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Innovations Of 90s Video Game Music
The history of the Video game music library is extensive and peculiar. To the uninitiated, the chip tunes of the 80s and early 90s video game were ear-bleeding nonsense. But with these limited resources, the skilled composers of the more significant titles often came up with quite catchy melodies. Households internationally are haunted by the echoes of Dreams Come True's Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks, and decades on, parents who have never even touched a joypad can recognise such tunes. Even now, the grating electronic sound of these early chips is among the many retro-stylings of the modern Indie titles. Remakes of legacy titles often make a point of revisiting earlier sounds. Climatic themes in Final Fantasy IV and V contain feature samples of the songs they were based on before bringing out the full digital sound of the rest of the title's music.
Whilst the last decade is widely associated with the maturation of music used in video games, the nineties contained many landmarks. The home computer, always one step ahead of the curve, was creating sophisticated tracks well before the consoles, which were limited for a long time to instruments in their MIDI tables. Even before the innovations in the late 90s, later SCUMMVM titles like 'Monkey Island 2' pushed the proverbial envelope with intriguing dynamic music systems. The instruments in Lucasarts' midi system were capable of seguing neatly between scenes and other actions on screen without the need to pause. Later in the decade, tracks that were composed in much the same way to electronica production musicwere widely used. Notable examples of this kind of music being widely used were found in the Unreal engine titles 'Unreal' and 'Deus Ex': total sound fidelity was finally a reality.
Music from this period became a lot less about making defining themes and melodies, and some artists became more experimental. The use of ethnic chants and instruments defined PC strategy title 'Homeworld', its 'Industrial Arabic' sound linked to the game's story of returning desert-planet exiles. 'Homeworld' was also somewhat innovative for using both a choir ('Agnus Dei', 'Adagio for Strings' in vocal form) and a guest artist (Yes) on the soundtrack. All this is remarkable when you consider that the games of just ten years previous didn't have enough audio bandwidth for both the music and the sound effects Library.
Outcast Game – Opening Sequence