My other childhood companion

I was reading a thread on GAF earlier about someone playing The Legend of Zelda for the first time recently. Unsurprisingly, the thread quickly turned into graph paper map-making nostalgia rather quickly. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I never really made maps to the games I loved as a kid. I wondered, half aloud, what did I do as a kid with the games I loved?

I recorded their music.

I’ve always been fascinated with music in games, but The Legend of Zelda on my NES was the first game I remember falling in love with for the music. I don’t quite remember what I used to do it, but I do remember walking to school a few days later with my yellow Sony Walkman on. Inside was a tape that was full of Zelda music that I had recorded, most likely by putting the recorder in front of the tinny, little speaker on my parent’s TV. I wish I had that tape now, though, because I vividly remember not being able to sit still for more than a few minutes while I recorded the music and continually playing, Link’s sword swipes mixing in with the music.

That’s probably where it started, but I’m not sure I’ve ever fell out of love with video game music. I was born in 1981, so I grew up with an NES controller in my hands. I always favored RPGs (which was strange as a kid, I’ll admit), which are famous for their music. With little text and no voice acting for a long time, RPGs had to rely on music to convey creepy dungeons, heroic castles, victory, and loss.

Music, naturally, got much better during the SNES and Genesis days, with both consoles having their own respective and memorable “sounds.” My two favorite games of the era were ToeJam and Earl for the Genesis and Chrono Trigger for the SNES. There are many, many more games that have their songs stuck in the back of my brain (and surely yours as well). Below are the main theme from TJ&E and a nice selection of ten songs from Chrono Trigger, thanks to YouTube:

During the Playstation and PS2 days music took another leap forward with yet more sound capabilities. However, voice acting started to come into the mix (especially in the PS2 days). To be clear, I’m not against voice acting at all, but the problem often comes when voice acting becomes the focal point of games over the music. Sure, there have been great soundtracks (the most memorable being from the RPGs I enjoyed on both platforms), but they seem fewer and farther between. Granted, this may be because there was an increased focus (and these pressures still apply today) of orchestrating the music in games, in making them more grand, more sweeping. No longer can you have one guy in a room with a keyboard making music for an 8-bit game; you need a full orchestra and hours upon hours of music that often change with what the player is doing.

Or you license a bunch of music and call it a day.

I’m not sure I had a specific goal in my mind when I started this other than getting some nostalgia out of my brain. I certainly don’t think that all music in games are worthless nowadays like some grizzled gamer shaking his fist and those damned kids on his lawn again.

I guess what it comes down to is that I won’t be setting my tape recorded up next to my TV and capturing Ezio’s sword swipes alongside its music.

And maybe that means I’ve lost something, in the end.