The first time video game music made me cry was listening to the ending of Final Fantasy VI on my Genesis. Okay, Final Fantasy VI was only on SNES and this was my American imported Genesis, but you get the point. I believe I was 16 years old. It was 3 am on a school night, and I had finally finished the beast of a game that was 70 hours long. As the credits played and each character’s theme melded into one outro, I lost it. Tears. Down my face. My dad came to use the restroom and peeked in on me. He shook his head in pity. “Joe, it’s just beeps and boops.”
My dad wasn’t entirely wrong. The hardware limitations of days past were insane. The NES could only play 5 channels of sound at once; 2 of those being pulse waves, 1 triangle, 1 noise channel, and finally 1 sample channel. If you were a musician on the NES, you were forced to be creative with crumbs. Picture Michelangelo with crayons and a shattered straight edge.
Except those crumbs? Michelangelo made Mama Mia out of crumbs. Listen to Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. theme. Those 23 seconds of melody do more work than most other songs. It’s got driving beats that matched Mario’s every move on screen. It was catchy as hell; my mother would hum it while doing dishes. “That stupid Mario song is stuck in my head again.” She sang. Immediately sending lasers from her eyes.
Growing up I would play Tetris on my Game Boy beneath the sheets with nothing but moonlight to see by, because I was too cheap to buy the flashlight attachement they sold at Toys”R”Us. Some random Russian folk song- what was it called?- stuck in my head. For some reason that song connected with the game in my neurons. To this day if I hear that song I will instantaneously make sweeping motions with my hands.
I popped in Mega Man 2 for the first time and felt like I could understand what these idiots were yammering about. Each individual level had a theme that musically represented the traits of each Robot Master. Industrial sounding drums for Metal Man. Splashing sound effects for Bubble Man. Nearly folk music for Wood Man. But Dr. Wily’s castle level… man, did it blow my 11-year-old mind. An aggressive rock influenced level theme that sold me on not only the final boss fight, but an entire science fiction universe. I recorded it onto my tape player ( yes with the actual boom box microphone pressed against the television ) and received the worst sounding tape that I would listen to secretly in math class. My teacher, Mrs. Henderson caught me rocking out air solos to what sounded like white noise and sent a note home to my parents threatening my childish “behaviour”.
Moving from an 8-bit Nintendo to a 16-bit SNES was like putting in your first pair of glasses. Crystalline sound, rich, detailed. Sony designed the Super Nintendo’s sound chip – yes THAT Sony – before they stole Mario and made the PlayStation. However, during this time Nintendo allowed for musicians to have access to 8 channels of sound with reverb built in. Game audio entered a renaissance period and Nobuo Uematsu was there to sweep us all off of our feet.
Final Fantasy IV for Super Nintendo was a masterclass in musical storytelling. Characters had themes that would change as their personality grew throughout the story. Motifs that would play during certain emotional scenes and evolve as a song unto itself by the ending credits. When Rydia, your main party member returned during the epic final battle, her theme returned with her. Except this time it was revamped into a more powerful, mature sound. Never once was there any spoken dialogue in that game, and it spoke to me louder than any cinema soundtrack.
What blew my mind was how little mainstream these composers actually were. Nobuo Uematsu, Yuzo Koshiro, Koichi Sugiyama- these guys wrote music that I, and millions of other gamers knew by heart but could not receive any validation that these songs held any musical credibility outside of our hobbyist community. I sat down one day for music class with my high school band teacher and got into a very passionate debate about the legitimacy of video game music with him. Mr. Jackson was a lover of The Beatles and could not understand why I was arguing so much about my point. Clearly he was wrong. I stormed out of class that day with an unwanted detention, but it was worth it.
Speaking of Yuzo Koshiro, the composer of Streets of Rage deserves his own damn wikipedia page. Instead of SNES using sample based playback of audio files, Genesis used FM Synthesis. Creating a thin, sometimes robotic type of sound. While other composers struggled to make magic within this style of sound, Yoshiro created danceable beats with elements of House, Techno and Detroit Electronic Music. What’s more is that he wrote his own assembly programs to help him achieve this sound. I discovered his soundtracks years later while combing the racks at Reckless Records in Chicago. I proceeded to blast these CDs at college parties to a captive audience who had never even owned a Genesis.
Certain video game melodies are engraved into my subconscious. Start any random Stranger Things kid on the opening 7 notes to Zelda’s overworld theme and they’ll whip their head up in your direction. Lock eyes with another human being and just scream DON’T PUSH-START. We all spoke the same musical language growing up, even if none of you listened to Chrono Trigger. When I was studying abroad in Japan- yeah I was THAT dumb and took out a student loan toJapan- I made a bond with my host brother over fighting game music. I had no idea he spoke english, but we were both humming away to Guile’s theme from Street Fighter II. We clicked instantly and talked very little for the rest of the trip, because who needs a phrase book when you have Jazz.
I started my video game soundtrack collection with a purchase from Toronto. While on vacation with family I found a Final Fantasy VI import of the entire game spread across 3 CDs for… wait for it…. $40 Canadian dollars. That was like a weeks worth of groceries to me as a working high schooler at Dairy Queen. But I had to have it. Needed it for research even. So from then on, every few months I would receive a package in the mail from Japan. With white jackets and crazy letters detailing in Japanese that I didn’t know how to read what I was purchasing. My roommate Dave thought I had a screw loose. “You defeated that game years ago, why are you buying the soundtrack?” How was he supposed to know that music could be divorced from the gameplay itself?
