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Video game music is any of the musical pieces or soundtracks from computer and video games.

History

8-bit machines and chip music

At the time video games began to blossom as a form of entertainment in the 1970s, music was stored on physical medium in analog waveforms like compact cassettes and turntables. Such components were expensive and prone to breakage under heavy use making them less than ideal for use in an arcade cabinet. A more affordable method of having music in a video game was to use digital means, where a specific computer chip would change electrical impulses from computer code into analog soundwaves on the fly for output on a speaker. Sound effects for the games were also generated in this fashion.

While this allowed for inclusion of music of arcade games in the 1970s, it was usually monophonic, looped, or used sparingly between stages or at the start of a new game, such as Pac Man, or Pole Position. The decision to include any music into a video game meant that at some point it would have to be transcribed into computer code by a programmer, whether or not the programmer had musical experience. Some music was original, some was public domain music such as folk songs. The popular Atari 2600 home system, for example, was capable of generating only 2 tones, or 'notes,' at a time. Some exceptions, such as arcade games developed by Exidy, took steps toward digitized, or 'sampled' sounds.

This approach in game development carried on into the 1980s. As advances in silicon and cost of technology fell it ushered in a definitive new generation of arcade machines & home consoles. In arcades, machines based on the Motorola 68000 cpu and Yamaha YM chips for sound generators allowed for several more tones or 'channels' of sound, sometimes 8 or more. Home console systems also had a comparable upgrade in sound ability beginning with the Colecovision in 1982 capable of 4 channels. However, more notable was the Japanese release of the Famicom in 1983 which would later be known in the US as the NES in 1985. It was capable of a total of 6 channels, one being capable of simple PCM sampled sound. Also of note was the home computer Commodore 64 released in 1982, which was capable of early forms of filtering effects and different types of waveforms. Its comparatively low cost made it a popular alternative to other home computers, as well as its ability to use a TV for a monitor.

Approach to game music development in this time period usually involved using simple tone generation and/or frequency modulation synthesis to simulate instruments for melodies, and use of a 'noise channel' for simulating percussive noises. Early use of PCM samples in this era was limited to sound bites(Monopoly), or as an alternate for percussion sounds (Super Mario Bros 3). The music on home consoles often had to share the available channels with other sound effects. If a lazer beam was shot by the spaceship, and the lazer used a 1400hz tone, then whichever channel was in use by music would stop playing music and start playing the sound effect.

The mid-to-late 1980s saw a tide of software releases for these platforms that had music developed by people with more musical experience than before. Quality of composition improved noticeably, and evidence of the popularity of music of this time period remains even today. Composers who made a name for themselves with their software include Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda), Koichi Sugiyama (Dragon Quest), Rob Hubbard (Monty On the Run), Hirokazu Tanaka (Metroid and Kid Icarus), Martin Galway (Times of Lore), Hiroshi Miyauchi (Out Run), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Yuzo Koshiro (Ys). Toward the end of the life of the Famicom, some cartridge games were released with additional tone generating chips built into them, further expanding to the number of channels. This demonstrated a more dedicated attention to the sound and music of games as the expansion added to the developer's cost of the cartridge.

The oncoming generation of Arcade, home consoles, and home computers would reshape the approach to music in videogames.

Early Digital Synthesis and Sampling of 1980s and 1990s

Amiga 1000.jpg featured digitized sound in 1985]]

The first home computer to make use of digital signal processing in the form of sampling was the Commodore Amiga in 1985. The computer's sound chip initially featured four independent 8-bit wide digital-to-analog converters. Instead of simply generating a waveform that sounded like a simplistic "beep", such as FM synthesis, this allowed short samples of pre-recorded soundwaves to be played back through the computer's sound chip from memory. It allowed a developer to take a 'sample' of a real instrument or sound they wanted at a significantly higher quality and fidelity than was previously available or would come to be available on home computing for several years. This was an early development example of what would later be called wavetables and soundfonts. For its role in being first and affordable, the Amiga would remain a staple tool of early sequenced music composing, especially in Europe. The Amiga's main rival, the Atari ST, used the Yamaha YM2149 programmable sound generator (PSG), which was limited compared to the Commodore 64's SID chip and thus digitized sound was heard on Atari ST only through certain programming tricks that consumed processor time making it impractical for games. Since it had in-built midi ports, the Atari ST was used by many professional musicians as a MIDI programming device.

