Why The Music Industry Should Embrace Video Games
25Aug
Why The Music Industry Should Embrace Video Games
The early history of music and video games is fondly remembered by gaming enthusiasts: an electronic chorus of wailing mass produced chips worked upon by unsung musical geniuses. We thought they were pioneers. They thought they were film industry rejects. We were both right.
But those who were not indoctrinated into the world of video game music have never really understood the fascination with these coarse, unnatural sounds. Least accepting of all was the music industry itself, and there wasn’t a lot of cross pollination. Music based on game tunes was thin on the ground and are probably best forgotten. Google Ambassadors of Funk’s ‘Super Mario Land’ and Doctor Spin’s ‘Tetris’ if you’re a masochist (but you can have the trivia that Doctor Spin was a pseudonym for Andrew Lloyd Webber for free).
In the nineties, some ‘games’ exploited the newly emerging CD format for quick wins (The Make My Video series of games that allowed you to mess around with videos for INXS and Marky Mark). The list of artists who worked on actually creating games based around their music is slightly more impressive: Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker is perhaps most fondly remembered, though David Bowie’s input to David Cage’s bizarre Omikron: The Nomad Soul is undeservedly obscure.
Video Game Music Embraced?
But even as games have moved beyond the problems of limited fidelity, the music industry (which lets face it, has more than a fair share of its own problems anyway) has been slow to dip its toe in the lake of opportunities in gaming. The explosion of the music genre in the last five years bought a raft of karaoke games, guitar puzzle titles and variations on those themes only to end with a kind of mutual parting. Musicians everywhere saw it their place to look down on anyone who dared to hold a plastic guitar and the late-coming lawsuits brought by Maroon 5 and Courtney Love over the use of likenesses in various titles speaks volumes for the animosity. Though in all fairness, the music genre had a simple innovation problem, and the band-themed Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles jumped a particularly lethargic and malnourished shark.
Nevertheless, composers working in video games now have the same technology that is available in any field they dare to work in. And composers who reknowned mostly for working in Film (Harry Gregson-Williams, Hans Zimmer) are collaborators and originators on major video game projects. But what of the lumbering giant that is popular music itself? Are artists and agents adequately offering up music to the games industry, and are game directors raiding the treasure troves of popular music to enhance their games?
A Few Great Examples
It cannot be a coincidence that the few games that have embraced popular tunes to bolster their atmosphere are also among the few that have set the industry alight in recent years. Any other scenario would require the creativity to come from the music industry itself, and good luck with that. Among the luminaries of the last decade, we’ve got the Grand Theft Auto series, which innovatively featured a mix of radio stations along genre lines (that were cleverly coordinated with each city’s gangs). Getting around the fact that budgets were small and the music industry wasn’t especially interested, earlier games featured songs by lesser-known artists who deserved the exposure. Little Big Planet would repeat this, giving well deserved exposure to experimental rock groups and foreign artists.
Apart from this, there has been a wealth of royalty-free music to exploit for period-based games. The Fallout games use music from the era of vocal harmony bands to add a fifties flavour to its nuclear paranoia fuelled world of wastelands. Fallout 3 aped Grand Theft Auto’s radio station approach effectively. Similarly, the Bioshock games add music from the same period played over tannoys, radios and victrolas. In fact, Bioshock is a cut above Fallout 3, which feels like somebody did a library search for the words ‘farm’ and ‘atom bomb’: Bioshock actually places its music in areas where it’s most effective. So ‘God Bless the Child’ is played when the story is currently focusing on the freakish ‘Little Sisters’, and ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ plays in an area where the downfall of the underwater city of Rapture is most apparent.
The Music Industry Needs Video Games
But despite these fantastic examples, the video game industry seems to be a no-go area for popular music. The chief usage of contemporary music seems to be in trailers dreamt up by the marketing department (such as Eminem’s ‘I Collapse’ in adverts for Modern Warfare 2). Tunes that are nowhere to be seen in the game itself. And it needn’t be this way: the film industry may hate the fact that video games are keeping young people out of the cinema, but at least it knows how to exploit it. The music industry doesn’t even have to compete with video games, but because it’s ‘new’ (i.e. less than thirty years old) it yet again finds itself in a situation where it doesn’t quite know how to exploit them, or to make itself affordable or appealing for people who make them.
So how about it, music industry. How about turning this particular nail in your coffin into a weapon for once?
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