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Is Music More Lasting Than Graphics In Games?
Thanks to Tokyopia for their article arguing that music may be more important than graphics for the most enduring videogames. The author, apparently a "a renowned game music composer who would rather remain nameless", argues: "In going back to look at a few rare [older] videogames that still [have lasting value] today, it struck me that the graphics have almost always dated horribly, but the music - almost without fail - still succeeds. At worst, old music elicits a smile. At best, a full on emotional connection that really enhances the game." He then references Sega's NiGHTS Into Dreams and Namco's Ridge Racer Type 4 as titles which benefit from this connection, concluding: "Over time, a game's graphics will inevitably be relegated to being the mere nuts and bolts of the experience. The basic structure around which the all important game play is wrapped. But the music? The music is our emotional connection. It's the experience. And it plays forever."
Ask a game artist to look at an old game and comment on it and chances are they will mention the graphics in a sort of nostalgic way. They probably won't have a lot to say about the music. The same could be said for a game designer.
This guy is just focusing on the bits that he has control over. His insight about music being more lasting is just his biased opinion, nothing more.
I used to be a coder in the Amiga demo scene and nowadays, when I think back to those times, it's the music that I remember. There were a few particularly impressive graphical innovations that I remember but (obviously) I have no emotional connection to them. But some of the music... oh, masterpieces!
Anyone remember 4Mat and Nuke of Anarchy?
Or the track Jesus on E's?
Some of the best music I've ever heard came out of the Amiga scene.
One reason music doesn't seem as dated may just be because music hasn't changed as much as graphics have. While music reproduction and quality are orders of magnitude better than they once were, it seems to me that the difference is less drastic than the advances in graphics (or, seen another way, the nature of older graphics is more primitive than the nature of older music).
If you think there've been no memorable video game soundtracks since mid-2000, you've been sleeping in a room cushioned by your own nostlagia. To name a few excellent soundtracks that've been released between then and now:
I listen to these soundtracks all the time, as well as older ones, because they are good music. They stand on their own as being great soundtracks. You can play the game, and get that extra nostalgia-tilt value in there, but people who are not gamers can listen to these and go, "that's some good music!"
"The pixelated graphics just remind us how silly and trivially we expended our youth. But the music...the music makes us want to waste our youth yet again."
Not to me. The graphics are the same as always, and the music is the same as always. Perspective might change, but it's still the same game. The first and most important part will always be the gameplay. For example, I may hate sports games, but there are a couple of sports games released that have such great gameplay I can play them regardless of their genre. Graphics and sound are a part of the experience; you can't easily judge them in a vacuum.
I can play the old NES MegaMan games with the sound off and still really enjoy it, because the gameplay is something I really enjoy. The graphics don't seem dated -- low resolution and low colour depth, yea, but apropos for the hardware involved.
The only really ugly graphics you see are on the PS1/Saturn/N64 era games, when most games had either non-filtered textures, lack of hardware perspective correction (I hate that about PS1 games), or blurry textures. First-gen PS2 games suffer from a bad case of jaggies, but it's not something that's going to throw me off a good game.
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What about the sound effects from Asteroids? Or the opening effects of the Atari 2600 Pac-Man? It isn't just music, but sound itself.
Sound has always played a vital role in our enjoyment of videogames, just as it has in movies (a bad film score can kill a decent movie). How many of us can't stand silent movies with no scores? I love silent movies, when they have a score, but fall asleep whenever there is just dead silence.
Sometimes we underestimate the effect sound can have on our enjoyment of a medium...
You probably play action games. Those, while good, rarely prove to be timeless. The article talks mostly about those games that have achieved immortality, and still hold loyal fans sometimes well over a decade after their release. Go to a website like GameFAQs, and look at the top boards in any of the older systems (especially the NES, Genesis, and above all the SNES). The top lists don't change much, except shuffling around between the top twenty or so, and they very rarely contain action games. The action games sold a lot better during their time, but they didn't pull off immortality, and live forever for the next game to keep the fans interested. The top games are mostly RPGs (For example, the top list on GameFAQs' SNES boards has almost always been dominated by Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, and Super Mario RPG, with Star Ocean, Tales of Phantasia, Earthbound, Zelda, and a few others making their bids now and then). Other genre's only make a good calling for the high slots if they have storylines comparable to the RPGs they're competing against, or just had a fan-made translation hack released, or something simmilar. While you're there, look at the top ten or fifteen boards or so. You'll almost always be able to find a thread asking just what has kept people interested in the game for all the years its been around. Graphics almost never get mentioned - obviously, if that's what you cared about, you wouldn't be opening up and tinkering with your SNES cartridges constantly just to keep the SRAM batteries alive or fighting with dead ROM sites to emulate games when you can't revive or find the hardware anymore. The only mention graphics will usually get is that they may be excellent considering the meager hardware they run on (Some late SNES games were easily a match for the first year's stock of PS1 games, but still not much by any modern reckoning). What does get mentioned is most often storyline (although the older a game gets, the less this gets mentioned, as people get to the point of memorizing event triggers and dialog threads), music, and sometimes gameplay (although that tends to trail off with time too, with brief resurgences when somebody stumbles along some trick that's never been discussed before).
You can hum music. You can't hum graphics or gameplay.
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