Video game music ( VGM ) is the soundtrack that accompanies video games . Early video game music was once limited to sounds of early sound chips , such as programmable sound generators (PSG) or FM synthesis chips. These limitations have led to the style of music known as chiptune , which became the sound of the first video games.
108-614: VGM may stand for: Video game music , a style of music Van Gogh Museum , a museum in Amsterdam named after the famous painter VGM (file format) , a computer music file format used in old gaming consoles Verified Gross Mass (VERMAS or VGM), a SOLAS Convention requirement for container weight as defined by the International Maritime Organisation that transmits container weight information Volo's Guide to Monsters ,
216-551: A chiptune rendition of Yellow Magic Orchestra 's " Rydeen " (1979); several later computer games also covered the song, such as Trooper Truck (1983) by Rabbit Software as well as Daley Thompson's Decathlon (1984) and Stryker's Run (1986) composed by Martin Galway . Home console systems also had a comparable upgrade in sound ability beginning with the ColecoVision in 1982 capable of four channels. However, more notable
324-513: A strategy . Western Gun was his next game licensed to Midway for release in the United States, with the title changed to Gun Fight for its American release. Midway's Gun Fight adaptation was itself notable for being the first video game to use a microprocessor . Nishikado's Western Gun allowed the two players to move around anywhere on the screen, whereas Midway's version Gun Fight restricts each player to their respective portions of
432-488: A "new high watermark for what music in games could sound like." The soundtrack for Streets of Rage 2 (1992) in particular is considered "revolutionary" and "ahead of its time" for its blend of house music with " dirty " electro basslines and " trancey electronic textures" that "would feel as comfortable in a nightclub as a video game." Another important FM synth composer was the late Ryu Umemoto , who composed music for many visual novels and shoot 'em ups during
540-519: A CD drive supported 32 channels of PCM at the same resolution as the original PlayStation. In 1996, the Nintendo 64 , still using a solid-state cartridge, actually supported an integrated and scalable sound system that was potentially capable of 100 channels of PCM, and an improved sample rate of 48 kHz. Games for the N64, because of the cost of the solid-state memory, typically had samples of lesser quality than
648-491: A DAC engine of one or more streams. Only a minority of developers ever used Amiga-style tracker formats in commercial PC games, ( Unreal ) typically preferring to use the MT-32 or AdLib/SB-compatible devices. As general purpose PCs using x86 became more ubiquitous than the other PC platforms, developers drew their focus towards that platform. The last major development before streaming music came in 1992: Roland Corporation released
756-456: A MIDI controller to run the sequence. However, different products used different sounds attached to their MIDI controllers. Some tied into the Yamaha FM chip to simulate instruments, some daughterboards of samples had very different sound qualities; meaning that no single sequence performance would be accurate to every other General MIDI device. All of these considerations in the products reflected
864-486: A MIDI controller) to give it the features of a fully integrated card. Unlike the standards of Amiga or Atari , a PC using x86 even then could be using a broad mix of hardware. Developers increasingly used MIDI sequences: instead of writing soundtrack data for each type of soundcard, they generally wrote a fully featured data set for the Roland application that would be compatible with lesser featured equipment so long as it had
972-484: A My MLB sound track feature that allows the user to play music tracks of their choice saved on the hard drive of their PS3, rather than the preprogrammed tracks incorporated into the game by the developer. An update to Wipeout HD , released on the PlayStation Network, was made to also incorporate this feature. In the video game Audiosurf , custom soundtracks are the main aspect of the game. Users have to pick
1080-469: A PC, inserting custom music into the stations is done by placing music files into a designated folder. For the Xbox version, a CD must be installed into the console's hard drive. For the iPhone version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars , players create an iTunes playlist which is then played by the game. Tomohiro Nishikado Tomohiro Nishikado ( 西角 友宏 , Nishikado Tomohiro , born March 31, 1944)
1188-495: A Yamaha chip, the YM2612 ), but largely held the same approach to sound design. Ten channels in total for tone generation with one for PCM samples were available in stereo instead of the NES's five channels in mono, one for PCM. As before, it was often used for percussion samples. The Genesis did not support 16-bit sampled sounds. Despite the additional tone channels, writing music still posed
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#17328592187151296-564: A challenge to traditional composers and it forced much more imaginative use of the FM synthesizer to create an enjoyable listening experience. The composer Yuzo Koshiro utilized the Genesis hardware effectively to produce " progressive , catchy, techno -style compositions far more advanced than what players were used to" for games such as The Revenge of Shinobi (1989) and the Streets of Rage series, setting
1404-447: A cross between sequencing samples, and streaming music is used. Games such as Republic: The Revolution (music composed by James Hannigan ) and Command & Conquer: Generals (music composed by Bill Brown) have utilised sophisticated systems governing the flow of incidental music by stringing together short phrases based on the action on screen and the player's most recent choices (see dynamic music ). Other games dynamically mixed