IBM PC clones in 1985 would not see any significant development in multimedia abilities for a few more years, and sampling would not become popular in other video game systems for several years. Though sampling had the potential to produce much more realistic sounds, each sample required much more data in memory. This was at a time when all memory, solid state(cartridge), magnetic(floppy disk) or otherwise was still very costly per kilobyte. Sequenced soundchip generated music on the other hand was generated with a few lines of comparatively simple code and took up far less precious memory.

The previously mentioned hybrid approach (sampled and chip) to music composing in the Third Generation of consoles would continue into the Fourth Generation, or 16-bit era, of home game consoles with the Sega Mega Drive in 1988. The Mega Drive, (Sega Genesis in the US) sported advanced graphics over the NES and improved sound synthesis, but largely held the same approach to sound design. 10 channels of total tones with one for PCM samples were available in stereo instead of the NES's 6 channels in mono. As before, often times it would be used for percussion samples, or 'drum kits' (Sonic the Hedgehog 3). The 16-bit which referred to the CPU should not be confused with 16-bit sound samples. The Genesis did not support 16-bit sampled sounds. The sound system would still be considered rather limiting to most musicians & it forced much more imaginative use of the FM synthesizer to create an enjoyable listening experience.

As cost of magnetic memory declined in the form of diskettes, the evolution of video game music on the Amiga (and game music development in general) shifted to sampling in some form. It took some years before Amiga game designers learned to wholly utilize digitized sound effects in music (an early exception case was the title music of text adventure game The Pawn, 1986). Also, by this time computer & game music had already begun to form its own identity, and thus many music makers intentionally tried to produce music that sounded like what was heard on the Commodore 64, which resulted in the chiptune genre.

The release of a freely distributed program named Sound Tracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987 started the era of MOD-format which made it easy for anyone to produce music based on digitized samples. MOD-files were made with programs called "trackers" after Obarski's Sound Tracker. This MOD/tracker -tradition continued with PC computers in 1990s. Good examples of Amiga games using digitized instrument samples include David Whittaker's soundtrack for Shadow of the Beast, Chris Hülsbeck's soundtrack for Turrican 2 and Matt Furniss's tunes for Laser Squad. Richard Joseph also composed some theme songs featuring vocals and lyrics for games by Sensible Software most famous being Cannon Fodder (1992) with a song "War Has Never Been So Much Fun" and Sensible World of Soccer (1994) with a song "Goal Scoring Superstar Hero." These songs used long vocal samples.

Similar to the Amiga, this approach to sound & music developments in arcades began to appear in certain specialised Arcade system board revisions. In 1991 Games like Street Fighter II on the CPS-1 used voice samples extensively along with sound effects and percussion. Neo Geo's MVS system also carried powerful sound development which often included surround sound.

The evolution also carried into home console video games, most notably with the release of the Super Famicom in 1990, and SNES in 1991. This home console system sported a specialised custom Sony chip for both the sound generation and for special hardware DSP. It was capable of 8 channels of sampled sounds at up to 16-bit resolution, possessed an impressive selection of DSP effects including a type of ADSR seen usually in high end synthesizers of the time period, and full stereo sound. This allowed experimentation with applied acoustics in video games, such as musical acoustics (early games like Castlevania IV, F-Zero, Final Fantasy IV, Gradius III, and later games Chrono Trigger), directional (Star Fox) & spatial acoustics (Dolby Pro-Logic was used in some games, like King Arthur's World & Jurassic Park), as well as environmental and architectural acoustics ( A Link to the Past, Secret of Evermore). Many games also made heavy use of the high quality sample playback capabilities (Super Star Wars, Tales of phantasia). The only real limitation to this powerful setup was the still costly solid state memory.

