J-Pop Write-Up

So, I love video game music.

I love it so much that today I’m going to talk only about video game music, specifically, about the game music I remember growing up in the ’90s.

I remember opening up my very first video console, Sega Genesis, one year around Christmas, and popping in my Sonic 2 cartridge with squeals of anticipation. And then, the bright blue streak of Sonic himself, suggesting the fun that would ensue! “Sega!!”

Something about that time was so magical for me. Maybe it was the bright, flashing colors that piqued my initial interest, but as I steadily found my 6-year-old self enraptured by the music in games for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. It wasn’t until years later when I dumpster dived an old Nintendo that I was introduced to some of the 8-bit gems from that era. But the 16-bit era… that was when I came onboard. Those two-minute songs, repeating ad nauseam, dug to my brain; the sunny synths and sampled drum sets… Over and over…

Looking back on it, my sharp and unfortunately steep decline into childhood video game addiction may have been fueled by many things: the ennui of growing up in suburban Detroit, lack of physical exercise (I tried T-ball and it did not work for me), social pressures… But, for me, video game music was what really sealed the deal. Video game music was my companion to the experience of gaming, a way to connect the technical to the emotional side of the game. For example, what’s Tetris without the delightful Russian “Korobeiniki” to bring with it a sense of comrade-ery and plodding productivity? Or what about that quirky hemiola in the Super Mario Bros. Theme? Like film and television before games, music has become as pivotal a component to the experience of the medium as graphics or design.

But just as graphics and design have been continually updated, so too has music been pushed to up-the-ante. Today’s games feature state-of-the-art sound effects and lush, fully-orchestrated musical scores that would make the efforts of early video game composers like Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu seem like child’s play. This changed happened really quickly; in less than 20 years. Video games have quickly reached the audial standards of the film and television industries and may even surpass them.

What this leads to is music that is so much more self-conscious than it was a few decades ago. Commercially-produced video game music today is made with different standards in mind, and highly formalized to meet certain conventions. In 1996, Final Fantasy VI’s integrative “Aria di Mezzo Carattere”, “sung” by synthesizer (literally), by game character, Celes (figuratively), and directed by the player (the player must enter lyrics correctly to receive in-game rewards), opened up new avenues for musical experience in gaming. Today, these kinds of musical experiences, like the interweaving of music into the narrative, have become a hallmark of entire genres of video games: rhythm-based games, music management games (or ‘raising sims’), among others.

But, I guess I just have a hankering for those old 16-bit days. Of course, Uematsu must have had some commercial intentions behind his compositions, but something about the lower budget and smaller production teams of those days was different than the musical creative environment in today’s game industry. For a brief time, different aspects of development converged synergistically to produce music that was uninhibitedly simple, repetitive and not concerned with the ears of the population at-large. But that has been largely abandoned in the corporatized gaming world of the past decade. Well, I don’t mean to say that all is lost, and that no one out there is making music that is just as creative and evocative, but, that, as opposed to in the ’80s and ’90s, when video game composers could feel that they were the trailblazers, today’s game composers have to stand in opposition to the normative conventions promoted by higher-budget games to do anything different. It feels like the avant-garde has to be decidedly avant-garde, but I want young video game composers today to create the music that they feel called to create, not music that fits neatly into industry standards.

Well, anyway, for now I can always dust off my old Genesis, blow out the cartridge a few times and get more of that synth-poppy “Emerald Hill Zone” goodness. I’ll still play my high-budget jRPGs… but muted, with the Chrono Trigger OST on repeat.