I have to level with you; I listen to video game music. Even I get waylaid into visiting the grocery sometimes, and it’s just not enough to spend my leisure time playing the things and writing for this blog. So I fill the gaps with accoutrements of the medium. This creates problems, however, because it really gets in the way of ice-breaking chitchat.

It’s easy to see where this goes wrong if you imagine that we’re having that conversation. Once we’ve gotten past the what’s-your-job phase, we wander into hobbies. It has become more palatable to bring up video games here as they’ve become more mainstream, so no trouble here. However, the conversation almost inevitably runs aground when we start talking musical tastes and I have to revisit the gaming trough and end up looking more one-dimensional than I really am (cough). It certainly doesn’t help that famous musicians have recently been whining that video games are incapable of teaching you anything valuable about music.

So whenever someone asks me what kind of music I like, I just mumble something about “eclectic obscure stuff,” and try to divert the conversation down a different path. It’s a shame too, because game soundtracks really have a lot to offer; it just seems like so much trouble to describe. If only I had some kind of soapbox so I could explain it once and for all.

Actually, saying that game music is eclectic isn’t just a cop out; it’s actually true. Games have soundtracks in the same sense that movies do. So the music isn’t especially bound by genre, but rather by the game’s themes. A brawler might focus on metal and a puzzle game might lean toward atmospheric techno, but an RPG can be too long and complex for a single genre and will often draw inspiration from as many sources as it has composers. Best of all, all the music in each game is novel composition, so the industry churns out fresh music at an impressive rate.

Image courtesy of XKCD

Depending on your gaming tastes, you can even get a sampling of the music you’d hear on the radio. Ever since Crazy Taxi, games haven’t been shy about licensing music from popular bands. Games are a commodity after all, so publishers don’t really have any reservations about riding the coattails of popular bands. Indeed, some games like Guitar Hero are built entirely around mainstream and independent music, and you can get a quick survey of relevant music of the twentieth century simply by playing.

That’s not to say that game music is derivative, however. In the days predating even Red Book audio, games were limited to whatever chirps and tweets could be produced by a gaming console’s sound chip: technology that wasn’t always up to the spec of a common midi. Some composers tried to wring whatever verisimilitude they could from the hardware (hey, sometimes you get assigned to the Ghostbusters game and you have to shoehorn that theme into 5 channels of square waves), but everyone else was writing original music for the instruments they had. This gave all the music a sort of pseudo-electronica sound that doesn’t really fit into any genre. However, the sound was so distinctive that decades later, musical talents like Bit Shifter are producing chiptunes, a genre of music using whatever instrumentation was available from a given sound chip.

Different chips texture the music differently, and you can tell which console produced a given song from the instrumentation alone. So the same melodies written for different consoles have a distinct musical signature that gives both modern and classic chiptunes a compositional richness you might not expect. Even large scale developers have started appreciating chiptune composition again, and the recent oldschool gaming revival has given us new (if atavistic) games like Mega Man 9, complete with chiptune soundtracks.

Another quality of game music is that the mere fact of being a soundtrack combines with gaming’s legacy of technologically inferior sound hardware to create a culture that shies away from lyrics. If you’ve ever rued the vapid garbage coming out of the lead vocals in an otherwise enjoyable song, you can mostly leave any fear of that behind. When games do make use of human voice, it’s treated as an instrument, with Latin chanting being the closest you’ll come to recognizable language. One caveat though, ending themes have a terrible habit of featuring J-pop that didn’t quite make the cut for wide release.

Regardless of your preference for original chiptunes or licensed mainstream music, or lyrics or none, game music has one indisputable advantage over every other incarnation of the medium: memory. There’s really no other kind of music that ties so tightly to story, both in terms of gaming as a storytelling medium, and in terms of the specific actions you took while playing. For me, the music of Final Fantasy VIII takes me back to undergrad, when the game came out on a Friday and I chewed through it in one marathon session before I had to resume my classes on Monday. It’s like the smell of your grandmother’s cookie recipe; it’s the sort of thing that can effortlessly take you to another time and place.

So game music is far-reaching in its scope, complex, and ties into the memory of things you’ve enjoyed. If that doesn’t sound altogether abhorrent to you, then you might like to know where you can find some. Fortunately, the industry is always happy to do you a favor and take a few of those heavy dollars out of your wallet, and so there are official soundtracks out there for the interested buyer. Be prepared to spend though, because the market isn’t quite ripe for CD releases of game music in the United States (though you can score some of the higher profile releases on iTunes), and importers pay top dollar and pass the lack of savings along to you. You can always try your luck on Ebay, but you know as well as I do that the cheap soundtracks on there are bootlegs. While you’re at it, you might as well try torrents, because if you own the game you already kinda own the soundtrack as well, right?

Yeah well, the legality of intellectual property theft is hazy and tends to favor whichever side has a dozen high-powered lawyers. If you don’t think that side is you, then you may prefer something a little more on the free side. Enter Overclocked Remix, vast internet repository of amateur arranged game music. Although the composers who contribute the 1700 free downloads invariably change the music from the source material (because doing otherwise would lead us back to the theft issue), the arrangements often represent a simple change in instrumentation, leaving the source melody unmodified. If you doubt their credibility, know that they were commissioned to do the soundtrack for the recent Capcom title Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Check them out, you won’t be disappointed.

Whether you end up pursuing original soundtracks or remixes, just do me a favor and bring it up first when we meet. I never quite know how to bring up video game music during small talk.

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