I’m going to ask a favor of you. Take a couple of seconds to hum the theme from Mario…did you get it? Now do the same for the Legend of Zelda. Good. Now take the last game you played and hum a song from it. Finding it a little more difficult? What if I asked you to hum a diddy from a game you bought a year ago? Could you hum it at all? There’s something about the music from old games that stays with you even years after you played it.
Most games today have fully orchestrated music pieces. A composer writes the music. It is performed by an orchestra and recorded. This recording is then mixed, mastered, and, in it’s final version, placed on the game’s disc. Many of these new scores are beautiful but for some reason still forgettable. So what makes a song memorable? The melody.
The melody is the most important part of a song. It’s the bit you hum; the piece that sticks with you. In the songs you hear on the radio the vocals are the melody. So what makes old videogame music more melodic and therefore easier to remember? Limitations.
It’s not about what you can do, but what you can’t do. Old consoles, because they used cartridges, had very little memory to work with. Recorded audio was far too large to use. Any music or sound effects was rendered by the console and cartridge themselves. Each console had a sound chip that controlled the sounds each console was capable of making. That’s why Atari 2600 music sounds so much different from Sega Genesis music. The cartridge itself contained the “sheet music” telling the console what notes to play.
It’s this limitation that made old game music so memorable. If you can only use four different sounds to make a song then it has to be really good. Especially if the player is expected to listen to it on near infinite repeat for the entirety of the game. A good melody is a good melody despite the instrumentation. As with graphics, music continues to get the inevitable facelift. It’s easy to write complicated musical score with dozens of different instruments being utilized, but when you break them down to bare bones all the magic is lost. The limitations from cartridge days are gone. You can have as many tracks as you want so it’s far less important for it to be catchy.
SNES was the height of chiptune based music. It was somewhere between the harsh beeps and boops of the Atari and the advent of putting games on CDs where recorded tracks could be used. Take one listen to the music from Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, or Donkey Kong and you’ll be forced to agree with me.
So next time you are somehow restricted in whatever talent you wish to pursue don’t let it get you down. Turn that limitation into an advantage. Let it become part of what defines you, what gives you your own unique voice.
Photos Source: Wired
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