When gaming transitioned from cartridges to CDs in the mid 1990s, most of these sound obstacle limitations went away. PlayStation games could stream audio, include voice acting, and even add licensed tracks to their games. Sure enough Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX(all composed by Uematsu) would introduce larger sweeping pieces with full orchestral sounds. But something was lost with that transition. Problem solving became less creative as there were no more challenges.
That being said there were some games that legitimately made me emotional during my teens. Even though Aerith died and forever made those polygon girls look like humans. Final Fantasy VII had some fantastic moments but Yasunori Mitsuda’s soundtrack for Chrono Cross was jazz, world music, and video game music all wrapped into a beautiful soundtrack. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is another one of my favorites. Michiru Yamane knocked it out of the park with this gothic rock masterpiece.
Symphony of the Night was special for how they incorporated music into their gameplay. Baroque sounding harpsichord complimented the castle exploration, while electric guitar gave fight sequences more punch. Each area of the game had a distinct musical cue to help orient you. Listening to their soundtrack still gives me chills today and I’m instantly transported back to that hellish upside-down castle.
Something as big as video game music created communities of their own. OCRemix- also known as OverClocked Remix- was a site that introduced me to genres I never would have thought to apply to video game music. Jazz versions of my favorite Zelda songs, metalRRR you hear me? METAL arrangements of FF battle themes, ambient interpretations of Metroid soundtracks. It made me finally cede that these were legitimately good songs with or without the context of a video game. I spent days downloading these off of dial-up modems as my parents killed their phone line trying to call me.
Vinyl has made a comeback these past few years and video game music has not been absent from that comeback. I have pressings of every soundtrack from Journey to Persona 5 – and boy does my wife Sarah roll her eyes at me when I get these-. There is something magical about this rebirth of digital music into analog formats. Especially with older 8 and 16-bit songs that were entirely crafted by programmers playing you video game symphonies. Vinyl crackles pair so well with digital music.
You can clearly track Uematsu’s growth as a composer from game to game. With the advancing technology of gaming he went from restrictive 8-bit tracks to full blown orchestrated score, yet still knew how to craft a catchy tune that pulled at your heartstrings. Perhaps no song hits this emotional spectrum for me more than Dancing Mad from FF VI. That 17 minute, progressive rock influenced ending boss theme that pushed what the SNES was capable to its ABSOLUTE LIMITS. I showed the sheet music to my college music theory teacher. Dr. Nelson looked at me funny, made me listen to a midi version through headphones, and then admitted that it “wasn’t bad”.
Music set the tone for how we felt about gaming before render distances and framerate did. Before you could render a character’s subtle facial expressions or beautifully detailed world, composers were setting the tone for how you were supposed to feel about your sprite character and its limited animations. Chrono Trigger’s “At the bottom of night” made me more sad than anything I had seen on the screen.
Music from video games was a common thread throughout my high school career. Nothing gets you through Mr. Davis’ boring ass U.S history class like air-guitar battling the Final Fantasy VI battle theme ( all 4 of you did this at some point in high school. I know it. ). I made a friend because of this music. We looked at each other during this chaotic freshmen year and understood each other. We bonded over video game music. Mike ended up becoming a groomsman at my wedding and we snuck the main theme of Chrono Trigger onto my wedding playlist without Sarah knowing.
It took a while but my parents finally came around to video game music. Mrs.gioyama came around when she heard the orchestrated version of Final Fantasy playing Aerith’s theme live. “Oh honey,” she said, “that’s actually beautiful.” Mr. Giovanni took a little longer, but I was driving us up these ridiculously tall mountain roads in Colorado and decided to play “Corridors of Time”. It was such a calming song that synced so perfectly with the roads that he turned down and added it to his playlist. *insert mic drop*
We were graced with some fantastically talented composers that pushed their own boundaries as technology allowed them to. Some even went backwards and utilized older sounds for homages to their roots. Music “started” to sound less and less like video games as we were able to pull off high fidelity audio from games. But many artists implemented pieces of their older music to remind us of where we came from. Indie darlings like Shovel Knight managed to perfectly capture the essence of 8-bit while blending in elements of modern technology. Undertale created a beautiful soundtrack that fused chiptunes with modern day game music. They understood that limitations of past weren’t just boring technical restraints but the foundation of video game music.
Video game music is slowly becoming accepted by mainstream society. Grammy’s, sold out video game concerts featuring full symphonies, and being introduced to school music classes. It has been a long time coming.
Video game soundtracks will always be nostalgic to those who grew up listening to them. I can track were I was in life just by these songs. Listening to MMMONEY from Donkey Kong Country while cramming for finals. Road tripping to Canada with my brothers listening to FF collections. And slow dancing with my wife Sarah to a piano cover of “To Far Away Times”. These weren’t just video game songs they were life songs that we attached specific memories to when we first heard them.
I recently found my old FF VI import while cleaning my closet out. Yellowing case from being opened so many times, and the disc had tooth chip on it from me skipping to the ending so many times. I popped it into my CD player that I use more as a decoration nowadays and was instantly hit with a barrage of nostalgia remembering back to my childhood night playing this game. My mind was not playing any tricks; those songs STILL give me chills.
These composers worked with little to no recognition for the amazing pieces they created under insane restrictions. They have created music that has touched millions of players and created new genres of music. They deserve to be recognised not only as amazing video game composers but amazing musicians that found unique ways to express emotion through the smallest of bundles of bytes.
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