Tim Tse's Blog

Have you ever played video games? Other than the gaming content, have you noticed that you’ve also been exposed to the effects that video game music causes?

Parker Mason from blogcampaigning wrote a blog entry (Games and Music: The Soundtrack of the Game) about video game music. Based on my understanding after reading his blog post, video game music is defined as pieces that loop endlessly without lyrics. If you’re no ordinary gamer, you wouldn’t really pay attention to the music played while you smash on the buttons on your controller.

Mason suggests that video game music from 20-30 years ago were actually purposefully simply written just to ensure that it stuck to people’s brains easily. The first extraordinary example was the music in Space Invaders, where the background music changes accordingly to the level and the status of your spaceship. However, video game music probably didn’t attract gamers due to technological difficulties in creating pleasant tunes.

Have you ever noticed the change in the background music of your favourite Pokemon games?

Nowadays, video game music has evolved from simple MIDI files into better quality documents that support the use of different musical layers and several musical instruments. Video game music has been considered as the “soul” of the game itself. Knowing that that gamers actually notice the background music in games, gaming companies took a huge risk and began selling OSTs (original soundtracks) of their games. This became pretty successful, thus popular games right now oftern launch their own OSTs. Some gaming companies, for instance Square Enix, periodically organizes concerts to showcase their famous pieces. Even though the sales of game music dropped significantly, it has still remained the third bestselling genre.

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