1512-591: A deal initially made with Atari. However, the game instead ended up being licensed to Midway Manufacturing , who released the game in North America as TV Basketball in June 1974. It sold 1,400 arcade cabinets in the United States, a video game production record for Midway, up until the release of Wheels . TV Basketball was the first basketball video game released by Midway, which later followed with Arch Rivals (1989) and NBA Jam (1993). Nishikado's Speed Race
1620-516: A dynamic approach to video game music, using at least eleven different gameplay tracks, in addition to level-starting and game over themes, which change according to the player's actions. This was further improved upon by Namco's 1982 arcade game Dig Dug , where the music stopped when the player stopped moving. Dig Dug was composed by Yuriko Keino, who also composed the music for other Namco games such as Xevious (1982) and Phozon (1983). Sega 's 1982 arcade game Super Locomotive featured
1728-458: A gameplay feature, with the game generating levels based entirely on the music on whatever CD the player inserted. Microsoft's Xbox allowed music to be copied from a CD onto its internal hard drive, to be used as a "Custom Soundtrack", if enabled by the game developer. The feature carried over into the Xbox 360 where it became supported by the system software and could be enabled at any point. The Wii
1836-443: A loop, though it was dynamic and interacted with the player, increasing pace as the enemies descended on the player. The first video game to feature continuous, melodic background music was Rally-X , released by Namco in 1980, featuring a simple tune that repeats continuously during gameplay . The decision to include any music into a video game meant that at some point it would have to be transcribed into computer code. Some music
1944-512: A moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, but too large for most locations, so it was followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II , which sold 3,000 arcade cabinets . His first original arcade video games were the Pong -style sports video games Soccer and Davis Cup , with Soccer developed first but both released in November 1973. Davis Cup
2052-480: A music file to be analyzed. The game will generate a race track based on tempo, pitch and complexity of the sound. The user will then race on this track, synchronized with the music. Games in the Grand Theft Auto series have supported custom soundtracks, using them as a separate in-game radio station. The feature was primarily exclusive to PC versions, and was adopted to a limited degree on console platforms. On
2160-427: A playfield, allowed each player to control both a forward and a goalkeeper , and let them adjust the size of the players who were represented as paddles on screen. It also had a goal on each side. Nishikado considers Soccer to be Japan's first original domestically produced video game, in comparison to Japanese Pong clones released earlier, including Sega 's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong . TV Basketball
2268-463: A pseudo fourth sound channel. Its comparatively low cost made it a popular alternative to other home computers, as well as its ability to use a TV for an affordable display monitor. Approach to game music development in this time period usually involved using simple tone generation and/or frequency modulation synthesis to simulate instruments for melodies, and use of a "noise channel" for simulating percussive noises. Early use of PCM samples in this era
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#17328592187152376-511: A significant role in the arcade industry, so they tasked Nishikado with investigating TTL technology as he was the company's only employee who knew how to work with integrated circuit (IC) technology, and one of the few engineers at any Japanese coin-op company with significant expertise in solid-state electronics . He began working on video game development in 1972. He was interested in creating arcade video games , so he spent six months dissecting Atari 's Pong arcade unit and learning how
2484-654: A single note long, and play it back through the computer's sound chip from memory. This differed from Rally-X in that its hardware DAC was used to play back simple waveform samples, and a sampled sound allowed for a complexity and authenticity of a real instrument that an FM simulation could not offer. For its role in being one of the first and affordable, the Amiga would remain a staple tool of early sequenced music composing, especially in Europe . The Amiga offered these features before most other competing home computer platforms though
2592-654: A song "Goal Scoring Superstar Hero". These songs used long vocal samples. A similar approach to sound and music developments had become common in the arcades by this time and had been used in many arcade system boards since the mid-1980s. This was further popularized in the early 1990s by games like Street Fighter II (1991) on the CPS-1 , which used voice samples extensively along with sampled sound effects and percussion. Neo Geo 's MVS system also carried powerful sound development which often included surround sound . The evolution also carried into home console video games, such as
2700-600: A song (often not American) that is upbeat and has lots of rhythm. The inclusion on the FIFA soundtrack has given many artists exposure that helped launch their music careers. Sequencing samples continue to be used in modern gaming where fully recorded audio is not viable. Until the mid-2000s, many larger games on home consoles used sequenced audio to save space. Additionally, most games on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS used sequenced music due to storage limitations. Sometimes
2808-561: A sound card) would actually handle all the decompressing. Fifth generation home console systems also developed specialised streaming formats and containers for compressed audio playback. Games would take full advantage of this ability, sometimes with highly praised results ( Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ). Games ported from arcade machines, which continued to use FM synthesis, often saw superior pre-recorded music streams on their home console counterparts ( Street Fighter Alpha 2 ). Even though
