Comments on: 8-bit Tunes And Why We Are Chasing Them

By: HarbingerZero

HarbingerZero — Mon, 05 May 2014 14:58:39 +0000

Just getting around to catching up on my RSS feed. Great post! I too have noticed that I turn the music in my games off, and have been doing that for years now. I never did that when I was listening to 8 or 16 bit tunes, no matter how many hours in a row I had to listen to them.

By: flosch

flosch — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 20:07:40 +0000

You are right in that, if you listened to a single tune over and over again, you could get pretty sick of it. Thankfully, a lot of audio designers learned early on that you needed variety. That’s at least one reason why every Mega Man level had its own theme tune. Of course, then you’d end up in final dungeons in RPGs, with awesome music that you hadn’t ever heard before, but that would play endlessly while you’re trying to fight your way through, until you can’t stand listening to it any more.

Another revealing point is how you said that you could listen to game music and never realized you heard it 100 times before. That’s probably partially because you set the volume so low, but it’s also because lots of game music follows the film paradigm and just “isn’t going anywhere”. It just stays this nebulous thing that’s just draped over the scenery. You can make an art out of that, definitely: just ask Brian Eno. Then again, maybe there’s a reason Ambient isn’t exactly a great seller.

I still think that the sound, as much as the melodies, made those 8-bit tunes memorable. There just isn’t anything else quite like it around. As much fun as all these “modern remixes” of 8-bit classics can be with their electric guitars or jazz combos or symphony orchestras, they always feel a bit off to me. Like a cover song, they can be good (occasionally), they can be bad (all too often), but they always feel slightly unreal.

By: R

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 19:38:23 +0000

Personally, I think it was a more basic change… back in the day I don’t recall any sort of granularity over sound, it was either “On” or “Off” (if you even had that choice) plus a volume control. I remember music being much more present, especially since there wasn’t any voice audio happening.

These days, primarily in an effort to be able to hear dialogue, I tend to set the discrete music channel to low volume… it’s barely noticeable so I don’t actually hear the music very often. I could listen to a soundtrack of a modern game I just played for 100+ hours and not realize it came from that game… and I’d probably be thinking “ooh, I’d love to play a game with that music” while listening to it.

Also, as TGP indicates, music was simple so it had to be catchy to serve any sort of function. I didn’t even own a Nintendo system at any point in my life but I can still vividly remember the music from Mario Brothers… it was a core part of the gameplay and the music was somewhat integrated with the basic interactive game sounds, I think, while now non-music sounds are related to actual sounds like birds chirping, wind, footsteps, sword clashes, etc that have nothing to do with the soundtrack. And yeah, nostalgia has certainly smoothed over the annoyance of listening to the same sounds over and over for days or weeks at a time.

By: The Guilty Party

The Guilty Party — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 23:35:35 +0000

Pretty much the only thing you *could* make was hooks. So the songs stick in our head, and we loved them, but honestly, at the time it was kind of annoying after hour 12 of hearing the same thing over and over.

By: flosch

flosch — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 21:24:07 +0000

Small addendum: I have this quote in my mind (which I can remember neither exactly nor who it came from) from a musician who basically said, “when synthesizers became available, we were all stunned and thought of the limitless possibilities. We were no longer confined by building physical instruments, but could make sounds all the ways we’d like… and then all we ended up doing with synthesizers was better and better impressions of instruments that already existed. How disheartening.”

That’s what I had in mind when I said that there were “virtual instruments that had never been there before” in 8-bit music, if only for the limits of technology at that time.