Other consoles of the generation could boast similar abilities. The Neo-Geo home system was capable of powerful sample processing, but was several times the cost of a SNES. The Sega CD upgrade to the Genesis added multiple PCM channels, but few titles used this feature and instead simply streamed music off the CD from a red-booked format. Neither saw the circulation of the SNES.

Popularity of the SNES and its software remained limited to regions where NTSC television was the broadcast standard. Partly because of the difference in frame rates of PAL broadcast equipment, many titles released were never re-designed to play appropriately and ran much slower than originally intended, or were simply never released. This represented a divergence in popular video game music between PAL & NTSC countries that still shows to this day. This divergence would be lessened as the Fifth Generation of home consoles launched globally, and as Commodore began to take a backseat to general purpose PCs and Macs.

Though the Sega-Cd, and to a greater extent the PC Engine in Japan, would give us a preview of the direction video game music would take in streaming music, the use of both sampled and sequenced music continues in game consoles even today. The huge storage benefit of optical media would be coupled with progressively more powerful audio generation hardware and higher quality samples in the Fifth Generation. In 1994, the PlayStation with a cd-rom drive supported 24-channels of 16-bit samples of up to 44.1khz sample rate, equal to cd audio quality. It also sported a few hardware DSP effects like reverb. Many Squaresoft titles continued to use sequenced music, such as Final Fantasy 7, Legend of Mana, and Final Fantasy Tactics. The Sega Saturn also with a cd drive supported 32 Channels of PCM at the same resolution as the PSX. In 1996 the N64, still using a solid state cartridge, actually supported an intergated and scalable sound system that was potentially capable of 100 channels of PCM, and an improved sample rate of 48khz. Games for the N64, because of the cost of the solid state memory, typically had samples of lesser quality than the other two however, and music tended to be simpler in construct.

The more dominant approach for games based on CDs, however, was shifting toward streaming audio.

Pre-recorded & streaming music into the modern era

Taking entirely pre-recorded music had many advantages over sequencing for sound quality. You could use whatever number of instruments you wanted of whatever type in studio production and simply record one track to be played back during the game. Quality was only limited by the effort put into mastering the track itself. Memory space costs that was previously a concern was somewhat addressed with optical media becoming the dominant media for software games. CD quality audio allowed for music and voice that had the potential to be truly indistinguishable from any other source or genre of music.

In the same timeframe of late 80s to mid 90s, the sampling approach had skipped over PC games. Early PC gaming was limited to a 1-bit PC Speaker, leftover legacy from an IBM clone's standard and was poor for generating complex sounds. Expansion cards allowed for FM synthesis, such as the AdLib sound card. Midi sequencing was used by the game developers to drive the FM synthesis (Doom). A typical PC lacked the specialised computing power to deal with sampling play back, or a way to output it. Rather than the game developer do their own sampling, wavetable sequencing became a popular alternative. A wavetable with samples pre-made and conforming to General Midi would be installed on a sound card either by design, or by addition of a daughter board. Quality of these wavetable samples had the tendency to range wildly from on manufacturer to the next, but Roland's product were used as a standard until the release of Creative's Sound Blaster in 1989. The Sound Blaster represented an affordable catch-all solution for PC users to have access to sound features. It included a joystick port, midi support using AdLib FM synthesis compatibility, a standardised port for daughter cards for their own Wave Blaster and for other companies' products, and 8-bit 22.05khz (later 44.1khz) digital audio recording and playback of a single stereo channel. This still did not result in wide use of sampling for PC games because of the inability to play more than one sample at a time. Sequenced music would continue on PCs until mid 90s as CD-ROMs became a more common feature of PCs and game software, as well as a general increase in computing power. This gave developers the memory space to use streaming for their soundtracks.

