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Gaming Music Goes Mainstream
Steve writes "CNN has posted an article about the emergence of a big business in video game music. According to the author, budgets for one game recently surpassed $300,000, with composers being paid between $700 and $1500 per minute of composition, even more 'if it's produced for an orchestra.' The article points out that the production quality of game music has surpassed that of television, where money is rarely budgeted for high-quality soundscapes."
Good! I've found that in the last few years, the music I find most interesting is composed for games. Hollywood soundtracks still provide some good stuff, but the more imaginative things are coming from games. The downfall has been the instrumentations, being mostly relegated to various qualities of synth. That's fine for the songs that use synth the way it was meant to be used, not when it's used because they didn't have the budget to use the instruments they really wanted. It's annoying to hear what should clearly be a great piece, but have it sound so bad. Now, with them getting more money, maybe we'll get more and more real instruments where they're needed.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Yeah the difference is that the average end user typically doesn't spend 40 hours in front of a television listening to the same bit of soundtrack over and over again.
(That is unless you go out and rent/buy 4-5 seasons of a show at a time and watch them in marathon sessions like I do.)
I'm glad people are finally spending more money on video game sound tracks. After several hours of the same speed-metal high-adrenaline "fight music", I typically want to take a hammer to whatever faceless composer put together the repetitive noise I'm listening to, and then follow up by bludgeoning whatever management muckety-muck cut his 'masterwork' down to a 2 minute loop, so as to maximize the throbbing in my temples.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
So you advocate a position where large developers cannot spend more money on a title than small developers? Where all the games match the lowest common denominator of what any studio can produce?
Because that doesn't sound quite right to me.
One of my favorite game soundtracks is from TES: Morrowind. Jeremy Soule came up with about an hour's worth of phenomenal orchestral composition, and the collector's edition of the game included these songs on an extra CD. (Yes, the game has them in mp3 format, so I could have burned my own, but that's beside the point.) Considering that there are hundreds of hours of gameplay available in Morrowind (and I'm sure I spent that much time playing), it's amazing that not once did I tire of the music. Not only did I never turn it off in-game, but I also listen to it in my car on occasion. Compare this to the pretty good soundtracks from Diablo II and World of Warcraft, which got old after a while.
Nobuo Uematsu, famed composer for the Final Fantasy series of games, also deserves recognition. For several games in a row, he was composing music for very limited platforms. Then comes FF8, with a wonderful orchestral piece accompanying the closing credits. There were indications that Square had made FF8 into sort of a movie that you play. This was shortly before their full CG Final Fantasy theatrical movie came out, and it seemed like FF8 was partially a technology proof-of-concept and partially an attempt to get geared up for making a movie. Anyway, the "game as movie" theme would simply not have worked had the music been merely average, but Uematsu's soundtrack made it work.