Tag Archives: atari

VGM Entry 23: Wizards & Warriors

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 23: Wizards & Warriors
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

If we are looking for the best soundtracks in the fantasy genre up through 1987, of what I have heard Koichi Sugiyama, Nobuo Uematsu, and the early team efforts of Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe take the cake in pretty much every category, while the works of Kenneth W. Arnold in Ultima III and Ultima IV for the Apple II remain my personal favorites. But there is probably a lot of great stuff out there which I am missing. There are also some absolutely phenomenal songs that simply lack the context of well-rounded albums.

The works of David Wise in Wizards & Warriors (Acclaim, developed by Rare, 1987) make for an excellent example. The game is not in RPG or adventure format; it is a typical side-scrolling hack and slash with a medieval setting. As such, it calls for slightly more action-oriented songs, and that seems to have been a weak point for Wise at this stage of his career. But perhaps more importantly, he seems to sell himself short, leaving a lot of songs unfinished.

The title screen track is a simply gorgeous classical piano piece which could not help but function in any gaming medium past or present. It is a nice little reminder that the excessive emphasis on orchestration today is not always necessary. And it is not the only excellent song in the game.

“Outside the Castle” is arguably much better. In spite of the track looping after only 17 seconds, it feels as though it could go on forever. The periodically fading wave in the background is such a small touch, but it magnificently transforms an already pretty pleasing tune into something entirely enchanting. It has that sort of time dilation effect which came to characterize later forest-theme songs.

But the brevity of Wise’s compositions quickly begins to cause trouble. “Inside the Tree” could be a wonderful song, full of subtle, tasteful variations on a theme which is neither too safe for a little action nor too aggressive for anything else. But it isn’t. In fact, it’s only six seconds long! Wise, what were you thinking?

And on that note, why is this called “Inside the Tree” anyway? It sounds like it should be the sort of tune that plays inside a castle or library or something, whereas the actual song “Inside the Castle” is a boring mess that should have never been included in the game. I don’t think I’m being picky here–“Outside the Castle” functions well enough, but it definitely has a forest vibe to me, and there is a forest stage, you know. “Invincibility Potion” is actually really pretty, and could have functioned effectively as an end credit theme, or at least the start of one. (It’s only 16 seconds.) Instead, the game has no ending credit music at all. Meanwhile,”Invincibility Potion” is so out of character for any action sequence that I think I’d have been inclined to avoid the item during gameplay just to not ruin the vibe. And the boss music, oh the boss music! It simulates the sort of dread you might associate with learning that your mother-in-law is visiting for the weekend.

Here is “Forest”, or “Forest of Elrond”, depending on which track listing you’re looking at. Entirely inappropriate for the theme of the game and absurdly obnoxious when heard for more than half a minute or so, I think it reiterates my point. This whole soundtrack to me feels like Dave Wise either had zero confidence in his song-writing capabilities or else was given about three days to complete the project and had to submit incomplete tracks and some slapped-together last minute fillers. And yet the songs that pull through, most notably the title screen/end credits and “Outside the Castle”, rank among the best songs on the NES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQkBXjk6w4

The music of Gauntlet (Tengen, 1987) for the Nintendo was composed by Hal Canon. (Atari’s 1985 arcade Gauntlet, on which it is based, contained very little music, and Canon’s work is original.) The theme of Stage 1 is entirely appropriate for the ghoul and goblin-graced dungeon on the load screen. Despite the game being quite distanced from your typical adventure game, the music manages to keep pace and still present a wonderful medieval vibe. I do not wish to say that the album falls short after the first level, because it does remain fairly well written and entirely appropriate to the gameplay, but it abandons any serious attempt to sound classical after that first phenomenal success. The music only continues to work because the game itself isn’t nearly as thematic as the title screen leads us to believe. Hal Canon proves here to be a consistently good composer; he doesn’t quit trying the way Wise seems to have. If only he’d remained consistent in style as well, Gauntlet could have numbered among the best.

VGM Entry 07: Other chip options

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 07: Other chip options
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I am at the unfortunate disadvantage of having no clue what key terms such as “FM Synthesis” and “Programmable Sound Generator” really mean, and no amount of reading technical explanations or listening to arbitrary examples of audio employing one or the other is really going to fill me in. I feel like it is the very sort of thing this series of articles is intended to explain, but it’s not currently within my grasp.

One thing I’d like to know is what makes arcade games like Tube Panic (Nichibutsu/Fujitek, 1984) sound so much better than their arcade predecessors of only a year or two prior. (Unfortunately this composer’s name has eluded me, perhaps lost in translation.) This game uses a General Instrument AY-3-8910 chip, or so I am told, which is a PSG. So did Jungle Hunt, and the two are worlds apart. Jungle Hunt‘s three very basic tones could barely hold themselves together, constantly breaking out of rhythm and sounding quite primitive even when they all synced up. Of course the glitchiness was part of the charm, but Tube Panic is an entirely different animal. There is definitely no sense that the system is struggling to contain the music, and the tones are much fuller. What changed? And if it’s the case that later arcade games stacked multiple audio chips where early ones did not, how exactly does this effect the end product?

