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 Axel Strohm
European Correspondent
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Melodies, Where Have You Gone?

When I look back at the last few years of video gaming, one thing strikes me as often being overlooked. Many games have been missing a solid soundtrack. By "solid," I don't mean some fiddly background songs that get on your nerves after 15 minutes. I mean themes that sneak eerily into your psyche and that will haunt you when you go shopping. That's when you start to whistle a melody without knowing where it's coming from. Your first thought might be, "Hmmm, it's from a movie probably." And most of the time you will be right, because in recent years, musicians in the gaming industry haven't been very inventive when it comes to making good melodies or themes in game soundtracks.

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Cinematic music at its best combined with great melodies: Metal Gear Solid 2.
Before you send me dozens of e-mails with notable exceptions, know that I really am aware that the melodies are coming back--particularly recently. Prior to my time at GameSpot, I composed music for some 16-bit games, so it's not like I'm talking about something I don't know anything about.

The only question I want to raise is: Is it just me or did we have more melodies in games back in the 16-bit or 8-bit days? Even on the C64 you had such great melodies, even though everything was created with oscillators and no real music samples, but still some games had such a motivating soundtrack that you kept whistling the melody while you were playing and trying to get to the next stage. The Amiga and the SNES also saw many splendid soundtracks. Even a Mario Kart game had enormously well-written melodies that simply stuck in your mind forever. Thank god the trend is coming back and that great and especially memorable melodies are coming back into the gaming realm. Look at Metal Gear Solid 2, which picks up on the theme of the PS Metal Gear Solid. Harry Gregson-Williams did the right thing and used the main melody that thousands of gamers are familiar with already, and he simply added in different variations. Games like Final Fantasy X are also doing an enormously good job in the music area. You simply fall in love with the piano theme in the opening scene or even the music during battle scenes. Games like Metropolis Street Racer and GTAIII picked up on the popular car-radio style and both delivered an incredible and diverse experience of that. Other games such as Headhunter, Ecco The Dolphin, or even a cartridge-compressed Conker's Bad Fur Day all delivered memorable melodies that you'll remember for a long time to come.

 
 Do you pay a lot of attention to the music in a game?

Yes, a lot
It just shouldn't get on my nerves
I don't really find music very important
I'm always switching it off anyway

 
In the 32-bit era I was really wondering where all the great game melodies of the 16-bit days had gone and whether they would at some point return at all or if the new cinematic approach wouldn't allow for simple, catchy melodies anymore. Some people say that a soundtrack is great when you don't really notice it, and while I partly agree, I also partly disagree. Personally I think a soundtrack somehow has to catch you, even if you're not really aware of it. I mean, what would a Disney or a Spielberg movie be without memorable melodies? Of course there are always people who don't pay attention to the music at all, but even they will note a good melody because it will make them feel a certain way.

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The Need for Speed series was soon making use of interactive soundtracks.
. Game soundtracks face another challenge, which can be one of the biggest advantages, and that's their interactivity. While movie soundtracks can be planned better because each note can be placed at a defined millisecond creating a specific feeling in a specific moment, the game soundtracks have different challenges. They sort of need to work in any moment, meaning that they have to deal with any action the player might be doing. Let's say you walk down a corridor with calm music and then the door breaks open and you gasp for air because you're shocked by the monster that jumps at you--then the music needs to break in too, so the previous track must be cut in every possible second, which puts a difficult task on the musicians' shoulders. A soundtrack must work in every scene, and it needs to adapt from scene to scene, location to location. Even in a racing game it's possible, which Electronic Arts showed perfectly in Need for Speed III on the PlayStation. The background race music changed depending on which area of the track you were on and whether you were racing at full speed or merely standing still because you had just had a crash. If you accelerated, a faster beat started kicking in, and new bass and melody arrangements supplied fuel for your heated racing action. I didn't notice it at first, and then I realized that my favorite melody was always playing when I was at the final stretch of each lap, regardless of my different lap times. It amazed me because that's a very subtle way to use interactive music that changes according to your actions, and probably very few people have noticed. It was executed enormously well in that game, in my opinion.

Anyway, it's good to see that after a pretty techno-influenced 32-bit era, the melodies are coming back and many of the upcoming games are further proving that. Of course bad soundtracks will continue to exist, but hopefully more developers and publishers will give the music in games the attention it deserves, because it's a major element that influences the mood of a game. After all, Silent Hill 2 wouldn't be half as scary without the music, would it?
 

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