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."

Comments

Hardly at all!

[Inoshiro]

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:

• Jet Set Radio Future
• Halo
• Homeworld
• Silent Hill 3
• Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
• F-Zero GX
• Soul Calibur 2
• Final Fantasy X-2

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.