The first time I ever saw a video-game sound track for sale was about six years ago. I was perusing through CDs at a Recycled Records store, vainly searching for an obscure King Missile album. Since most of King Missile's output can best be described as bizarre novelty songs, the album didn't neatly fit into any of the available genres. As I searched through the vast, uncategorized slush pile, I came upon The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was a two-track single, with music taken directly from the Nintendo 64 game.
Talk about limited mass-market appeal! Who would ever buy music from a video game? Well, $9.99 later, I had my answer, along with my new Zelda CD. But surely, there weren't enough of us fan-boy, game dorks to make the production of such a sound track profitable. I mean, who else cares about video-game music?
Designers, for one. For the last 20 years, game designers have struggled to enhance the playing experience with primitive bleeps and bloops masquerading as music. Koji Kondo's dynamic score for the original 1985 Super Mario Bros. actually changed according to what events and places were seen on the screen. When Mario ducked into a pipe, the music changed. When a star made Mario invincible, the music changed. And when that invincibility star waned at the worst possible moment and Mario died, a quick requiem played, a melody now burned into the consciousness of a generation of gamers.
But it was still just video-game music, its simplicity a result of the restrictions of the audio technology of the time. It would be years before advances in hardware would win the attention of the music industry, though there were some early exceptions.
Most notable among these is Michael Jackson's brief foray into the land of pixels. Before the end of his reign as King of Pop, Jackson contributed his likeness and music to the Sega Genesis game, Moonwalker. The game featured synthesized versions of Jackson hits like "Beat It," and "Billie Jean," as Jacko, decked out in his "Smooth Criminal" duds, moonwalked from level to level, searching for kidnapped children. That's right. Sometime in the coming weeks, we'll undoubtedly see that Sega game cartridge introduced into evidence.
When the first Sony PlayStation was released in 1994, in addition to playing games, it also could play CDs. This meant 24-channel, digital-quality, stereo sound. Suddenly, the music in video games could sound as good as in any other medium. This era—which also saw the invention of the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, 3DO and Atari Jaguar—was the beginning of massive growth in the video-game industry, until today, when it generated $10.3 billion in U.S. sales in 2002, according to a recent study by the NPD Group, a market research firm.
As the medium's popularity grew, big-name musical talent started to contribute to the virtual adventures.
Electronic Arts' introduced its EA Trax system in 2002, letting players customize their games from a selection of modern music—including some tracks not yet released on CD. The feature is a success, and the recently released NBA Street Vol. 3 features music from the Beastie Boys. "Beastie Boys are among the most influential artists of all time," said Steve Schnur, EA's worldwide executive of music, in a statement at the time, "and their participation in NBA Street Vol. 3 represents an unprecedented new coming-together of hip-hop, basketball and video-game culture." More than a dozen other hip-hop and rap artists account for the remainder of the sound track.
Now, slowly but steadily, video-game music is earning widespread respect, and with that respect comes an onslaught of greater talent with an interest in composing music for games. The upcoming Majesco title, Advent Rising, will feature a completely original score by a 70-piece orchestra, conducted by Emmy-winner Mark Watters and engineered by Grammy-winner Armin Steiner, whose recent Hollywood credits include work on Finding Nemo, Seabiscuit and The Matrix films.
"Our approach with Advent Rising was to create a game-play experience similar to that of an epic film," says Ken Gold, Majesco's marketing vice president. "Creating a powerful sound track was a key component to evoking a higher level of player emotion and allowing the player to feel completely immersed in the Advent universe while playing the game."
Video games inherently allow an audience to experience music in a completely different way. Rather than simply being heard passively, video-game music, like the fantastic events on screen, is actively experienced by players. This opens up new and exciting possibilities that entice people like Gregor Narholz, a composer whose music has been used in shows like The X-Files and films like The Cable Guy, and whose latest project is the sound track to Activision's X-Men Legends II.
"The futuristic, high-adrenaline adventures of the X-Men create a prolific playground for my imagination and music," said Narholz in a statement. "I am looking forward to creating unique, modular compositions to underscore this exciting new brand of interactive production."
In 2000, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences decided interactive games could compete in the Grammy awards. They're now considering creating an award category specifically for video-game sound tracks. Considering the impressive variety of artists contributing to the huge sound tracks of games like Tony Hawk's Underground and Grand Theft Auto, this seems long overdue. We're even beginning to see some cases where songs from big-name artists appear exclusively in video games, as with Snoop Dogg's cover of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm" in EA's Need for Speed Underground 2.
Bringing together Jim Morrison's vocals, the Doors' music and Snoop Dogg's energy was descibed as "revolutionary" by Schnur. "And if you want to hear the song ... forget radio, forget CDs—it's only in the game."
Cynics could say it's all about the money, that no legitimate artist has anything beyond a monetary interest in video games, and that producing music for the medium is only a means of selling out, but the true culprit for this multimedia fusion is more likely something far less sinister. When I went back stage to interview Story of the Year at the Nintendo Fusion Tour—a series of concerts held to promote upcoming Nintendo releases—I found the band playing on their GameCube, and I doubt it was simply because they were contractually bound to do so. A lot of these musicians are as much fan-boy, game dorks as the rest of us. Do you think rapper and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit is on the cover of NFL Street 2 because he regularly plays football in grungy parking lots? Not likely, but I bet he regularly plays PlayStation 2. The first recorded work in years to come from reclusive Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose is his voice-over work as a San Andreas DJ in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Granted, the limited instrumental score for The Legend of Zelda, even in retrospect, only appeals to a handful of the most hard-core gamers, but times have quickly changed. Who knows? In the next few years, we may see big hits from recording artists who appear exclusively on PlayStation 3 games. And when people who don't even play video games have the sound track to Grand Theft Auto 6 in their CD players because it's the exclusive source of the latest Eminem single, then we'll know the fusion is complete.