There is one thing I’ve noticed, and it’s probably both an amateur observation for those who know what they’re talking about and a pointless one for those who don’t. But it seems to me like audio employing FM-synthesis is much cleaner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3on20-Tw4DY

Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) for instance was composed by Hibiki Godai and released for the NEC PC-8801 the same year that this system began to incorporate a Yamaha YM2203 sound chip, which, as best I understand it, used FM synthesis. Whatever that actually entails, what I seem to be hearing here is a lack of distortion never attained with the AY-3-8910, or with the Commodore 64 SID for that matter (another PSG). That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing–distortion was the perfecting touch to the early Ultima soundtracks (the Mockingboard also employed multiple AY-3-8910 chips) and it would be the focal point for some of the best ZX Spectrum titles. But there is a noticeable difference in clarity, and if I had to guess I’d say it’s the dominant difference between FM synthesis chips and PSGs.

The most impressive early consequence of this cleaner sound is Marble Madness (Atari, 1984), which used the YM2151, an FM synthesis chip similar to the YM2203. The music Brad Fuller and Hal Cannon manage to create here is gorgeous and completely unbecoming of an otherwise conceptually mundane video game. The music of Marble Madness can essentially function as a stand alone semi-ambient synth album. With a few exceptions and a little longer content it could have been commercially released independent of any game to reasonable acclaim, and it is not all that particularly different from the sort of works you might expect on the Yamaha keyboards employed by 1980s synth musicians. Tasking Brad Fuller and Hal Cannon with the job and providing them with the sound chip to get it done might have been one of the only things Atari did right in the 1980s.

The last thing to note here is that Earl Vickers is credited as the Marble Madness sound programmer. This is one of the earliest games for which I’ve noticed different names associated with ‘composition’ and ‘sound programming’, and it’s a confusing distinction which will impact plenty of future discussions.

VGM Entry 03: The crash of ’83

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 03: The crash of ’83
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

You may have heard that the video game market crashed in 1983. You may have even heard that this was the consequence of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, December 1982) being a commercial disaster. I don’t know that anyone is naive enough to actually believe this latter claim, but E.T. certainly tops most lists of “worst” video games ever made because of it. A more accurate explanation is summed upon Wikipedia: “the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.” E.T. was definitely one such low-quality game, but it was one of many.

Yes, the market was flooded, games and systems were being cloned right and left, and everyone was looking to maximize profits by minimizing production costs. The mere existence of such titles as Purina PetCare’s Chase the Chuck Wagon (Spectravision, 1983) should raise an alarm, and nothing surpassed the almighty failure of the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man (Atari, 1982).

Rumor has it Atari released a test version in the early stages of development in order to get the title on the market in time for the holidays, but the game appears to have been released in March. Either way, it was completely unplayable. Atari were so convinced that consumers would purchase it based on the name alone that they produced two million more game cartridges than actual Atari 2600s.

Atari’s deceptive business practices certainly did not win over the hearts and minds of the public, so why didn’t other companies pick up the slack? Well, the truth is they couldn’t. Games like Pac-Man could have been better, but they couldn’t have been much better, because they were constructed with 1977 technology. Atari didn’t deceive the public by blowing off the production of Pac-Man so much as they deceived the public by pretending that the game was even possible on the system. It really wasn’t.

This is the arcade version of Up’n Down (Sega, 1983), to steal an example from Karen Collins. It was pretty standard for its day, and while it has nothing on the likes of Gyruss, it certainly did not contribute to a market collapse. Indeed, if everyone owned a home console with the graphic and audio capacity of 1983 arcade machines instead of the 1977 Atari 2600 there would have likely been no market crash; this is the point which I think a lot of commentaries overlook.

You couldn’t pull off a game like this on the popular home systems of the early 80s. Once ported to the Atari 2600, Up’n Down sounded like something of a sadistic nightmare set to the visual backdrop of a sewage drain. The technical explanation for why the music was so terrible is a bit beyond my grasp, but in plain terms the sound chip was simply not in tune as we commonly think of it. Further complicating the problem, the approximate notes available in any particular octave varied drastically, and the tuning for the North American and European versions were slightly different. Attempting to create good music on the Atari was simply hopeless, and visually, well, you can count for yourself how many pixels developers had to work with.

This wasn’t going to cut it. Nothing in the second generation of video game consoles was. It’s not that home gaming had to keep pace with the arcade, but it still needed to break that threshold of well, being any good. Quality wasn’t a possibility on these older systems, and by 1983 novelty had run its course.

The last interesting point I care to make is that a lot of Atari 2600 games did in fact have continuous music during gameplay. Up’n Down is a prime example. Quite a number of second generation systems–the Atari 2600 (Atari, 1977), Bally Astrocade (Bally Technologies, 1977), Odyssey 2 (Magnavox, 1978), Intellivision (Mattel, 1979)–were theoretically capable of this. If music was guaranteed to sound as bad as Up’n Down, then perhaps no developers bothered to waste their time with it initially, before the arcade made it an expected feature of games. But on the other hand, maybe some developers did, and their games were later lost in the sea of trash that characterized first and second generation game consoles. Was Rally-X in 1980 really the first? I suppose it’s not an important question, but I think the typically unsourced claims to its credit merit scrutiny.

