In the past week I've learned a lot about the history of video games playing Evoland. One thing that's really stuck with me is how much of a difference the sound made. The game seemed a little awkward at first, and when I unlocked sound effects, I realized why: until that point, it had been silent. Soon after I unlocked background music, which really made the gameplay more immersive and enjoyable. Later on I unlocked 16-bit music, which made even more of a difference. It occurred to me how much of a difference the sound makes, so I've decided to dedicate this blog post to it. A few notable landmarks in the development of video game music, as I learned from this article: At first, video games were entirely silent. The first one with any kind of sound was the 1972 arcade game Pong, with one sound effect. Two years later was the release of the handheld game Simon, in which players press buttons to copy sound patterns using just four separate notes. Still, it was music. Another milestone is the Magnavox Odyssey2, released in 1978, with phonetic speech capability. 1983 saw the release of Dragon's Lair, one of the first games with stereo sound. In 1985 came Super Mario Bros., complete with audio cues. In 1986 came the Sega Master System, with four sound channels. 1989's Nintendo GameBoy also had four channels for sound. In the same year, the Sega Genesis was released, with six sound channels. 1990's SNK NeoGeo had 15. It's worth mentioning here that 16-bit machines didn't mean 16-bit music, as it wasn't just for sound. Most of it was 8-bit music. In 1993 came the Panasonic 3DO, with a 16-bit processor and 17 different channels. Also in 1993, Atari's Jaguar was released, with two 32-bit processors, one of them for sound. Jumping ahead to 1996, we have the release of the Nintendo 64, which used its CPU for sound generation. It was, as the name suggests, a 64-bit system. In 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time comes out, with music as an integral part of the gameplay; it was one of the first games to have this. A year later the Sega Dreamcast console is released, with a 32-bit, 64-channel RISC CPU on its sound processor. The year 2000 had a couple interesting developments. One of these was the game Hitman from Io Interactive, with a soundtrack scored by an entire orchestra. Another interesting development was the pet-simulation Seaman, using voice-recognition to allow for conversations with digital characters. The year also saw the release of Hey You, Pikachu!, which used voice commands to guide the eponymous character through miniquests. In 2001, Nintendo released the SongBoy, an audio adapter for the GameBoy Color for playing MP3 files. This was also the year that Internet radio led to video game music radio, as gaming music began to leak into the mainstream, as well as increased processing power in new consoles, meaning better sound. Memory has also been a concern, since early video games didn't have the memory to have elaborate sound schemes. So, to summarize:
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AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
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