MegaBubble's First Stream-of-Conscious Wildly Philosophical Thoughts on Video Game Music

     

        I'm starting this entry with nothing particular in mind, except that I have a passion for video game music!   Well, it's not really a passion, but I have a huge appreciation for it.  Having grown up with video games (starting with the Atari 2600 in the early to mid 80s, and the NES and so on), I have seen video games evolve from having no music at all, to having some quite interesting and sophisticated music.  [Ugh, Times New Roman is boring :3 ]

[Let's see how this is.  Ah, that's better B-) ] - I'm going to include bolded brackets to indicate a complaint/observation having absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand - thus, you can skip those portions, for the sake of your sanity :3

Just like the Texas Rattlesnake many other kids that grew up in the 80s, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was my first major console with respect to good background music, and was my console of choice for quite a while.  But before that, I had had an Atari 2600 that my sister and I would play quite frequently.   

Asteroids was one of our favorite titles - it had some Jaws-like music, so the music was pretty insignificant (comparatively speaking to later games for other consoles).  In retrospect, however, it was somewhat of a breakthrough that VGs started having music at all.  I don't think Asteroids would have been nearly as interesting without that 2 note, ominous music to remind us of how dramatic and dire the situation was that we had to blast all the asteroids, or else we would surely perish. :3

[For the sake of not being 100% boring, I'll make this entry (a bit) shorter and just continue with the same idea in future blog posts.  (Man, I really don't like this blog layout and font choices - I'm having to constantly be typing at the bottom of the screen instead of being able to scroll down - first world problems)]

So let's go ahead and skip to one of the most memorable music themes in video game history - Super Effing Mario Brothers for NES (and don't forget Duck Hunt).  Being the first game for the NES (packaged with almost all of the original NES consoles), everyone was pretty much forced to play this classic title - and what a breakthrough for a debut title for the console!  I believe that the Stage 1-1 (and all subsequent Overworld levels in the game) music really set the standard of high quality for many NES titles.  Of course, this is not to say that there weren't plenty of awful music themes on NES games, but there were also a lot of absolutely amazing ones.

My favorite NES music - and actually my favorite video game music from any period (thus far) - is in the original Mega Man games (1-6).  Like many others, my first Mega Man game was Mega Man 2, because it was so wildly popular and highly reviewed.  A 1988 release, Mega Man 2 has some of the most catchy and innovative music I've ever heard (in any genre of music anywhere).  Not many people really think about it, but a lot of the music somewhat preempted various forms of dance/electronic music.  In fact, I noticed that Wood Man's theme is somewhat of a drum and bass tune, which didn't really make its mark until the 90s with "Jungle" music, which is more beat-oriented.

[ man, I really can't decide on a font.  I'll have to explore any potential further options later :3 ]

And I believe that the Mega Man (NES series) sound composers (MM games were a Capcom release, by the way) really had a lot of talented composers - especially considering the inherently limited methods of composition and sounds to work with.  According to Wikipedia, we have Takashi Tateishi to thank for the MM2 soundtrack, though I thought there were more.

Mega Man 2 was really one of the first NES titles that I can think of off-hand that had an extremely versatile and varied soundtrack.  There were 8 bosses that Mega Man had to destroy before he got to Dr. Wily's stage(s) (Wily is an evil scientist who was bent on taking over the world, and Mega Man was created by Dr. Light to fight Wily - who was once teamed up with Dr. Light - who had gone awry at some point)

The bosses (from memory) were Flash Man, Crash Man, Bubble Man, Wood Man, Metal Man, Quick Man, Air Man, and Heat Man - each with his own musical theme as Mega Man blew through their (respective) levels to reach the bosses - who were apparently just kinda hanging out in a room waiting to be (easily) destroyed :3

If I had to choose a favorite MM2 theme, it would be Bubble Man's stage.  Quite an evocative theme - coupled with the fact that the stage was predominantly green and blue, my two favorite colors (and wonderful shades of blue and green, I might add).  For those not familiar, here's a YouTube video I had put up a while ago of Bubble Man's Stage OST (original soundtrack), with gameplay in the background:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_asnMs2WJg

[ I was going to post it as a video, but couldn't get that to work - so it'll open in another window :3  Or I'll edit it in later ] 

Really all the themes from the game were great to me.  One of the weakest was probably Crash Man's theme, because it was a little longer than the other ones.  However, it worked extremely well with the level (which I also believed was too long, since it was excruciatingly painful to slowly climb the ladders - that was fixed in Mega Man 3) 

Simply put, Mega Man 2 would not have been such a huge hit if it weren't for the amazing soundtrack.  I bet it would still have been a great title, but the music was so unique, and left a profound impression on me (I eventually went on to study music in college - mostly because of my love for classical music [specifically music for solo piano], and I later realized that video game music was a big part of my musical appreciation as well)

Not to mention the mere beauty of the art/animation, ease of gameplay, and straightforwardness were amazing as well.  But someone else can write about that, because we're out of time, folks :3

jk, we're not really (or are we??)  But I've rambled on enough, I guess.  I'm pretty biased towards Mega Man music, and believe that Capcom composers really inspired a lot of other game composers to aspire to that same high-quality standard (though most of them failed :P )

Thus concludes a totally epic -BubbleBobble- rambling on video game music.  For lots of classic video game soundtracks, visit mah YouTube channel (I have several of them now):  http://www.youtube.com/ReceiveDeath