Also this soundtrack from SSX Blur (Junkie XL).
Is there such a genre anymore? I think there used to be, when the limitations of eight bit and (I think?) sixteen bit sound and the limitations of the particular hardware were such as to force a certain kind of creativity which in turn led to a signature “video game music” sound. But these days it seems that those kinds of limits don’t really exist anymore, such that there needs be no creativity put into figuring out what to do with those limits, which means creativity can be spent elsewhere in the music–at the cost of there no longer being a characteristic “video game music” sound.
Well, that’s the kind of thing I began to think after my first year, way back when, as a music composition major who’d started out wanting to write video game music. The following year, I was an English major instead. Thought it’d be more practical and also thought I might write fiction and poetry for a living. No on all counts.
Just to be clear, I was talking about all video game music, not just 8/16-bit.
That makes the question a bit more confusing. In terms of my favorite video game soundtracks, which of the following are ‘video game music’?
The music for Super Mario Land 2 was composed specifically for the game. It mostly consists of variations on a main theme. It is designed to loop. It is all 8-bit, and therefore is played when the Game Boy’s sound chip interprets MIDI(?) data in the game.
The music for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was composed specifically for the game and recorded by a live orchestra. It is all orchestral, though it varies somewhat in genres. Some pieces are based around a main theme but most of it changes with in-game location. It is all designed to loop. Many of the songs were released as a soundtrack disc.
The music for Sonic Adventure 2 was composed specifically for the game. It was partially recorded by live musicians and partially created digitally. It varies in genres from orchestral to rap to jazz to hard rock, and others. Some of it is designed to loop and some is not; the songs that are not are ‘theme songs’ for the characters and are available through a ‘soundtrack’ section of the game. Many of the songs were released as a soundtrack disc.
The music for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was not composed specifically for the game. It consists of popular music mostly in the punk and rap genres that was previously recorded by live musicians. It is not designed to loop, and is played like a CD throughout the game, switching to the next song on a list when one is finished playing.
(Huh. Weird. It looks like a lot of my favorite games/soundtracks are sequels.)
So - what is a video game song? If there were a Grammy category for video game music, could Kazumi Totaka submit his Super Mario Land music in the form of MIDI data? Would it make sense to place it in the same category as Koji Kondo’s orchestral pieces for Zelda and Jun Senoue’s rock songs from Sonic? Is the Tony Hawk soundtrack excluded, even though it makes a fantastic soundtrack to gameplay (and encapsulates something about skater culture) because the songs aren’t original? I’m not saying that a Grammy category is the be-all and end-all of “serious genres”, I’m just using it as an example to show why it is hard to consider video game music to be just one genre.
Hmm? Ocarina of Time, along with every Zelda game before and since, used Midi. The only Nintendo-produced games that have used orchestral recordings are Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.