In arcades, most people likely heard their first example of a sound stream when they walked by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet, which played back an edited recording of the cartoon show's opening music. Simple streaming in fourth generation home video games and PCs were limited to playing a red-booked audio track off a cd while the game was in play (Sonic CD). However, there were several disadvantages of regular cd-audio. Optical drive technology was still limited in spindle speed, so playing an audio track from the game cd meant that the system couldn't access data again until it stopped the track from playing. Looping, the most common form of game music, was also problem as when the laser reached the end of a track, it had to move itself back to the beginning to start reading again causing an audible gap in playback.

To address these drawbacks, some PC game developers designed their own container formats in house, for each application in some cases, to stream compressed audio. This would cut back on memory used for music on the CD, allowed for much lower latency and seek time when finding and starting to play music, and also allowed for much smoother looping due to being able to buffer the data. A minor drawback was that use of compressed audio meant it had to be de-compressed which put load on the CPU of a system. As computing power increased, this load became minimal, and in some cases dedicated chips in a computer (such as a sound card) would actually handle all the decompressing.

Fifth generation home console systems also developed specialised streaming formats & containers for compressed audio playback. Sony would call theirs yellow book & offer the standard to other companies. Games would take full advantage of this ability, sometimes with highly praised results (Castlevania: Symphony of the night). Games ported from arcade machines, which continued to use FM synthesis, often saw superior pre-recorded music streams on their home console counterparts(Street Fighter Alpha 2). Even though the game systems were capable of "cd quality" sound, these compressed audio tracks were not truly "cd quality." Many of them had lower sampling rates, but not so significant that most consumers would notice. Some games continued to use full redbook cd audio for their soundtracks(wipeout, wipeout xl, & wipeout 3) and could even be played in a standard cd player.

This overall freedom offered to music composers gave video game music the equal footing with other popular music it had lacked. A musician could now, with no need to learn about programming or the game architecture itself, independently produce the music to their satisfaction. This flexibility would be exercised as popular mainstream musicians would be using their talents for video games specifically. An early example would be Way of the Warrior on the 3DO, with music by White Zombie. A more well known example would be Trent Reznor's score for Quake.

An alternate approach, as with the TMNT arcade, was to take pre-existing music not written exclusively for the game and use it in the game. The X-wing and Tie Fighter series, and X-wing Vs Tiefighter, took music composed by John Williams for the Star Wars movies of 10 years before, and used it for the game soundtracks.

Both using new music streams made specifically for the game, and using previously released/recorded music streams are common approaches for developing sound tracks to this day. It is common for X-games sports based video games to come with some popular artists recent releases (SSX, Tony Hawk, Initial D), as well as any game with heavy cultural demographic theme that has tie in to music(Need For Speed: Underground, Grand Theft Auto). Sometimes a hybrid of the two are used, such as in Dance Dance Revolution.

Sequencing samples continues to be use in modern gaming for many applications, mostly RPGs. Sometimes a cross between sequencing samples, and streaming music is used. Games such as Republic: The Revolution (music composed by James Hannigan) and Command & Conquer: Generals (music composed by William Brown) have utilised sophisticated systems governing the flow of incidental music by stringing together short phrases based on the action on screen and the player's most recent choices. Other games would dynamically mix the sound on the game based on cues of the game environment. In a recent game, if your snowboarder in SSX took to the air after jumping off a ramp, the music would soften or even muffle a bit, and the ambient noise of wind and air blowing would become louder to emphasize the sensation of being airborne. When you land, the music would resume regular playback until its next 'cue'.

Personalised Soundtracks in the modern era

Being able to play one's own music during a game in the past usually meant turning down the game and using an alternate music player. Some early exceptions were possible on PC/Windows gaming where you could independently turn down the in-game music and then have a music playing program running in the background.

Some PlayStation games supported this by swapping the game cd with a music cd, though when the game needed data, you had to swap the cds again.

It wasn't until the Xbox in the sixth generation of home consoles came and its ability to copy music from a cd onto its internal hardrive allowed gamers to utilise their own music more seamlessly with gameplay than ever before. The feature, called Custom Soundtrack, had to be enables by the game developer. This feature carried over into the seventh generation with the Xbox 360.

