one of the reasons im still fascinated by game music is that so much of it was composed by morons and savants and moronic savants. and like, i dont want to exaggerate what that means, every popular music scene has people who are more literate in their genre or “what sounds good” than music theory. this is why there’s a gulf of difference between King Crimson and Atomic Rooster. this is not games exceptionalism, it’s something i find fun in general across music. just ppl making shit.
the difference i think is that chipsound is very naked, it can’t really be compensated with effects or pedals or samples. the potentiality is much lower and you have to commit. and people have committed to absolutely feral ideas instead of learning to go I-V-VI-IV. chipsound is a very unadorned, direct musical style… it is formally vulnerable and intimate. it’s fucking beautiful to have decades of this stuff outside of the narrow confines of tonality and western music theory.
as more and more game critics start to turn against AAA in various ways (finally), this transfer is one that doesnt get written about as much. the Orchestral Soundtrack obliterated a healthier, more creative, more freeform artistic practice. a shrewd trade for fame and authority. every game composer who saw themselves as the next maher or beethoven or stravinsky or gershwin thumbed their nose at ppl just making shit. and now that impulse is boxed away as an irregular aesthetic, while the shambling parodies of full bands and orchestra are Real Music
it's me, the complete amateur beginner who opened the nesdev wiki and proceeded to make a few hundred chiptunes without ever learning a lick of music theory and yeah I think a lot of "highly polished" games these days have very boring unmemorable soundtracks
not that I claim to be a better composer than them but I don't claim to be a professional who gets paid to work on AAA games either
one of my favourite examples of this where you can clearly see the evolution and growth of someone with no musical training who made music for games anyway is Tim Follin, who started out making stuff that sounded… well, certainly more like “music” on a technical level than you might expect to come out of the 1‐bit beeper in the ZX Spectrum, but not very cohesive as a piece of music. (high volume and harsh noise warning for these first 2 video embeds.)
within a few years, he was already making stuff for the same platform that was not only even more technically advanced for the hardware limitations, but also more musically accomplished (even though almost all his tracks at this stage were just iterating directly on his previous works!):
and despite his start making what’s maybe best described as “experimental harsh noise”, he quickly tended to stuff that sounded like live music — and far more convincingly so on the SNES than even the orchestral soundtracks from industry giants like Square, which feel dreadfully muffled in comparison:
yet his later music maintains a unique, appealing flavour which i’d say first started forming in his earliest works on more (the most?) limited hardware. i don’t think you’d get his later soundtracks without his earlier ones!
it’s interesting to read some of the stuff he’s said in interviews with all this context in mind.
