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Video Games Live at Gen Con
GameDaily reports on the upcoming concerts at this year's Gen Con. Video Games Live will be playing this Friday and Saturday, to coincide with the second and third days of the annual RPG event. From the article: "'Performing Video Games Live with such a distinguished orchestra, venue, and convention helps to further legitimize the important cultural and artistic aspects of video games and their music,' said Tommy Tallarico, famed video game composer and co-creator/executive producer of Video Games Live." I uh, won't be able to make them. Because, you know, I'll be gaming.
I guess someone ran out of good ideas for putting on a concert.
I am an old school gamer. I remember when the great sound tracks were Final Fantasy VI and to an extent Link to the Past.
This event is being held at an RPG event, but if ever there was a time it should make the jump to an all over event now. No longer is well done scores held only to the RPG. Metal Gear Solid had an amazing score along side it.
It's true that many games instead opt for commercial music, but at the same time, many more games such as Ico and Shadows of the Colossus and even god of war are working towards better music. It was only a generation or two ago that the only places a real score was worked on was RPGs and even there it was mostly in the SquareSoft realm to really put the resources these companies are able to place on it now.
The question is with the way the price of music is (at least 50K just to have a song in a tv show), will more games opt for a cheaper but more personalized soundtrack. It's true it wouldn't be worth the effort for large games like GTA, where the music needs to be licensed, but for a game like Dead rising, the entire game can last with out a single licensed piece of music, and can have some interesting applications of music.
In it's own area look at Konami's extreme amounts of music that they have produced for the bemani series. That alone tells me that game studios may be able to produce music on the same levels as Record studios, perhaps for a fraction of the price.
Anyone ever play 1942 for nintendo 8 bit? That's my nomination for the worst music ever.
God spoke to me.
I just saw the performance at the Rosemont Theatre outside Chicago (coinciding with Wizard World). It was a lot of fun... performances including: Classic Video games (Pong opened the night), Frogger competition onstage, Mario, Final Fantasy, Halo, Castlevania, World of Warcraft, Sonic, Medal of Honor, motion tracked Space Invaders challenge onstage, God of War, Beyond Good and Evil, Tron, Advent Rising, and more...
I would like to attend this. Would you?
GenCon is the biggest tabletop/pen-and-pencil RPG and gaming con out there. (Unless you count things like DragonCon, which isn't primarily a gaming con.) But it's not a computer/console/electronic gaming con. Why have performances better related to electronic gaming there?
I know of people who play music in the background of their RPG sessions to add a little mood music, but I don't think I'll be hearing of any orchestras in people's living rooms any time soon. It seems like they didn't think enough about their target audience and target context.
Interesting. My concept of recent video game music is more like film music, but with more possibilities due to non-linearity. It should be possible to have a very effective soundtrack without huge "forces" (composers refer to the number of performers required to perform a composition in this manner) with a more reasonable budget. This soundtrack would not necessarily be among the greatest ever, but it might be more effective than a commercial music ripoff.
One of my life goals is to, at some point, write and produce a video game score. I never seem to have enough time to do it; I was trying last summer to find an open-source game that I was sure would actually be produced, but even then, it really wasn't a project for which I could do justice in a summer. Once I'm not in school anymore in three years or so, I might be interested in a commercial video game project, if someone was willing to hire someone with "only" a bachelor's degree in composition. (I'm a doctoral student in performance. Hey, maybe I could even play on the soundtrack.)
Was there a point to this post? Probably not. This is Slashdot, after all. But if there was a point, it would be that creativity might help with budget issues, enabling more video games to have quality music.
>I am an old school gamer. I remember when the great sound
>tracks were Final Fantasy VI and to an extent Link to the
>Past.
FFVI? "old school gamer"? Uhm... well... no.
Go back to Loom (an early Lucas release) and Wing Commander in 1990, or any of the other projects involving The Fat Man (George Sanger).
Check out some of the Apple II stuff Origin did with the Mockingboard, particularly Ultima V.
There were great computer soundtracks back in at LEAST the mid 80s, if not earlier. Sometimes you just had to pay a little extra for the hardware (SB16s are a dime a dozen now, but back when an AdLib card ran $200 or more... imagine what it was like paying for a Mockingboard Sound II, much less two of them for maximum effect on Ultima V).
-l
I know for a fact that Last Ninja 2's soundtrack from 1988 (Commodore 64) is one of the best ever. Matt Gray even covered some Tangerine Dream music for it.
It was only a generation or two ago that the only places a real score was worked on was RPGs
Totally untrue. Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games all had fantastic scores based on the mood and setting of scenes. Countless Nintendo games like Ducktails, Contra, Kirby's Dream Land, and and the Super Mario Brothers series had memorable and professional soundtracks. Even games for the Commodore 64 and Tandy took advantage of those systems' advanced sound and music processors.
Saying that RPGs had the only legitimate soundtracks is just an opinion, and certainly not the most common one. Even my parents would play Tetris and Dr. Mario with the music on even though they'd heard the songs a million times.
Those were less scoring and more properly manipulating midi, but yes. Wing Commander and Loom both had excellent scores for their time. The problem with Wing Commander that I remember is you heard the same bit of music after every battle, the same bit of music for the battle, but it was well done.
:)
And people didn't buy Adlib cards. They bought Adlib Compatible to save 50 bucks. Yes they had to work on the settings in the games, but they saved money
Those were less scoring and more properly manipulating midi
Why make a distinction between the two?
If anything, MIDI scoring is more difficult than scoring for live musicians. A human musician is trained to give nuance to the music, to balance within the ensemble, to make the music sound natural. To get the same effect out of a group of crude electronic waveform generators, or even a set of looped samples of real musicians, is a painstaking task involving a lot of data shaping. The musicianship has to be added in manually, one byte at a time.
I guess it's the same reason GenCon doesn't "just" have Dungeons and Dragons - despite that being its roots. GenCon, while still focused on RPGs is a "gaming" convention as a whole - and even that is starting to branch out more and more, as this year they're offering an "anime only" badge, for those that are interested in only seeing the anime rooms that have been growing in size the last few years.
Oh I'm surely not saying that a human musician has an easier job than Midi Scoring. The distinction I'm making is more that the Midi is clever use of hardware rather then expertly done music. Do I think that the guy who did FF6 is better than wing commander? not in the least (and when we factor in my personal hero's name (Spector) to the equation WC is much better) but at the same time, it's not the same style score. FF6 score was done by a musician for the most part. Wing Commander score was done by a programmer. Their greatness is equal, but their path is definatly different.
I work for a local news station in Indy and I was able to actually play Frogger with the orchestra behind me...incredible. I think that this is a brilliant show... Check out the video here...