It is expected the PlayStation 3 will also support a version of this feature.

Current Application and Future Developments

The Xbox 360 wields Dolby Digital support, sampling and playback rate of 16-bit @ 48khz, hardware codec streaming, and potential of 256 audio simlutaneous channels. While powerful and flexible, none of these features represent any major change in how game music is made from the last generation of console systems. PCs continue to rely on 3rd party devices for in game sound reproduction, and Soundblaster despite being largely the only major player in the entertainment audio expansion card business continues to advance its product development at a significant pace.

Future technology, while also powerful, does not represent any fundamental shift in video game music creation either. The PlayStation 3 will handle multiple types of surround sound technology, including Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD. The Nintendo Wii will share many audio components with the Gamecube from the previous generation, including Dolby Pro Logic II. These features are extensions of technology already currently in use.

The game developer of today has many choices on how to develop music. More likely, changes in video game music creation will have very little to do with technology and more to do with other factors of game development as a business whole. As sales of video game music separate from the game itself became marketable in the west(compared to Japan where game music CDs had been selling for years), business elements also wield a level of influence that it had little before. Music from outside the game developer's immediate employement, such as music composers and pop artists, have been contracted to produce game music just as they would for a theatrical movie. Many other factors have growing influence, such as editing for content, politics on some level of the development, executive input and other elements.

Game music as a genre

Many of the games made for the Nintendo Entertainment System and other early game systems featured a similar style of music which may come closest to being described as the "video game genre" in terms of musical composition, as opposed to simply "video game music" for being in a video game or being played on a video game console. Some compositional features of this genre continue to influence certain music today, though, game soundtracks currently tend to emulate movie soundtracks more-so than this classic genre. This genre's compositional elements may have developed due to technological restraints. Features of this genre include:
  • Songs almost always have main sections or "verse sections" consisting of chord progressions of four or more chords (similar to much of J-Pop and 1980's Western Pop), as opposed to the two chord progressions found in most Western Pop verses. The "chorus" of the songs also often contain four or more different chords in their chord progressions. Often many songs feature a chord progression which is extremely popular in J-Pop, which (in the key of C) could be given as: F minor, C minor, G major, C minor, with C major quickly inserted before the series repeats again. Overall, there would be generally a higher number of sections of a song than a comparable pop song, as this helps to reduce the repetitive aspect of the music, which was generally played as a continuous loop. This also sets it apart from even J-Pop music or most other forms of popular music.
  • Songs feature a heavy amount of synchronization between instruments, in a way that would be difficult for a human to play. For example, although the tones featured in NES music can be thought of emulating a traditional four piece rock band (triangle wave used as a bass, two pulse waves analogous to two guitars, and an affected white noise channel used for drums), and although video game music was influenced by rock or pop music at the time, composers would often go out of their way to compose complex and rapid sequences of notes. That has been compared to music composition during the baroque period, where it is believed that composers compensated for instruments such as the harpsichord (which do not allow for musical expression based on the volume of the sound) by focusing more on musical embellishments. Composers were also limited in terms of polyphony, or the amount of notes that can be played at once. Only three notes can be played at once on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A great deal of effort was put into creating the illusion that more notes are playing. As of the late 1990s, musical groups covering these melodies have sprung up. One such group is The Minibosses, who attempt to emulate these melodies as closely as possible using real instruments. Another such group is The NESkimos, who opt to explore these songs artistically, and create entirely new songs out of them.
  • The bassline of a large percentage of tunes during the 8-bit period consisted of notes played in the rhythm of a quarter note followed immediately by two eighth notes on most beats. The particular note played would often be the root of the chord.

Video Game Music outside of Video Games

Appreciation for video game music, particularly music from the Third & Fourth generation of home video game console, continues today in very strong representation in both fans and composers alike, even absent the presence of a Video Game. Melodies and themes from 20 years ago continue to be re-used in newer generations of video games. Themes from the original Metroid by Hirozaku Tanaka can still be heard in Metroid games from today as arranged by Kenj Yamamoto.