VGM Entry 01: Proto-game music

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 01: Proto-game music
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I woke up one morning in June with a fairly innocent idea in mind. I thought I’d write up a short series on my favorite video game soundtracks. It would be a simple enough venture. I’d give a background post on the pre-Nintendo era, then do a little recap of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, all that jazz, and then before I know it be firmly rooted in my SNES/Playstation-era comfort zone, free to recap the two dozen or so games I like best without much interference.

It was a really terrible plan. The shear quantity of material I found myself obligated to cover to even reach my timeframe of interest was daunting, and even then, what could I really say about it? Video game music isn’t some even playing field with linear stylistic evolutions, where everything possesses an equal opportunity for aesthetic value and accessible histories lend themselves to easy commentary. First of all, video game music is a business in which artists can’t simply extend their deadlines until they’re fully satisfied with the end product, and second of all, technology is so intrinsic and varied that comparison becomes hopelessly arbitrary.

But good music is good unconditionally. Technological limitations can do nothing to compromise that; uncertainty obscures only the factors which lead to its creation. With that in mind, I will proceed with my little project here. I intend to listen to quite a lot of video game music attentively and share with you that which appeals to me most. I will provide what little history I can along the way, riddled with inaccuracies and technical fumblings, but in the ends it’s just an excuse to indulge my senses.

So, the first place to start is with that predictably loaded question “what was the first video game with music?” Since there exists no agreement on the definition of music, this question cannot be answered, but we can look at the potential candidates.

Gun Fight (Taito, 1975) had music in a very indisputable sense. I only hesitate to call it the first of its kind because the common consensus fails to confirm it as such; I find it frequently referenced as “one of” the earliest examples, but the sources are never sufficiently decisive. This vague conditional might indicate that no one has really thoroughly investigated the matter, or it might be a consequence of contextual displacement ported to Wikipedia and thence diffused. The latter holds quite a bit of weight; Gun Fight is the earliest game I have personally stumbled upon containing indisputable music, granted some questionable claims to the throne precede it.

But let’s carry on with the indisputables first.

Rally-X (Namco, 1980) was the first game with continuous music which we can indisputably regard as such. You’ll note that the music, whatever you may think of it, is clearly distinguished from the sound effects. The hum of the motor in the background is a distinct entity. Rally-X certainly did not inspire background music in video games–it is not historically significant in that sense–but it was the first game to employ it in such a way that no acceptable definition of music could deny its existence as such.

What’s more significant for my interests is the sound effects. The engine audio is interactive, such that the pitch changes depending on the direction in which the player steers the vehicle. This often clashes with the music, but it possesses the capacity to become a part of the music; one could imagine the player making rhythmic turns in pre-determined directions to harmonize the sound effects with the established musical track, or even producing such an outcome by chance for short periods of time. If we factor into our definition of music a performer’s intent then we are treading very thin ice, and if we do not then we may argue that the familiar blips of Pong (Atari, 1972) possess a musical capacity.

Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) is often distinguished from Rally-X. Wikipedia for instance employs the cop-out of describing the former as the first game with a continuous soundtrack and the latter as the first with continuous background music. This makes sense in so far as the music of Rally-X is distinct from its sound effects and the ‘music’ of Space Invaders is not, but it ignores the complication which the latter brings to light. I mean, it’s really the choice of notes that jeopardizes the classification of Space Invader‘s sound effects as music; it just doesn’t illicit much of an emotional response in the listener–or at least in me. If Tomohiro Nishikado had shamelessly replicated John Williams’ Jaws in this manner I might never have questioned its musical legitimacy even with half as many notes (and even had I never heard the original). When we begin to define music based strictly on aesthetic value, we again tread on thin ice, but perhaps we venture closer to the truth of the matter.

I’m not trying to beat around the bush here; I’m just humoring myself. I can state in plain terms that Gun Fight is the earliest game I know of that included music, Space Invaders took the first step towards incorporating music continuously into gameplay by giving its sound effects distinctly musical properties, and Rally-X made the final step into video game music as we commonly think of it. These ‘firsts’ aren’t that important anyway, as they were dictated by technological developments rather than artistic innovations.

I just find the whole early development of game sound fascinating in its implications for how music ought to be understood. Computer Space (Nutting Associates, 1971), created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and released a year before Pong, was the first coin-op video game designed for mass distribution, and its sounds possess substantially greater aesthetic value than the earliest attempts at video game music. No no, I’m not going to make some silly argument that it constitutes music, but just how important is ‘music’ anyway? Sound is the stimulus. It would take some time for ‘composer’ and ‘sound programmer’ to become two distinct jobs within the video game industry, and the difference between them is not so obvious as one might initially think.