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 early video games.
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 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.
History
Early video game technology and computer chip music At the time video games had emerged as a popular form of entertainment in 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 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.
While this allowed for the inclusion of music in early arcade video games, it 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 such 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Early games used simple tone generation and/or frequency modulation synthesis to simulate instruments for melodies, and used a "noise channel" for simulating percussive noises. PCM samples were limited to short sound bites (Monopoly), used in place of percussion sounds (Super Mario Bros. 3) or used for basslines (Gimmick!). Home consoles often shared music channels with sound effects. For example, a spaceship's 1400 Hz square wave laser beam sound effect would interrupt any music on that channel.
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 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 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 the Atari 2600 and several late Famicom titles. These chips add to the existing sound capabilities.
Early digital synthesis and sampling
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 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 the chip itself. Konami's 1983 arcade game Gyruss used five square wave 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 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. Reprinted from The widespread adoption of FM synthesis by consoles would later be one of 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 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 Macintosh and Amiga home computers offered these features before most others. The Atari ST, the Amiga's main rival, used a Yamaha YM2149 Programmable Sound Generator (PSG); but, compared to Amiga's proprietary sound engine, Atari's PSG could handle only one channel of sound and needed the computer's CPU to process data. This was impractical until the 1989 release of the Atari STE, which used DMA techniques to play back PCM samples at up to 50 kHz. The ST remained relevant, however; equipped with a MIDI controller and external ports, it became the choice for 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 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 sound chip-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 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.Grannell, Craig (August 2008). "The Making of Marble Madness". Retro Gamer (Imagine Publishing) (53): 82–87.