Video game music soundtracks have been sold separately on CD in Japan far sooner than anything seen in other countries. Interpretive albums or re-mixes, and live perfomances were also common variations to original soundtracks or OST. Koichi Sugiyama was an early figure in this practice, and following the release of the Dragon Quest game in 1986, a live performance cd of his compositions was released & performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra( then later by other groups including the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and NHK Symphony). Yuzo Koshiro, another early figure, released a live performance of the Actraiser soundtrack. Koshiro's compositions for Ys, along with Mieko Ishikawa's and Hideya Nagata's, would have such long lasting impact that Ys music cds outnumber all other game-type music cds in number of releases.{fact}

Like animé soundtracks, these soundtracks and even sheet music books were usually marketed exclusively in Japan. Therefore, interested non-Japanese gamers have to import the soundtracks and/or sheet music books through on or offline firms specifically dedicated to video game soundtrack imports. This has been somewhat less of an issue more recently as domestic publishers of anime and videogames have been producing western equivalent versions of the OSTs for sale in UK and US, but only for the most popular titles in most cases.

Other original composers of the lasting themes from this time have gone on to manage symphonic concert performances to the public exhibiting their work in the games. Koichi Sugiyama was once again the first in this practice in 1987 with his "Family Classic Concert" and has continued concert performances almost anually. In 1991 he also formed a series called Orchestral Game Concerts, notable for featuring other talented game composers such as Yoko Kanno(Nobunaga's Ambition), Nobuo Uematsu(Final Fantasy), Keiichi Suzuki(Mother /Earthbound), and Kentaro Haneda. He even composed a ballet in 1995 for Dragon Quest.

Global popularity of video game music would begin to surge with Squaresoft's success, particularly Chrono Trigger and FF7. Compositions by Nobuo Uematsu with Final Fantasy 4 were arranged into Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon, a live performance by string musicians with strong celtic influence recorded in Ireland. The Love Theme from the same game has been used as an instructional piece of music in Japanese schools.

On November 17, 2003, Square Enix launched the Final Fantasy Radio on America Online. The radio station has initially featured complete tracks from Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XI: Rise of Zilart and samplings from Final Fantasy VII through Final Fantasy X.

The first Final Fantasy concert in the United States was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, on May 10, 2004. All seats at the concert were sold out in a single day. "Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy" followed & was performed at various cities across the United States.

On July 6, 2005, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra also held a "Video Games Live" concert at the Hollywood Bowl. This concert featured a variety of video game music, ranging from Pong to Halo 2. It also incorporated real-time video feeds that were in sync with the music, as well as laser and light special effects. Other notable examples of video game music outside of games are listed in the timeline in this article.

Fan culture

Additional to these professional deviations, a huge network of English speaking fandom has sprung up with the help of emulators and the internet in recent years. Consumption of mostly classic video game music branched off from popular system emulation software. As an emulator is a piece of software that allows behavior of certain hardware in a contained environment, separate software developed to only emulate the sound chip from the video game system. One would conceivably then obtain an image of an original game ROM and feed it to this specialised emulator. It became possible to hear NES music virtually the same as it was heard on an actual NES sound chip even if you didn't have access to an NES.

Similar sound chip emulators would develop both as stand alone media players, and as plugins for popular media players like Winamp. Other systems followed with emulation, including Genesis, and even PlayStation. Website communities sprung up, and archives which contain partial ROM images of the sound information of a game also became popular. Each system emulated developed a specialised format such as NSF, GBS, SID, HES, VGM, SPC, PSF, PSF2, and others. This is the closest most people come to hearing the music as it was played as much as 20 years ago on its original game console if they do not/did not own the console.

A fan culture developed in the 90s of transcribing video game music into a MIDI standard of some kind. This allowed fans who, lacking any immediate musical performance abilitty but possessed some computer skill, to take early sound chip based music and re imagine it with a variety of sampled instruments that the General MIDI standard afforded. More than a few archives of such works can be found today and have extended into other MIDI standards.

