In early video games, music was rarely an important element, and often there was no music at all but a few beeps and bops played at regular intervals. During the 8-bit era of consoles there were now dedicated sound chips, though with very limited number of channels and possible sound effects, but at least it produced some of the most memorable video game music scores.
Even with the advent of even more powerful sound chips in the 16-bit consoles, musical tracks tended to be short and infinitely looping until stopped abruptly. The only exception I've heard, which at the time blew me away, was Final Fantasy VI, which pushed its SPC700 chip to its limits by playing two non-looping 10-minutes tracks one after the other.
There was an interesting effect in Super Mario World where a rhythm track, available in all songs, would play only if Mario is on Yoshi. While this was the first kind of "interactive music" I've experienced in a game, sadly keeping a whole track "in reserve" all the time was such a constraint that no other game on the SNES repeated that technique,
It wasn't until the 64-bit console "Nintendo 64" that interactive music started to be much more interesting. First, with "Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there were moments in the game when when a battle with an ennemy starts, the next loop in the music becomes different. That way, the music transition becomes much more natural than the typical fade in / fade out, so much so that in the heat of the battle you might not have noticed how much the music gradually changed. Second, with Banjo Kazooie, the game has essentially a single song but in a great variety of tracks that fade in and out (at any point of the loop) depending on the context of the game. The result was spectacular and memorable.
Up to there, the sound chips would essentially generate sounds from simple waves to a few small samples, and couldn't mix fully pre-recorded audio. Nor would the game storage would be big enough to have large audio samples in the first place. As sound processing moved closed to the CPU or went through immensely more powerful sound chips, things started getting interesting.
I'll finish the rest of this "article" tomorrow, covering the 2000s up to now.
Published on May 16, 2012 at 22:38 EDT
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