Music is a big part of games; it’s surprising how much space sound takes up within a game. I guess music within gaming is defined by animation almost. Basically what I mean is that you’ll in pretty much every game you’ll play, things move, collisions happen and events take place which cause sound to happen and therefore to make it more realistic the sound is in time with the things that go on within the game itself.
For example if you’re playing a game such as Halo you’ll find that when the character moves you’ll hear the noise of footsteps, when a character is swimming in water, you’ll hear the sound of the rippling water etc. Not only this but even in menu interface you’ll probably find that most games have sounds when navigating through different screens. That’s basic stuff however then comes the background music in different parts of the game. Now based on the events and the scenes that happen within games, can vary the outcome of what’s needed as background music. What I mean is you want the background music to be fitting with the situation or cut scene of the game and possibly have it stylised to fit in with the theme of the game’s music.
I remember back in the day, playing a game for the PlayStation called Medievil, the game has really great music. The theme basically is horror/Halloween type of feel and scenery about it all the way through. It’s set in 18th century England, as you could imagine, graveyards, cemeteries, and haunted castles. Playing through most levels the music is so fitting.
You can just imagine this being a real life scenario wandering through lonely haunted ruins with darkness throughout the land. It may sound a bit cliché and something that I wouldn’t play, but that’s irrelevant for now, but you can see how they captured the feel for that particular level, it’s fitting and it works. The genre of game, effects the music, the style of the music must be fitting with what is going on in the game where it will be used. The soundtrack to this game in particular has an orchestra theme to it throughout which I think is really fitting towards the old country of England, where you would think of thing such as castles, dragons, swords and other cliché things related.
I remember a moment at the end of the game Super Mario Galaxy there is this quite emotional music that plays, you sort of think back to the time you spent playing and everything you went through to reach the end and story makes you gain this emotional bond to the characters throughout. It also plays throughout the back story that is told once you unlock it; it makes you feel connected and is perfect to fit the story.
It’s very fitting to the end and again it’s an orchestral style they used in the game. I’m not too sure of many key composers for video game music, but this game in particular had an actual orchestra to perform the music for it. This piece of music from the game was composed by Koji Kondo:
I don’t know if this was composed by the same guy, but this was used in the second Mario Galaxy game:
I think Good Times by Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards is a very popular song and yes I do believe it is very influential, because a lot of people or music Artists I should say tends to steal the bass line from it. It’s definitely a song I’ve heard many times whether it is on the radio, TV or videos on the internet etc, it is much overused.
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