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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."
Yeah, Biohazard gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, Nights was pretty teardripping, and Luigi scared the living daylights out of me 8)
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.
Every now and then, I hear my daughter (15) playing some riffs of Doom music on her flute.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
On the other hand, I can't figure out what the heck the author means by this categorization--
The first (Tetris, Pac-Man, Space Invaders) is the game that plays you. Your interactivity is merely a response to dilemmas inherent in the game. Move or be eaten. Shoot or be invaded. Reach the end before time is up.
The second type (GTA3, The Sims, Halo) is the game that you play. There are ground rules, but there are also choices. This is the next evolution of gaming: replicating an experience.
After reading this, I'm at a loss to figuring out what he means by this--the first set of games has low quality graphics, the second his hi quality, but I doubt that's it. There are no choices in Tetris?
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).
For some reason, the theme from Defender of the Crown sticks with me: great old Amiga game.
Dum dum da-dum
Dum dum da-dum
dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum dum dum da-dum..
Hmm, of course, that could be about 80 other video game themes, now that I look at it.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Yes, but he's right. Graphics almost have to be technically impressive to be good, whereas music often is better when it's a bit primitive. An old synth can still be used as an instrument, and the SID chip in the C64 was often used far more effectively than the orchestras they can use in modern game scores.
This has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has to do with the different media: Graphics are usually supposed to mimic the world (mimesis), music rarely does that. Any sound can be used to make music. If it sounds good, it's perfect.
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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for how enduring the music is is at Overclocked Remix. A must-listen for those who know video game music never dies - it just gets remixed.
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).
The same is true in movies, but the point can be proven there much more easily. Watch Psycho (the original) or The Godfather and pay attention to what the music is doing for the scene.
A good developer, just like a good director, is going to use the music to set the scene, to introduce a character (and even to change a character), and to adjust the viewer/player's emotions.
Doom and Quake used music and sound to put people on edge, which is something that is missing from almost every FPS since the first Quake. Halo used music to give the player a sense of awe, especially when combined with the imagery (given, of course, that you played it when it first came out on the XBox rather than at it's PC release, after people became jaded by hype and not having it because of it's XBox-only status, and the entire genre had already taken from Halo and moved forward).
Many of the console franchises (especially Final Fantasy) rely heavily on re-use of previous musical themes, in part because it brings nostalgia on the part of long-time players, and because they already have an idea of which themes were successful from the earlier releases.
-PainKilleR-[CE]