“You essentially have to take the core storytelling aspects of music composition and break them apart as if they’re all cards in a deck,” says Winifred Phillips, author of A Composer’s Guide To Game Music. When a specific action occurs, the game jumps to the appropriate section of the song - as if the player is James Brown, telling the computer to “take it to the bridge”.įor the musician, though, horizontal resequencing presents a huge conceptual headache. The technique is called horizontal re-sequencing, and it works by putting “triggers” into the Midi files that contain the musical score. As he walks away, the pirates’ theme ends with a flourish, before segueing seamlessly back to the overture. When he wakes up a group of sleeping pirates, for example, a jaunty accordion picks up the melody. Every time he enters a building or encounters a new character, the game introduces a variation on the main theme. It’s apparent right from the start, when the ornately named protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood, wanders around the small town of Woodtick. Using the patented iMUSE (Interactive Music Streaming Engine) system, Michael Land and Peter McConnell created a branching musical score that could react dynamically to the player’s choices. Trent Reznor wrote the unsettling score for PC shooter Quake, David Bowie cropped up in the adventure game The Nomad Soul and Michael Jackson, who’d worked with Sega on the Moonwalker arcade game that accompanied his film of the same name, got involved with scoring Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (his contributions were largely abandoned, but fans have found fragments of songs like Jam and Stranger In Moscow hidden in the Sonic soundtrack).Ī more ambitious approach debuted on 1991’s The Secret Of Monkey Island 2 - a point-and-click adventure on the PC and Amiga. Sensing this shift, some pop artists started to get involved in game composition. Yuzo Koshiro introduced house and techno to the soundtracks for The Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage - while Yoko Shimomura’s music for Street Fighter II became a hip-hop staple, sampled by Frank Ocean, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Dizzee Rascal.

The success of Sonic proved games could compete with pop music and suddenly the floodgates opened. So I wanted to write songs like that for Sonic the Hedgehog as a film.” “There were a bunch of hit songs, like those from Top Gun, Flashdance, and Dirty Dancing. “At the time, MTV and films were very popular,” he told Video Game Music Online in 2011. To write the music for the console’s flagship game, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega hired J-pop star Masato Nakamura - who deliberately distanced himself from the 8-bit, chiptune sounds that had become the medium’s distinguishing characteristics.

House of the dead 2 soundtrack