Want a challenge and not nearly enough kudos as a result? Time was, you could be in charge of music of a video game. Game development has seldom been a glamorous job, but the music guy was usually the complete outcast of the group. With a limited budget and limited tools, the ‘sound guy’ was mostly the guy whose band never took off. At best your results would be ‘charming’. On some of those less capable machines, you even had to make a call between sound effects and a soundtrack. However, it was also common for the sound designer to take on other roles in small teams or when they simply didn’t have all that much to do: and these programmer musicians were the inevitable site of significant musical innovation.

One of the most challenging aspects of creating ‘events’, (whether they be visual, story or musical) in a video game is that they have to react to a player who approaches them at their own pace. If a distant explosion is played out, you have to make sure the player sees it. The easiest way of dealing with this is of course to put everything important into ‘cutscenes’, but this as an uninspired, anti-interactive way of telling a story. Other games attempt to draw the player’s attention with positional sound, ‘look there’ shouts and lighting cues. When it comes to music for games, there are an interesting set of issues. Making the soundtrack dynamic makes for an experience that is ‘truer’ to the interactive form. When a player sprints at breakneck speed through a game’s events (either literally, or by skipping stuff like dialogue scenes), music cues constantly overlap. If they move too slowly, you have to have epic, overlong pieces if you want to retain some semblance of artistic integrity.

Some games take the easy way out, and there are plenty of games (sometimes among the best on the market) out there with sparse audio cues with two minute long tracks. For many games, a dynamic soundtrack is far more appropriate, not mention unique to video games. For musicians, the challenge is to not simply make music for films. In the early 90s, ‘Ultima Underworld’ and ‘Monkey Island 2′ found ways of easily transitioning between MIDI tracks. The seamless transition between more complex tracks came in the early noughties, with processes that found common elements in each track to highlight whilst transitioning.

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Computer Games & Software