so is game music just really easy to get right or what
i've literally never heard anyone say "yeah this game is pretty good but the music sucks"
seems like every gdq run someone says "by the way this song is great. in fact all of this game's music is great"
even terrible games can have great music. sonic '06? great soundtrack. cheetahmen? no one knows anything about that game except the theme rules
@monorail i actually saw a theory about this once
that bad video game music exists, just that it's a lot easier to just not remember... because of the history of video games. the genre began with such limitations that technology-wise, composers were limited to just the melody, so they had to come up with really catchy and strong melodies. that's the part easiest for human brains to remember, and so even as technology grew, the "genre taste" tended to be melody-heavy. >
@monorail a lot of the video game music i've seen slagged on as bad suffer from sounding too generic to be memorable. and there are plenty of jokes about how it doesn't sound like video game music, but instead *movie soundtrack*. in other words, nobody remembers it as good because it's trying to be a very modern "wannabe danny elfman", aping a medium where it's been a much longer time when music had to be melody-focused by technological limitations.>
@monorail so modern bad video game music gets ragged on for sounding generic and forgettable.
meanwhile the good video game music has often kept in that genre convention of being melody-heavy - "easily hummable" instead of a big orchestral complex piece.
i think this also helps the good stuff 'stay evergreen' because that early music especially, being so simple, really opened the door for a lot of covers, remixes, reinterpretations, etc.>
@monorail so good video game music, being melody-heavy, is able to occupy the modern consciousness of fans and still be remembered for being good. the bad shit gets more easily forgotten.
a casual example is one of the favourite things i've found lately is a channel that does big band style covers of video game songs. if "still alive" was more complex, it probably would have been forgotten more easily. but since it's simple and catchy, it's still very much around >
@monorail with people doing Frank Sinatra style lounge singer covers, heavy metal covers, hell it wouldn't surprise me if there's an operatic cover of it out there somewhere.
the good shit staying in the public consciousness, making people forget the crap, is definitely a selection bias that happens in a whole lot of media - i mean thank god i can listen to the classic rock station and not hear EVERY song that would have been on the radio in 1972, y'know? thank fuck for good shit only - >
tldr video game music good in part because good shit easy to remember, because real early computers only do so many beeps n' boops, so they only had room for the good beeps
but i took five million words to say that Whoops
@wigglytuffitout i skimmed because i'm exhausted but i'll give it a real read later, and anyway what i read made sense to me
i've noticed that a lot of instrumental music tends to be a lot less melody-focused than most video game music is, unless it's something like chiptune that's specifically trying to evoke a video gamey feel
@monorail yeah! and i've seen that kinda music really panned as generic and forgettable when it pops up in video games.
i don't think it's BAD music by definition, just that it's more diffuse, and when diffuse music is there to help push along a mood, it's harder to single it out and remember it as Really Good.
but i'm also biased because all my fav movie music is also strongly strongly "hummable" and "coverable" too (insert star wars lietmotif-a-gogo), lol
@monorail but i think video game music, with that "melody focus via technology limitations" taste, definitely has a bit of an advantage here. (and i think it also got a good boost from early composers being, well, good enough to leap over that technological limitation and make it work. it's a bit "if you can make an evening gown out of a trash bag, you can probably make a really fucking good evening gown if we actually give you cloth this time". trial by fire! sink or swim! lol)