2916-479: A specific computer chip would change electrical impulses from computer code into analog sound waves on the fly for output on a speaker. Sound effects for the games were also generated in this fashion. An early example of such an approach to video game music was the opening chiptune in Tomohiro Nishikado 's Gun Fight (1975). While this allowed for the inclusion of music in early arcade video games , it
3024-502: A supplement for the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title VGM . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=VGM&oldid=1035445480 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
3132-527: Is a Japanese video game developer and engineer . He is the creator of the arcade shoot 'em up game Space Invaders , released to the public in 1978 by the Taito Corporation of Japan , often credited as the first shoot 'em up and for beginning the golden age of arcade video games . Prior to Space Invaders , he also designed other earlier Taito arcade games, including the shooting electro-mechanical games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II ,
3240-493: Is also able to play custom soundtracks if it is enabled by the game ( Excite Truck , Endless Ocean ). The PlayStation Portable can, in games like Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City and FIFA 08 , play music from a Memory Stick . The PlayStation 3 has the ability to utilize custom soundtracks in games using music saved on the hard drive, however few game developers used this function. MLB 08: The Show , released in 2008, has
3348-621: Is also credited for Chase HQ: Secret Police published by Metro3D for the Game Boy Color in 1999, the 3D eroge visual novel Dancing Cats published by Illusion for the PC in 2000, Super Bust-A-Move ( Super Puzzle Bobble ) published by Taito for the PlayStation 2 in 2000, Rainbow Islands ( Bubble Bobble 2 ) and Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder for the Game Boy Color in 2001, and
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3456-659: Is common for X-games sports-based video games to come with some popular artists recent releases ( SSX , Tony Hawk , Initial D ), as well as any game with heavy cultural demographic theme that has tie-in to music ( Need For Speed: Underground , Gran Turismo , and Grand Theft Auto ). Sometimes a hybrid of the two are used, such as in Dance Dance Revolution . Many sports game titles like Madden NFL , NBA 2K , and FIFA use popular and underground songs in their soundtrack to give their menus atmosphere. The phrase "FIFA song" has become popular in recent years, it describes
3564-449: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Video game music With technological advances, video game music has grown to include a wider range of sounds. Players can hear music in video games over a game's title screen, menus, and gameplay. Game soundtracks can also change depending on a player's actions or situation, such as indicating missed actions in rhythm games , informing
3672-483: Is frequently cited as the "first" or "original" in the shoot 'em up genre. Space Invaders pitted the player against multiple enemies descending from the top of the screen at a constantly increasing speed. The game used alien creatures inspired by The War of the Worlds because the developers were unable to render the movement of aircraft; in turn, the aliens replaced human enemies because of moral concerns (regarding
3780-472: The Commodore 64 and NES, which resulted in the chiptune genre. The release of a freely-distributed Amiga program named Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski in 1987 started the era of MOD -format which made it easy for anyone to produce music based on digitized samples. Module files were made with programs called " trackers " after Obarski's Soundtracker. This MOD/tracker tradition continued with PC computers in
3888-510: The Fifth Generation . In 1994, the CD-ROM equipped PlayStation supported 24 channels of 16-bit samples of up to 44.1 kHz sample rate, samples equal to CD audio in quality. It also sported a few hardware DSP effects like reverb . Many Square titles continued to use sequenced music, such as Final Fantasy VII , Legend of Mana , and Final Fantasy Tactics . The Sega Saturn also with
3996-651: The Macintosh which had been introduced a year earlier had similar capabilities. The Amiga's main rival, the Atari ST , sourced the Yamaha YM2149 Programmable Sound Generator (PSG). Compared to the in-house designed Amiga sound engine, the PSG could only handle 1 channel of sampled sound, and needed the computer's CPU to process the data for it. This made it impractical for game development use until 1989 with
4104-511: The Motorola 68000 CPU and accompanying various Yamaha YM programmable sound generator sound chips allowed for several more tones or "channels" of sound, sometimes eight or more. The earliest known example of this was Sega 's 1980 arcade game Carnival , which used an AY-3-8910 chip to create an electronic rendition of the classical 1889 composition " Over The Waves " by Juventino Rosas . Konami 's 1981 arcade game Frogger introduced
4212-563: The NEC PC-8801 and PC-9801 in the early 1980s, and by the mid-1980s, the PC-8801 and FM-7 had built-in FM sound. The sound FM synth boards produced are described as "warm and pleasant sound". Musicians such as Yuzo Koshiro and Takeshi Abo utilized to produce music that is still highly regarded within the chiptune community. The widespread adoption of FM synthesis by consoles would later be one of
4320-562: The PC speaker , and some proprietary standards such as the IBM PCjr 3-voice chip. While sampled sound could be achieved on the PC speaker using pulse width modulation, doing so required a significant proportion of the available processor power, rendering its use in games rare. With the increase of x86 PCs in the market, there was a vacuum in sound performance in home computing that expansion cards attempted to fill. The first two recognizable standards were
4428-559: The Roland MT-32 , followed by the AdLib sound card. Roland's solution was driven by MIDI sequencing using advanced LA synthesizers. This made it the first choice for game developers to produce upon, but its higher cost as an end-user solution made it prohibitive. The AdLib used a low-cost FM synthesis chip from Yamaha, and many boards could operate compatibly using the MIDI standard. The AdLib card
