Videogame music

I have always had an affinity for computers, and periodically play video games. By that I mean the first video game I ever played was Pong—I don’t think you can get much older than that. (I did not have this game as a kid, but a friend of mine did.)

Back with some friends in the 80s, I played on the NES completely through the first two Zelda games and Super Mario Bros. 3… Then I didn’t play for years. Then, in the late 90s, I played the first two Tomb Raider games, Total Annihilation, and all the Monkey Island games (that were available at the time). Then I stopped playing for years again. In 2017, I bought the then-new Nintendo Switch because I really, really wanted to play Mario again.

The thing with Super Mario Bros. games is… I have to play them completely through… all the way, every level, every star or moon or whatever. And say what you want—they do get insanely difficult at times. At least for such a casual player as myself.

Which inevitably, sooner or later, leads to situations like the one pictured below (from New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe… perhaps my favorite “classic” Mario game), where I curse that §$%§! piece of §%&! “one-wrong-move-and-you-are-dead” plumber! (Yes, that is an actual screenshot of me playing the game in 2019.)

So I have periods where I play one or more games intensively, and then sometimes years where I don’t play any video games at all.
These last few months, I have not really played many video games because I spend my time on other (presumably more important) things—but I still like video games.

As far as music is concerned: yes, some of it has been really great. I mean, by nature, most (though not all) video game music is mood- rather than context-specific, so it is generally not very dramatic music, but rather sets the atmosphere. It must not be too specific or dramatic, because oftentimes it has to be able to be played in a loop, depending on how long a player stays within a certain scene. So it’s different from film scores in many ways. Some of it is quite nice. Grant Kirkhope’s music for Mario + Rabbids, for example, is terrific, with many charming melodies, songs, twists, and turns. The music was performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Nic Raine, so I guess film score fans certainly know these names (James Fitzpatrick was listed as the orchestra manager).

There was some music with a definite “Danny Elfman” touch in an early level of Super Mario Odyssey (I’m pretty sure it was an intentional reference).
I do have a few soundtracks of video games, like the BALDUR’S GATE III soundtrack (which came with the game, which I played a bit last year—but on the PC, not a console), and some of it is indeed very good and very “filmic”.

Haha… yeah, the Monkey Island scores by Michael Land are great, I actually do listen to them apart from the game. Of course, I also loved the games. I played Ron Gilbert’s THE RETURN TO MONKEY ISLAND (the belated sequel) when it came out and had a lot more fun playing that than I have from watching most movies today.

I discovered Deriviere with his early scores to the OBSCURE games. He seems to be very into the technically side of how music dynamically works within the game itself. Probably quite some work to get an actual listenable album out of that. I got quite some of his scores from his bandcamp but have not yet fully conscientiously listened to them all (same with Wintory’s work). GREEDFALL and A PLAGE TALE are also more classic scores if I recall right.

Will look into that video sometime. If you haven’t you should have such stuff with a short article on the site 😉

Knut Avenstroup Haugen I don’t know even by name. I can understand that Wintory is problematic to get into.

I’m firmly convinced Rare’s success was at least 65% the music for their games, and not the rather floopy, looks-better-on-the-box-than-in-motion gameplay. The soundtrack to Donky Kong Country still makes me feel some kind of way.