VGM Entry 03: The crash of ’83

Posted on August 1, 2012 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 02: Early arcade music

Posted on July 31, 2012 by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 02: Early arcade music
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

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.

VGM Entry 01: Proto-game music

Posted on July 30, 2012 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.