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4536-516: The SNES role-playing video game Lufia & the Fortress of Doom in 1993, the beat 'em up Sonic Blast Man II in 1994, and the puzzle game Bust-A-Move 2 ( Puzzle Bobble 2 ) in 1995. He left Taito in 1996 to found his own company, Dreams . Under Dreams when it was owned by Nishikado, his credited games include Bust-A-Move Millennium , published by Acclaim Entertainment in 2000. Dreams
4644-548: The TurboGrafx-CD RPG franchises Tengai Makyō , composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto from 1989, and the Ys series , composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Mieko Ishikawa and arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu in 1989. The Ys soundtracks, particularly Ys I & II (1989), are still regarded as some of the most influential video game music ever composed. However, there were several disadvantages of regular CD-audio. Optical drive technology
4752-647: The sports video game TV Basketball in 1974, the vertical scrolling racing video game Speed Race (also known as Wheels ) in 1974, the multi-directional shooter Western Gun (also known as Gun Fight ) in 1975, and the first-person combat flight simulator Interceptor (1975). Tomohiro Nishikado was born in 1944. He began conducting his own science experiments at an early age and, in junior high school , started working with electronics by building radios and amplifiers . He graduated with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1967. He had originally planned to work for Sony , but failed
4860-464: The volume-control dials used in his earlier Pong -inspired machines, Speed Race had a realistic racing wheel controller , with a accelerator , gear shift , speedometer and tachometer . It could be played in either single-player or alternating two-player, where each player attempts to beat the other's score. The game also had selectable difficulty levels , giving players an option between "Beginner's race" and "Advanced player's race". The game
4968-592: The 1990s. As the cost of magnetic memory declined in the form of diskettes , the evolution of video game music on the Amiga, and some years later game music development in general, shifted to sampling in some form. It took some years before Amiga game designers learned to wholly use digitized sound effects in music (an early exception case was the title music of text adventure game The Pawn , 1986). By this time, computer and game music had already begun to form its own identity, and thus many music makers intentionally tried to produce music that sounded like that heard on
5076-524: The 1990s. Examples of Amiga games using digitized instrument samples include David Whittaker 's soundtrack for Shadow of the Beast , Chris Hülsbeck 's soundtrack for Turrican 2 and Matt Furniss's tunes for Laser Squad . Richard Joseph also composed some theme songs featuring vocals and lyrics for games by Sensible Software most famous being Cannon Fodder (1993) with a song "War Has Never Been So Much Fun" and Sensible World of Soccer (1994) with
5184-425: The 2008 Nintendo DS version of Ys I & II . He personally oversaw the development of Space Invaders Revolution , released by Taito in 2005, and was involved in the development of Space Invaders Infinity Gene , released by Taito's current owner Square Enix in 2008. Dreams was involved in the development of the fighting game Battle Fantasia , released by Arc System Works in 2008. As of 2013, he
5292-478: The Atari 2600 and several late Famicom titles. These chips add to the existing sound capabilities. From around 1980, some arcade games began taking steps toward digitized, or sampled , sounds. Namco's 1980 arcade game Rally-X was the first known game to use a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to produce sampled tones instead of a tone generator. That same year, the first known video game to feature speech synthesis
5400-480: The CD while retrieving game data exclusively from the hard disk, thereby allowing the game CD to be swapped for any music CD. The first PC game to introduce in-game support for custom soundtracks was Lionhead Studio's Black & White . The 2001 game included an in-game interface for Winamp that enabled the players to play audio tracks from their own playlists. In addition, this would sometimes trigger various reactions from
5508-457: The CD, allowed for much lower latency and seek time when finding and starting to play music, and also allowed for much smoother looping due to being able to buffer the data. A minor drawback was that use of compressed audio meant it had to be decompressed which put load on the CPU of a system. As computing power increased, this load became minimal, and in some cases, dedicated chips in a computer (such as
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#17328592187155616-563: The CD-ROM itself. The popularity of the Super NES and its software remained limited to regions where NTSC television was the broadcast standard. Partly because of the difference in frame rates of PAL broadcast equipment, many titles released were never redesigned to play appropriately and ran much slower than had been intended, or were never released. This showed a divergence in popular video game music between PAL and NTSC countries that still shows to this day. This divergence would be lessened as
5724-682: The Run , International Karate ), Koji Kondo ( Super Mario Bros. , The Legend of Zelda ), Miki Higashino ( Gradius , Yie-Ar Kung Fu , Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ), Hiroshi Kawaguchi ( Space Harrier , Hang-On , Out Run ), Hirokazu Tanaka ( Metroid , Kid Icarus , EarthBound ), Martin Galway ( Daley Thompson's Decathlon , Stryker's Run , Times of Lore ), David Wise ( Donkey Kong Country ), Yuzo Koshiro ( Dragon Slayer , Ys , Shinobi , ActRaiser , Streets of Rage ), Mieko Ishikawa ( Dragon Slayer , Ys ), and Ryu Umemoto ( visual novels , shoot 'em ups ). By
