Story Soundtrack
Why Video Game Soundtracks Aren’t Just Irritating Beeps
Video games have been nothing but challenge after challenge for music composers. Qualifications for being a game’s ‘sound guy’? You must have been in at least two completely unsuccessful bands, and you had to put with working at the edge of the team, and with instruments with all the sophistication of a pocket calculator (so being a Kraftwerk fan helped immensely). In the 80s, the highest praise you could expect was to have the fruits of your labour called ‘charming’. Sometimes you’d be choosing between the sound effects and music. But with team sizes requiring the composer to usually be talented artists, writers or programmers, innovation was inevitable sooner or later.
Planning for interactivity is one of the things that sets games apart from film design and other medias. Given the freedom to approach things with different solutions, at different paces, ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to visual, story and music design don’t exploit the full potential of the medium. Take for instance, the humble explosion, a staple of the video game environment: if it’s important, you have to make sure that your player sees it. The easiest way of dealing with this is of course to put everything important into ‘cutscenes’, but this as an uninspired, anti-interactive way of telling a story. Those games that attempt to present the game as a continuous interactive experience, can deploy positional sound, subtle lighting cues, or simply have friendly characters shout ‘look over there’. When it comes to music for games, there are a set of unique issues. Soundtracks must be similarly dynamic. When a player sprints at breakneck speed through a game’s events (either literally, or by skipping stuff like dialogue scenes), music cues constantly overlap. If they move too slowly, you have to have epic, overlong pieces if you want to retain some semblance of artistic integrity.
There are several approaches to the great difference in interaction length: some of the market’s best games simply rely on ambient sound, or background sound effects, relying on short snippets of music for key moments (but this is a somewhat lazy way out). But when games employ dynamic soundtracks, they approach game music appropriately, instead of simply making music for films. When MIDI was the primary music method for video games back in the early 90s, PC games like ‘Ultima Underworld’ and ‘Monkey Island’ lead the way by being able to mix, on the fly, between the instruments and melodies that each scene required. MIDI was slightly easier to work with, considering that the tracks were composed of distinct elements that could be stopped and started: however, modern games have mastered the art of transitioning smoothly between themes seamlessly.
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story – Soundtrack
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