jungle hunt | Through the Shattered Lens

VGM Entry 07: Other chip options
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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 02: Early arcade music
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Few early games had music mainly because they were better off without it. The music of Rally-X was certainly an enhancement to the gameplay, but if it really showcases the best technology of the day then it’s easy to understand why most programmers didn’t bother. New technology came fast though, and Rally-X was hopelessly outdated in a matter of months. Carnival (Sega, 1980) is often credited as the first game to employ any of the new and improved sound chips for continuous music, but this claim amounts to little. All of the arcade developers took advantage of the advancements as quickly as they were able.

That’s why you get games like New Rally-X (Namco, February 1981), released less than a year after the original. Video game music immediately emerged in fully developed form the moment it became an option; it didn’t really take any market research to recognize that this would enhance the product.

From 1981 on, arcade music sounded pretty decent. Certainly a lot of games suffered from bad compositions, but many did try, and the work here becomes a simple matter of listening to everything and picking out the best. Arcade games had a unique advantage in this regard. Being self-contained systems, every new game had the opportunity to employ the newest technology on the market. This was seldom the case with computer games, and never the case on home consoles. A pretty massive disparity in sound quality would continue to distinguish arcade music from all of the competition up through the end of the 1980s, when the arcade began to die out as a viable source of revenue for game producers.

The indisputable king of arcade music was Taito. They backed up their claim to being the first, with Space Invaders in 1978, by maintaining a higher standard of quality than most of the competition. Jungle King (1982) is one of my favorite early examples. Here the music isn’t just a nice added feature; it’s the game’s entire selling point. The player feels compelled to keep moving, driven by a sense of urgency and adventure that would be completely absent otherwise. The sound effects make an effort to acknowledge the music’s dominance, seldom clashing and, with the hero’s footsteps on the rock-dodging stage, even roughly synching up to add another layer of depth to the music.

Jungle King has kind of a funny history. The form you are seeing here never made it far out the door before the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs won a lawsuit for copyright infringement on Tarzan. Having already tossed out a beta version called Jungle Boy, Taito recouped their losses by replacing the Tarzan character with a creepy explorer in a pith helmet and safari outfit and retitled the game Jungle Hunt. Never really satisfied with this conversion, they went back to the drawing board again after the release, replacing the explorer with a pirate. Pirate Pete became the forth and final installment of the game, featuring new graphics and a new soundtrack but the same old mechanics.

Konami may have been Taito’s driving force, persistently one-upping them. Gyruss (Konami, 1983) is a real audio masterpiece. Rally-X and Space Invaders both had tonal sound effects, and in the latter ‘sound effects’ and ‘music’ were one and the same entity. Gyruss might be seen as a sort of climax to this trend of music-sound effects-gameplay synthesis.

J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, might seem like an odd choice at first glance, but it had recently been converted into a rock and roll hit by the U.K. band Sky, so it certainly had some pop culture appeal. The significance here though is how well the game is paced to the music, or vice versa. Enemies appear almost on cue, and every sound effect is perfectly attuned to the background music. Really, to call it ‘background music’ at all does it a disservice. Gyruss has a very distinct song, but though the music and sound effects can be easily separated, in practice they are essentially indistinguishable.

What’s most impressive to me is that I really doubt the synthesis is programmed. It would become common enough in the future to sync up music to game events fluidly (consider the added music layer in Super Mario World when you mount Yoshi) and vice versa (the Guitar Hero series and many other games like it are based around the concept), but that’s all written into the code. In Gyruss the cues are apparent, not encoded reality. It tricks our senses, like a fine painting, and indeed it should be regarded as an interactive audiovisual work of art.