Though a videogame's soundtrack can take up over half its disc space, sound quality tends to be somewhat overlooked in a world of increasingly complex game-play and dizzyingly realistic visuals. As musicians become more involved in the process, however, that poor-stepchild relationship may be changing. Sega is taking a new approach to the dubious concept of game-based pop music, offering the characteristically mechanized sounds of one of its games as building blocks for a pair of techno musicians, while Electronic Arts is using techniques developed by electronic musicians to create dynamic sound effects.
"I kind of am a gamemaker because when I DJ for a group of people I feel like I'm taking them on a VR tour," says DJ Mars, who along with fellow trance artist Commander Tom adapted Sega's Fighters MegaMix as a dance record available now on the Sega Web site and to be included on Commander Tom's upcoming CD.
Mars' record - unlike the popular Japanese soundtracks that consist merely of a games' incidental background music on CD or the occasional American collection of actual songs that first appeared on a game's soundtrack - is an after-the-fact evocation of the Fighters' spirit built around snippets of music and sound effects from the game. Mars says the radio edit of the song is "70 percent our work. We took the energy of the game and then went back to reinforce the feel" with some of its actual sounds.
If Mars and Tom don't have the name recognition that White Zombie brought to 3D0's Way of the Warrior in 1992 or Ronnie Montrose to Sega's 1996 Mr. Bones - or even of Prodigy and the other semi-recognizable techno artists featured on last year's critically lauded Wipeout XL - Sega marketing manager Angela Edwards says that's partly intentional.
"The goal was to reach this underground twentysomething crowd that knows videogames only vaguely in a way that's not blatantly promotional," she claims. She says that Mars and Tom were "paid for their work," but that, since the duo retain all rights to the song, their main benefit will be the exposure.
And as Mars wages a zealous campaign to bring his beloved trance music to America's attention from his tiny San Francisco record store, he thinks exposure is something he can't have too much of. "Look at Jerry Garcia," he says. "He has ties in Nordstrom, and he's still underground." Besides, the spiky-blue-haired DJ, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sonic the Hedgehog, believes his union with Sega was somehow destined to happen.
Destiny or not, Sega was probably wise to seek out small-time musicians with their own label, says Psygnosis publicist Mark Day. Though Psygnosis had one of the rare successes in the soundtrack genre with Wipeout, Day says that trying to get music from name musicians into a game can be a losing battle. "While it enhances the quality of the game, it doesn't enhance it at the payment rate the record companies think it's worth." Forming a record company within a game business isn't particularly effective either, as Sega's PolyGram-distributed Sega Music proved by shutting down last winter.
Which leaves much of the soundtrack work to be done by specialized companies that produce music specifically for games and to the game companies' in-house musicians. "Some of our in-house musicians want to do it the other way," becoming pop musicians themselves, says Day. "Bringing in these groups sort of ups the ante."
The fact that most successful music coming out of a game setting is techno in feel probably has a lot to do with the fact that that kind of music tends to go into it in the first place. "It has to work in concert with a lot of other sounds." explains Day. "Techno music works really well because it's abstract and intrinsically instrumental."
"It's a cultural thing," says Tristan Despres, formerly Sega's music director and now in charge of the company's Internet projects. "That kind of techno is the music game developers like; it's the kind of music they make at home." Despres also attributes the traditionally electronic, programmed feel of videogame music to the fact that in gaming's early days it was often made - along with much of those early games' artwork - by programmers. As the games moved to the CD format, with its attendant quality of sound, he says, "major musicians started jumping on the multimedia bandwagon." Now that process is working in reverse as well, with musicians becoming programmers. Thomas Dolby, for instance, started a company earlier this year to build a Java-based music system for Internet games and multimedia.
And Electronic Arts is currently adapting techniques developed by electronic musician Kenneth Newby from the band Trance Mission to create shifting, live-sounding crowd noise for this winter's Triple Play 99 baseball game. "In making my own music," he says, "I never liked using fixed sequences; I got tired of hearing the same thing over and over again." Instead, he programs algorithms that generate music in real time according to a set of rules - with controlled randomness built in. Thus, when he plays along with a programmed track, "it feels like I'm playing with an improviser," he says.
For triple play, he's producing a similar kind of program, mapping crowd intensity into timing and pitch. The algorithms will produce crowd noise in real time in response to the specific type of action on the field. Random variables built into the program will guarantee that it never plays back exactly the same way. "That's how you make it breathe," he says. "Controlled randomness."
It can also be very efficient, since "instead of defining a whole ton of MIDI phrases, you can use just one with variations," he says. Which is important, since, says Sega's Despres, sound designers are "always out there fighting for disc space."
The final step in closing the circle from musicianship to game-building and back will be completed, say both Mars and Despres, when DJ's creations become backing tracks for another game. Though both sides express enthusiasm rather than actual plans, Mars thinks his lack of gaming experience shouldn't hold him back. When it comes down to it, he says, like all the noises on any given videogame, "this music is also made with ones and zeros."