Fan performances have also gained wide notoriety, ranging from concerts to remixing the original music themes. A rock group called Minibosses was one of the earliest to gain traction online with their downloadable mp3s of performances, as well as offer cds. An a capella music group from the University of Wisconsin known as Redefined, who performed (and acted) an a capella medley of songs from popular Nintendo games including Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Mortal Kombat, and The Legend of Zelda. A video clip of the entire performance was widely circulated on the Internet in 2005. * Other examples are listed below.

Among the most visible to fans of game music are remix communities where recreational musicians, djs, and other music talent produce re-arranged or remixed versions of tunes, and then share them for download in some compressed streaming format. Production values vary from artist to artist, from single instrument solo, to massive multi controller device soundbanks. Some of these artists have even gone on to received liscenced support from the game publisher to publish their own work. Others may simply provide a CD of their work to those who ask.

Even more interesting to some are the fan communities that base themselves around writing remixed or even new music using the very same sound chips from the classic systems themselves. Sometimes an emulator is used to generate the chip's sounds when the actual chip is not present. This is widely known as Chip Tune and is a very comparable to the use of an analog synthesizer in a music studio. Many times the compsoer choosing this format either has a specific familiarity with the technology being used, or is looking for a challenge in making an enjoyable music experience from a comparably simple musical tool.

Video game music timeline

Video games noted for their music

See following:

Popular sound formats by system

Note that these are named for file extensions given to music files extracted from games using either specialized software tools, or using emulators. An exception is MOD, which is a format used by various tracker programs on Amiga and PC (old Amiga MODs can be played with ordinary PC MOD-players). Sound emulation is seldom 100% accurate. Emulation gives a good picture of what those machines actually sound like but occasionally there may be notable differences between emulated and authentic sound.

Related music genres

See also

External links

Articles, essays and news about video game music

Composer-related links

Internet radio featuring game music

  • Video Game Scores — The greatest video game music from the greatest modern video games
  • VGDJ — The Official Podcast of OverClocked ReMix
  • VGAmp — VGM Radio with over 6000 songs utilizing an automated request system in full 128kb Stereo MP3.
  • Kohina — over 53 hours of handpicked oldschool game/demo music radio, recorded from audio hardware. (three 112 kbit/s ogg streams and one 56 kbit/s mp3 stream).
  • streamingsoundtracks
  • VGmusic Radio
  • GamingFM
  • SegaSonic Radio - Sonic the Hedgehog music.
Remixes

Sources of video game music

Dedicated to particular series

Emulator format music

General archives

Performers
  • The Advantage - California-based NES cover band.
  • Year 200X - Heavy Metal NES cover band from Lansing, MI.
  • Minibosses - NES progressive/rock cover band based in Phoenix, Arizona
  • Armcannon - Progressive metal styled video game cover band from Western New York.
  • Crow's Claw - Japanese hard rock band that makes original music in addition to remixes of music from Final Fantasy games.
  • David Hasselhoff Big Band - A Finnish demoscene band covering various video game songs.
  • Game Music Themes - Videos of performances and sheet music of video game music played on piano.
  • Temp Sound Solutions - one man band from Baltimore, Maryland that has made 5 cover cd's.
  • Neskimos - A hard rock band that remixes video game music
  • The OneUps - A band that does remixes to all sorts of video game music. Remixes include hard rock, jazz, piano, Christmas tunes, easy-listening, and everything in between
  • Press Play On Tape - A Danish band covering Commodore 64 game songs
  • The Video Game Pianist - Classical piano treatment of several classics
  • VGPiano - A group of individuals who perform video game music on the piano.
  • Megadriver - Brazilian Heavy Metal band performing mainly Mega Drive/Genesis music.
  • Chromelodeon AKA Sprite Slowdown - Philadelphia based progressive rock band covering a series of platform games, including most of Ninja Gaiden 2.

Computer and video game music | Computer game design

tietokonepelien musiikki | Musique de jeu vidéo | ゲームミュージック | Datorspelsmusik

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Computer and video game music".

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