History of Video Game Music

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Video Game Music

Video game music is a genre of music most commonly found in video games but also in concerts and albums dedicated to this style of playing. Video game music has advanced tremendously over the past 40 years since when it first began in the 1970s; it has increased in complexity and has come from being rare to ubiquitous. In many modern video games music is an important element of gameplay in much the same way as in a movie.

Early (First Generation) Video Game Music

First-generation video games (that is, video games that were made in the 1970s or before that) were extremely primitive in terms of sound that was played during the game; this mostly could not be described as music and consisted primarily of sound effects. This was because the primary way of storing music and other audio at the time was on a compact cassette or record. These were relatively fragile and under frequent use these were prone to breaking, such as in an arcade machine and therefore they were generally not used. There were exceptions, however: in the second generation (1980s) a game called Journey was created. This used a cassette player to play music, but was very easy to break and therefore the game was basically a failure. The first videogame to incorporate sound was Pong (made in 1972), a two-player tennis game in which a ‘bleep’ sound could be heard when the ball reached either players’ racket. This was played on the ‘Atari 2600’, capable of playing only two tones simultaneously through the television. The Atari could play many famous arcade video games including Space Invaders, which featured an ominous rumbling rhythm as the enemies slowly descended down upon the main character and a beeping sound whenever one of them was hit. The ‘music’ was only a small part of the gameplay, yet it supplied some important features, adding tension and speeding up as the player was forced to move faster and faster in the game. These sounds were produced digitally; a computer chip converted electrical impulses from the Atari into analog sound waves (ones that relied on the computer code frequency to change) to  be played on the television speaker.

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2nd Generation Video Game Music

The second generation of video games and thus video game music began in the early 1980s. Because many more advanced computer components were now less expensive to fabricate they were integrated into gaming systems. Arcade consoles now used upgraded sound chips similar to the microprocessors used in the Central Processing Unit of some 1980’s computers. This was a massive breakthrough and allowed for eight or more tones to be played simultaneously. The music began being written by people with greater musical experience whereas previously it was often simply written by any computer programmer ...

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