The Selection

The 80s and 90s had some good games that will always be remembered for the game and characters but what I loved apart from the game itself was the music that was played on the games throughout the 80s and 90s. My favourite was Sonic and Alex The Kidd as I had a Sega Master Drive rather than the Nintendo but I did play it a lot around people’s houses after school or when I was seeing family in London, oh and Mortal Kombat I used to be good on that with Sonia and Sub Zero two of the characters from the game. The music helped keep me from throwing the joystick out the window on the harder levels but that was one of the reasons why I enjoyed making music on my keyboard it was more enjoyable to do rather than scream at the TV every time I failed the jump or what have you. I was okay on the keyboard and nearly finished an ensemble which was the hardest bit but I just couldn’t stretch my fingers long enough to make it to that note so I took up practicing hard gaming music but a bit easier only some keys didn’t exist so an H sharp and for those who don’t play an instrument like a piano or a keyboard, there are only seven keys A -G then back again along with five sharps and one-note wrong parts will come across as flat and not sounding as it’s meant to. That’s why I always respected the ones who made the songs that made the tracks and it was on a 16-bit card that used to take knowledge and skill to program it in or at least know how much ram and what you have for each song and what it adds up to.  The good thing to come out of it was the amount of ram space you can have on your computer before it was only 1GB that was a ram and then the gaming experience happened after they decided games needed to have more gamer experience in there and music was the answer to the problems after they did a survey and found out Tetris theme tune was the most loved theme tune of all time and beat all the TV and Film scores that come before it. Gaming music became a staple of the gaming diet which was led by the simpler 8-bit tracks that were from the 70s and was abandoned as the sounds were said to be too harsh and too samey and people were getting confused on what game track was what so when the 16 bit came around it was much needed and held more space which meant a new wavetable form like the triangle or square. The gaming experience is different now and gaming music has dramatically changed as now it’s more cinematic but of course, that does depend on the game in the 70s, 80s, and 90s it was simpler but complex to play rhythms which were on waveforms out of the box. They say there wouldn’t be gaming music without the square and triangle waveform and that is true I think in fact it was the only two waveforms that fit on the ram or though I’m told it’s not the Ram it’s on the motherboard which had to be carefully put in place for each one. Tetris is said to be the first-ever gaming music that was designed especially for a game and that turned out to be the blueprint of future gaming music that was out after in the 80s and 90s which were jolly, dark, and sometimes mysterious. Anyway here are my top 5 gaming music themes from worst to best but they are all my favourites and spent a lot of time in gaming land and on the keyboard listening to them. When I was eight and above I used to go to the arcade it started early on but it was my thing to go down to the arcade and swear at the machine for apparently messing me up once again I gave up eventually took to playing out in the fields again but I was there for a year or two on and off and it was expensive after awhile  50ps quickly run out and I had to go home or somewhere else but I did enjoy playing the arcades and do you know what I can’t remember what games I played but I do remember when Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter was put up I was always on them quite a bit. Pac-Man didn’t have music until Mrs Pacman came out and that caused the earlier games to be released with music something that was unheard of and a great thing to push sales back up and bring in more in the future. The evolution of gaming music which was around the same time Mrs. Pacman was released in 1981 made the games more fun and they said that Mrs. Pacman was something new but they weren’t sure what it was. By the time Sega Master Genesis and Nintendo came out, it was changed from 8 bit to 16 bit and the music got jollier and less piercing in the arcade where the square or triangle waveform used was high pitched and thick sounding which came out the speakers at an alarming rate. Moving to when the Playstation was released the music changed to cinematic with the only game to play on PS1 and I know there was a few but it was Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot and the music in both is different but I feel it lacked musical spark which actually Tomb Raider took some while to get used to but I did note I could go to sleep to some of the tracks as they were actually quite therapeutic, but by the way that was because I was used to more upbeat in your face tracks not ones that might put me to sleep and not being rude. And you can’t mention gaming music without mentioning the Grand Theft Auto series which I felt pushed the boundaries of music and there were a lot of copies of GTA which were all good selections even Mafia. It had its own universe and dimensions which were different from what came before and pushed all sorts of limits and boundaries in gaming but the music was unforgettable and a key feature to the game and any game following GTA.