5832-558: The United States), released in 1975. The game's concept was adapted from a Sega arcade electro-mechanical game , called Gun Fight (1969), with the cowboy figurines adapted into character sprites and both players able to maneuver across a landscape while shooting each other. The game is historically significant for several reasons. It was an early on-foot , multi-directional shooter , that could be played in single-player or two-player . It also introduced video game violence , being
5940-470: The arcade phenomenon in North America was in part due to Space Invaders . Game Informer considers it, along with Pac-Man , one of the most popular arcade games that tapped into popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades. The game also played an important role during the second generation of consoles , when it became the Atari 2600 's first killer app , establishing Atari as
6048-496: The audio stream. Manipulating the stream any further would require a far more significant level of CPU power available in the 5th generation. Some games, such as the Wipeout series, continued to use full Mixed Mode CD audio for their soundtracks. This overall freedom offered to music composers gave video game music the equal footing with other popular music it had lacked. A musician could now, with no need to learn about programming or
6156-416: The chip itself. Konami 's 1983 arcade game Gyruss used five synthesis sound chips along with a DAC, which were used to create an electronic version of J. S. Bach 's Toccata and Fugue in D minor . Beyond arcade games, significant improvements to personal computer game music were made possible with the introduction of digital FM synth boards , which Yamaha released for Japanese computers such as
6264-424: The composition of a sequenced soundtrack. Being able to play one's own music during a game in the past usually meant turning down the game audio and using an alternative music player. Some early exceptions were possible on PC/Windows gaming in which it was possible to independently adjust game audio while playing music with a separate program running in the background. Some PC games, such as Quake , play music from
6372-573: The concept by taking "a typical pong game" and rearranging the shapes so that they looked like objects such as a basketball hoop . It was also the earliest basketball video game in arcades, and the second basketball-themed video game in general, after the Basketball overlay released for the Magnavox Odyssey console in 1973. In February 1974, TV Basketball became the earliest non-American video game to be licensed for release in North America, with
6480-404: The earliest shooter games , it set precedents and helped pave the way for future titles and for the shooting genre. Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay with the enemies responding to the player controlled cannon's movement. It was also the first video game to popularize the concept of achieving a high score , being the first game to save the player's score. It
6588-402: The expansion of the video game industry from a novelty into a global industry to the success of the game, attributing the shift of video games from bars and arcades to more mainstream locations like restaurants and department stores to Space Invaders . The game's success is also credited for ending the video game crash of 1977 and beginning the golden age of video arcade games . The launch of
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#17328592187156696-726: The fifth generation of home consoles launched globally, and as Commodore began to take a back seat to general-purpose PCs and Macs for developing and gaming. Though the Mega CD/Sega CD, and to a greater extent the PC Engine in Japan, would give gamers a preview of the direction video game music would take in streaming music, the use of both sampled and sequenced music continues in game consoles even today. The huge data storage benefit of optical media would be coupled with progressively more powerful audio generation hardware and higher quality samples in
6804-413: The final round of the company's testing process, so he instead joined an audio engineering company called Takt in early 1967. But after completing his training there he was not put in the development department, so he quit a year later and looked for a new job, eventually accepting a job offer from a communications company. Before beginning work, he met an old colleague at a train station who told him about
6912-446: The first General MIDI card, the sample-based SCC-1 , an add-in card version of the SC-55 desktop MIDI module. The comparative quality of the samples spurred similar offerings from Soundblaster, but costs for both products were still high. Both companies offered 'daughterboards' with sample-based synthesizers that could be later added to a less expensive soundcard (which only had a DAC and
7020-433: The first video game to depict human-to-human combat , and the first to depict a gun on screen. The game introduced dual-stick controls, with one eight-way joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction, and was one of the earliest video games to represent game characters and fragments of story through its visual presentation. The player characters used in the game represented avatars for
7128-509: The game architecture itself, independently produce the music to their satisfaction. This flexibility would be exercised as popular mainstream musicians would be using their talents for video games specifically. An early example is Way of the Warrior on the 3DO , with music by White Zombie . A more well-known example is Trent Reznor 's score for Quake . An alternate approach, as with the TMNT arcade,
7236-409: The game systems were capable of "CD quality" sound, these compressed audio tracks were not true "CD quality." Many of them had lower sampling rates, but not so significant that most consumers would notice. Using a compressed stream allowed game designers to play back streamed music and still be able to access other data on the disc without interruption of the music, at the cost of CPU power used to render
