Video Game Music

After months of preparation, I've had a piece on video game music published, and subsequently slashdotted. Writing it was a process of collecting my thoughts and continually reorganizing them as I worked on it, getting it ready for publication was partially a matter of tracking down examples and publicly available sources for music, and now it's a matter of promoting it and getting as much feedback and input as I can on it. My last foray into this subject was a bit more technical on the music theory side, this is much more about the gaming side of things.

I'm a big fan of slashdot's discussion system and their ability to filter out the most useful content and posts on a topic, often times the discussion can be more informative than the source, or go off in completely different directions as people weigh in. But it's also an intense vetting process as the audience may be as knowledgeable about a topic as you, I'm having to keep an eye on anything they think I might have missed or wished I had commented on. I think I hit all the broad points I wanted to hit, even if I wasn't able to give a shout-out to every worthy game even out of the ones I played.

One of the things the digital music revolution did for me in particular was increase my awareness of all the music out there, I suddenly had access to game soundtracks as well as arrangements and orchestrated albums that had never even been released in the United States. I gradually became aware that there was a much bigger game music scene out there. The great thing about the internet is, no matter how obscure your niche interest is, there's likely someone who shares it, and someone who's gone to the trouble of writing about it and collecting all the information available on it. (and in the few cases when that isn't true, I try to fill in the gaps myself)

When I took a hiatus from taking lessons in piano to go to college, one of the things I did was pick out a bunch of pieces I wanted to learn on my own. I wanted to get pieces I'd be able to get something out of without assistance, generally ones that I knew already, so I tried my fingers at some of the arrangements from the Final Fantasy piano collections. The nice thing about those books of sheet music is that they're actual arrangements — it's not just a literal transcription of the music as it appears in the game with indefinite repeats and all, as some game music books are, but a well-done arrangement of the basic melodies and progressions in a way that has a clear beginning and end.

I've picked up other books of game music for the Zelda and Chrono series, which take the amusing step of providing sheet music for absolutely every tune featured in a game, even if it's a brief adulatory fanfare. And I've discovered a number of musical treasures, string arrangements of pieces from the zelda series, orchestrations of soundtrack selections, remixes done by fan communities online, and even the original soundtracks themselves can be enjoyable for both their musical merits and nostalgia.

The culmination of my game music experience may have been going to the video games live concert this last year at comic-con. They had a live action version of space invaders where they dragged a guy on stage to play the ship and move around on stage to fire, plenty of arrangements of classic tunes or more recent ones combined with video clips, interviews from game composers, and they brought out some people from the industry to talk briefly about their roles. The dramatic culmination though was probably dragging a guy up on stage to play Guitar Hero for a chance to win a laptop. He was supposed to get through a certain song with a specific score on hard, but he insisted on bumping it up to expert. And I have never seen a crowd go quite as crazy in my life as they did for this man, playing Guitar Hero with live orchestra and choir backing him up, and nailing solos and riffs all to eventually walk away with a new computer. For a few brief minutes up there, he was living the dream.

Video games can be escapist, like all forms of entertainment and music itself. But like anything people do that requires any amount of skill, there's artistry that goes into it, and understanding and truly appreciating it can prove more rewarding than simply being entertained by it.