Great Game Music

Extra Credits just released a video about music in games. As is to be expected from those chaps, it was very well thought out and made some good points. The key one being: embrace simplicity.

It was great, though, listening to them reel off a massive list of music they consider to be classics. I think the Americans must have grown up with consoles in the same way my friends and I grew up with PCs. What are the pieces of music I most fondly remember from the 80s? That's easy.

You start HERE with a game from the BBC. Go through Jazz Jackrabbit, hit the 90s with Doom.

What was interesting, though was how much the boys (and girl) at Extra Credits were talking about old themes (Zelda et all) updated to be played by orchsestras.

I hate orchestral music. Years and years of bad hollywood films has made most orchestral themes blend together. They played the Halo theme and I honestly heard nothing to seperate it from the music of films from Johnny Nemonic up to From Paris With Love.

In all fairness, that's not the games fault, it's my own prejudices. It does interest me, though, that what I consider to be a great piece of game music strays so far from what they were talking about. Take the Deus Ex theme synthesised yet modern. Isolated from the Vampire Bloodlines soundtrack beautifully summs up the slightly unnerving new world you step into playing the game.

I also love some updated themes. Take Command and Conqor: Red Alert, A fantastic, thumping rock song. The updated version is even better...

The point about simplicity is a very good one. Blueberry Garden is, by all respects, a pretty bad game but its music is so fucking good it pretty much turns the game into art by itself. And I surely don't need to mention Braid or World of Goo.

To their credit, Extra Credits did mention Portal at the end, which is probably the most iconic bit of game music we've had in the last ten years but other than that, I do love how there is no real overlap between their opinion of iconic game music and mine. Console gamers are from mars, PC gamers are from venus...