7344-495: The game's integrated circuits worked, and began modifying the game. He developed Elepong (similar to Pong ), one of Japan's earliest locally produced arcade video games, released in 1973. He produced more than ten video games up until 1977, before Space Invaders was released in 1978. Nishikado developed Sky Fighter , a target shooting electro-mechanical game released by Taito for amusement arcades in 1971. The game used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of
7452-610: The generation could boast similar abilities yet did not have the same circulation levels as the Super NES. The Neo-Geo home system was capable of the same powerful sample processing as its arcade counterpart but was several times the cost of a Super NES. The Sega CD (the Mega CD outside North America) hardware upgrade to the Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) offered multiple PCM channels, but they were often passed over instead to use its capabilities with
7560-428: The high cost of memory storage which rapidly declined with the optical CD format. Taking entirely pre-recorded music had many advantages over sequencing for sound quality. Music could be produced freely with any kind and number of instruments, allowing developers to simply record one track to be played back during the game. Quality was only limited by the effort put into mastering the track itself. Memory space costs that
7668-551: The introduction of FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis, providing more organic sounds than previous PSGs. The first such game, Marble Madness used the Yamaha YM2151 FM synthesis chip. As home consoles moved into the fourth generation , or 16-bit era, the hybrid approach (sampled and tone) to music composing continued to be used. The Sega Genesis offered advanced graphics over the NES and improved sound synthesis features (also using
7776-402: The late 1970s, music was stored on physical media in analog waveforms such as cassette tapes and phonograph records . Such components were expensive and prone to breakage under heavy use, making them less than ideal for use in an arcade cabinet , though in rare cases such as Journey , they were used. A more affordable method of having music in a video game was to use digital means, where
7884-497: The late 1980s, video game music was being sold as cassette tape soundtracks in Japan, inspiring American companies such as Sierra , Cinemaware and Interplay to give more serious attention to video game music by 1988. The Golden Joystick Awards introduced a category for Best Soundtrack of the Year in 1986, won by Sanxion . Some games for cartridge systems have been sold with extra audio hardware on board, including Pitfall II for
7992-475: The major advances of the 16-bit era , by which time 16-bit arcade machines were using multiple FM synthesis chips. One of the earliest home computers to make use of digital signal processing in the form of sampling was the Amiga in 1985. The computer's sound chip featured four independent 8-bit digital-to-analog converters . Developers could use this platform to take samples of a music performance, sometimes just
8100-454: The market leader in the home video game market at the time. Space Invaders is today regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time. Nishikado's later credited games for Taito included the racing video game Chase HQ II: Special Criminal Investigation in 1989, the scrolling shooters Darius II ( Sagaia ) in 1989 and Darius Twin in 1991, the platform game Parasol Stars: The Story of Bubble Bobble III in 1991,
8208-400: The mid-to-late 1980s. In 1977, Nishikado began developing Space Invaders , which he created entirely on his own. In addition to designing and programming the game, he also did the artwork and sounds, and engineered the game's arcade hardware, putting together a microcomputer from scratch. Following its release in 1978, Space Invaders went on to become his most successful video game. It
8316-449: The other two, however, and music tended to be simpler in construct. The more dominant approach for games based on CDs, however, was shifting toward streaming audio. In the same timeframe of the late 1980s to mid-1990s, the IBM PC clones using the x86 architecture became more ubiquitous, yet had a very different path in sound design than other PCs and consoles. Early PC gaming was limited to
8424-418: The player they are in a dangerous situation, or rewarding them for specific achievements. Video game music can be one of two kinds: original or licensed . The popularity of video game music has created education and job opportunities, generated awards, and led video game soundtracks to be commercially sold and performed in concerts. At the time video games had emerged as a popular form of entertainment in
8532-455: The player's Creature, like dancing or laughing. Some PlayStation games supported this by swapping the game CD with a music CD, although when the game needed data, players had to swap the CDs again. One of the earliest games, Ridge Racer , was loaded entirely into RAM, letting the player insert a music CD to provide a soundtrack throughout the entirety of the gameplay. In Vib Ribbon , this became
8640-436: The players, and would yell "Got me!" when one of them is shot. Other features of the game included obstacles such as a cactus , and in later levels , pine trees and moving wagons, that can provide cover for the players and are destructible . The guns have limited ammunition, with each player limited to six bullets, and shots can ricochet off the top or bottom edges of the playfield, allowing for indirect hits to be used as
8748-412: The portrayal of killing humans) on the part of Taito. As with subsequent shoot 'em ups of the time, the game was set in space as the available technology only permitted a black background. The game also introduced the idea of giving the player a number of " lives ". It sold over 360,000 arcade cabinets worldwide, and by 1981 had grossed more than $ 1 billion, equivalent to $ 2.5 billion in 2011. As one of
8856-454: The potential to produce much more realistic sounds, each sample required much more data in memory . This was at a time when all memory, solid-state ( ROM cartridge ), magnetic ( floppy disk ) or otherwise was still very costly per kilobyte . Sequenced soundchip-generated music, on the other hand, was generated with a few lines of comparatively simple code and took up far less precious memory. Arcade systems pushed game music forward in 1984 with
