games made for the Nintendo Entertainment system almost all featured a similar style of music which can come closest to being defined as the "Video game genre" of music in terms of composition, as opposed to simply being called "video game music" because it is in a video game or is being played from a video game console. Some compositional features of this genre continue to influence certain music today, although because of the trend for games to emulate movies, many soundtracks shy away from this style because it is not similar to a style of music played in movies. Features of this genre are:

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video game music

Games - Video game music

Early history and the age of 8-bit machines

The Nintendo music as a genre

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