8964-557: The release of the Atari STE which used DMA techniques to play back PCM samples at up to 50 kHz. The ST, however, remained relevant as it was equipped with a MIDI controller and external ports. It became the choice of by many professional musicians as a MIDI programming device. IBM PC clones in 1985 would not see any significant development in multimedia abilities for a few more years, and sampling would not become popular in other video game systems for several years. Though sampling had
9072-758: The release of the Super Famicom in 1990, and its US/EU version Super NES in 1991. It sported a specialized custom Sony chip for both the sound generation and for special hardware DSP. It was capable of eight channels of sampled sounds at up to 16-bit resolution, had a wide selection of DSP effects, including a type of ADSR usually seen in high-end synthesizers of the time, and full stereo sound. This allowed experimentation with applied acoustics in video games, such as musical acoustics (early games like Super Castlevania IV , F-Zero , Final Fantasy IV , Gradius III , and later games like Chrono Trigger ), directional ( Star Fox ) and spatial acoustics ( Dolby Pro Logic
9180-623: The same year. It involved piloting a jet fighter , using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two, can scale in size depending on their distance to the player, and can move out of the player's firing range. The game used a form of pseudo-3D object-scaling to create the illusion of 3D space , a technique that was later used in racing video games such as Atari's Night Driver (1976) and Namco 's Pole Position (1982), and more extensively in Sega Super Scaler arcade games during
9288-435: The screen, with the characters made larger in size. Nishikado believed that his original version was more fun, but was impressed with the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version. This led him to design microprocessors into his subsequent games. Gun Fight was a success in the arcades, selling 8,600 arcade cabinets in the United States, where it was the third highest-grossing arcade game of 1975 and
9396-630: The second highest-grossing arcade game of 1976 . The game was ported to the Bally Astrocade console and several computer platforms. Gun Fight's success helped pave the way for Japanese video games in the American market. Interceptor is a first-person combat flight simulator designed by Tomohiro Nishikado. The game was first demonstrated in 1975, before releasing in Japan in March 1976, and in Europe
9504-553: The snowboarder lands, the music resumes regular playback until its next "cue". The LucasArts company pioneered this interactive music technique with their iMUSE system, used in their early adventure games and the Star Wars flight simulators Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: TIE Fighter . Action games such as these will change dynamically to match the amount of danger. Stealth-based games will sometimes rely on such music, either by handling streams differently, or dynamically changing
9612-458: The sound effect. The mid-to-late 1980s software releases for these platforms had music developed by more people with greater musical experience than before. Quality of composition improved noticeably, and evidence of the popularity of the music of this time period remains even today. Composers who made a name for themselves with their software include Koichi Sugiyama ( Dragon Quest ), Nobuo Uematsu ( Final Fantasy ), Rob Hubbard ( Monty On
9720-452: The sound on the game based on cues of the game environment. As processing power increased dramatically in the 6th generation of home consoles, it became possible to apply special effects in realtime to streamed audio. In SSX , a recent video game series, if a snowboarder takes to the air after jumping from a ramp, the music softens or muffles a bit, and the ambient noise of wind and air blowing becomes louder to emphasize being airborne. When
9828-480: The template for the shoot 'em up genre, with its influence extending to most shooting games released to the present day, including first-person shooters such as Wolfenstein , Doom , Halo and Call of Duty . Game designer Shigeru Miyamoto considers Space Invaders a game that revolutionized the video game industry ; he was never interested in video games before seeing it, and it would inspire him to produce video games. Several publications ascribe
9936-577: The work he was doing at Taito , which Nishikado found interesting. His friend told him that Taito were desperately searching for new engineers, so Nishikado decided to join Taito instead of the communications company. He joined Pacific Industries Ltd in 1968, a subsidiary of Taito Trading Company. He began working on arcade electro-mechanical games , developing the hit target shooting games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II . His bosses at Taito believed transistor-transistor logic (TTL) technology would play
10044-402: Was a team sport video game, a tennis doubles game with similar ball-and-paddle gameplay to Pong but played in doubles, allowing up to four players to compete, like Atari 's Pong Doubles (1973) released the same year. Soccer was also a team sport video game, based on association football . Soccer was also a ball-and-paddle game like Pong , but with a green background to simulate
10152-405: Was a driving racing video game , released in November 1974. He considers it to be his favourite among the games he had worked on prior to Space Invaders . It was also one the first Japanese video games released in North America, where it was distributed by Midway. Running on Taito Discrete Logic hardware, the game used sprites with collision detection . The game's most important innovation
10260-403: Was also released: Sunsoft's shoot 'em up game Stratovox . Around the same time, the introduction of frequency modulation synthesis ( FM synthesis ), first commercially released by Yamaha for their digital synthesizers and FM sound chips , allowed the tones to be manipulated to have different sound characteristics, where before the tone generated by the chip was limited to the design of
10368-535: Was also the first game where players had to repel hordes of creatures, take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers, in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack , with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed pace during stages. It also moved the gaming industry away from Pong -inspired sports games grounded in real-world situations towards action games involving fantastical situations. Space Invaders set
10476-549: Was an arcade basketball video game released by Taito in April 1974. It was designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who wanted to move beyond simple rectangles to character graphics. Taito released the game in Europe as Basketball in 1974. It was the earliest use of character sprites to represent human player characters in a video game. The gameplay was largely similar to earlier ball-and-paddle games, but with human-like characters rather than simple rectangles. Nishikado came up with
10584-533: Was its introduction of scrolling graphics, where the sprites moved along a vertical scrolling overhead track, with the course width becoming wider or narrower as the player's car moves up the road, while the player races against other rival cars , more of which appear as the score increases. The faster the player's car drives, the more the score increases. The game's concept was adapted from two earlier electro-mechanical driving games: Kasco's Mini Drive (1958) and Taito's Super Road 7 (1970). In contrast to
10692-408: Was limited to short sound bites ( Monopoly ), or as an alternate for percussion sounds ( Super Mario Bros. 3 ). The music on home consoles often had to share the available channels with other sound effects. For example, if a laser beam was fired by a spaceship, and the laser used a 1400 Hz square wave, then the square wave channel that was in use by music would stop playing music and start playing
10800-410: Was original, some was public domain music such as folk songs. Sound capabilities were limited; the popular Atari 2600 home system, for example, was capable of generating only two tones at a time. As advances were made in silicon technology and costs fell, a definitively new generation of arcade machines and home consoles allowed for great changes in accompanying music. In arcades, machines based on
10908-492: Was previously a concern was somewhat addressed with optical media becoming the dominant media for software games. CD quality audio allowed for music and voice that had the potential to be truly indistinguishable from any other source or genre of music. In fourth generation home video games and PCs this was limited to playing a Mixed Mode CD audio track from a CD while the game was in play (such as Sonic CD ). The earliest examples of Mixed Mode CD audio in video games include
11016-408: Was re-branded as Wheels by Midway for released in the United States and was influential on later racing games. Midway also released a version called Racer in the United States. Wheels and Wheels II sold 10,000 cabinets in the United States to become the best-selling arcade game of 1975 . The game received nine sequels: His next major title was Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in
11124-599: Was still limited in spindle speed, so playing an audio track from the game CD meant that the system could not access data again until it stopped the track from playing. Looping , the most common form of game music, was also a problem as when the laser reached the end of a track, it had to move itself back to the beginning to start reading again causing an audible gap in playback. To address these drawbacks, some PC game developers designed their own container formats in house, for each application in some cases, to stream compressed audio. This would cut back on memory used for music on
11232-625: Was the Japanese release of the Famicom in 1983 which was later released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It was capable of five channels, one being capable of simple PCM sampled sound. The home computer Commodore 64 released in 1982 was capable of early forms of filtering effects, different types of waveforms and eventually the undocumented ability to play 4-bit samples on
11340-531: Was to take pre-existing music not written exclusively for the game and use it in the game. The game Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and subsequent Star Wars games took music composed by John Williams for the Star Wars films of the 1970s and 1980s and used it for the game soundtracks. Both using new music streams made specifically for the game, and using previously released/recorded music streams are common approaches for developing sound tracks to this day. It
11448-460: Was used in some games, like King Arthur's World and Jurassic Park ), as well as environmental and architectural acoustics ( A Link to the Past , Secret of Evermore ). Many games also made heavy use of the high-quality sample playback capabilities ( Super Star Wars , Tales of Phantasia ). The only real limitation to this powerful setup was the still-costly solid state memory . Other consoles of
11556-469: Was usually monophonic , looped or used sparingly between stages or at the start of a new game, such as the Namco titles Pac-Man (1980) composed by Toshio Kai or Pole Position (1982) composed by Nobuyuki Ohnogi. The first game to use a continuous background soundtrack was Tomohiro Nishikado 's Space Invaders , released by Taito in 1978. It had four descending chromatic bass notes repeating in
11664-519: Was usurped in 1989 by Creative 's Sound Blaster , which used the same Yamaha FM chip in the AdLib, for compatibility, but also added 8-bit 22.05 kHz (later 44.1 kHz) digital audio recording and playback of a single stereo channel. As an affordable end-user product, the Sound Blaster constituted the core sound technology of the early 1990s; a combination of a simple FM engine that supported MIDI, and
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