The History of Music in Video Games - podcast episode cover

The History of Music in Video Games

Mar 21, 201138 min
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Episode description

Video game systems have evolved at an extraordinary pace, and this evolution includes audio as well as video. In this podcast, Chris and Jonathan recount the growth of video game music, from its origins to the work of modern-day composers.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com. And I just made the person sitting across from me crack up his name entitled our senior writer, Jonathan Strickland.

But reverse that. Yes, I love the band, we all do, but there's other things in life, you know that's more important. M hm uh yeah. Actually we're not gonna be talking a lot about bands per se, no, but we are talking about music, definitely the history of music and video games. And I have an interest in this because, of course, you know, I'm I'm a gamer. I enjoyed playing video games, but I really had early on a very deep fascination and admiration for some of the greats in video game music.

And you have to remember, Chris and I both come from an era in which home video games either had no music at all when they first came out, or or no sounds at all when they first came out, or the sounds were let's call them primitive. Well, I, well, I don't know. I think that's uh, that may be an oversimplification because we had well, you know, the early palm games Boop. You're right, that's incredibly sophisticated. I retract

my statement. Beat Boop is an amazing, amazing soundtrack. Okay, okay, let's just point that out now. We We've talked about the history of video games in different contexts in many in many podcasts, um. And not to get back into that, but you know, video games are are several decades old, now, Okay. The first one that I found, according to my research, was Pong Nolan Bushnell's amazing video game Pong with Magnificent Octopus, his Magnificent Octopus. I actually, actually I I still enjoy

Pong to something degree. It's very simple, but sometimes the simple games are are fun. I was just played exclusively. If there's no paint for me to watch dry, I love a Pong alright, well, alright, but yes, I actually do like playing Pong too. I'm just I'm grouchy because my medication is wearing of note to self, don't record more podcasts with with Jonathan when he's sick. Um. So yeah, Pong Okay, we're not talking a lot of soundtrack here,

but it did have at least have noise. It had sound sound effects that went along with the ball hitting the paddle and then of course the ball missing the paddle, also hitting the walls and hitting the walls yes, boop whoop. And to elaborate on that, before Palm came out, there were a few home game systems, but none of them

incorporate sound. They were absolutely silent. Yep, yep. Now, UM one of the games that I had sort of forgotten about, and basically I went to UH in search of video game music history and I found it a really awesome timeline by Glenn McDonald out there. If you can find it should be pretty easy to find. UM. But he brought up one that I had completely forgotten and didn't think of as a video game, but and it's really I guess technically not but as an electronic game, Simon,

And I didn't realize it was that old. UM. But yeah, Simon. It revolves around sound because you're trying to match the colors and and lights and sounds UM in a pattern. And it's a very very simple game. You just try to repeat it goes you know, from the first note to the second note of the third and you're supposed to repeat back the atter in it plays for you and until you finally miss one and it buzzes. It gets too complex for you to be able to follow.

But but yeah, it's it's funny because I had I had completely not thought about that as an electronic uh, you know, a step in the history of electronic gaming and the sound UM. But the next one he mentioned was another favorite of mine back from my days hanging out at the skating rink, UM Tito's Gunfight UM, which was the first to use rather than using hardwired circuits, it used the actual microprocessor to make the sounds. Yeah, we should point out that these early game systems, everything

was hardwired into the console. Like the Pong game. You couldn't play other games on that system. That's all it did. Let's play the variations of Pong, and so all the sounds that the console could make were hardwired into the circuitry. Um. There was nothing beyond that. And a lot of these early games like Simon, same thing. If you had assignment,

It's not like you could suddenly play music. I mean, apart from music that would have four notes to it and a little noise if you got anything wrong wrong. You couldn't play a song on it, no, because it only had those four tones that was capable of making. Yes, now that's you know, in in contrast to two other machines. UM. Actually, it reminds me a little bit of Loops, which just came out in the last year. I have one of those. You do have loops, so do I. That's funny. I

didn't know that, but yeah, you can. You can actually play music on that to some degree. But the sounds, they're far more advanced sounds on that. UM. Another system actually, one that I owned, the Attar, also had hardwired sounds on it. UM you were you were limited the people who would program games that would come on the cartridges, which are using ROMs you snap into place in the cartridge slot read only memory. Yes. Uh, the people who programmed games had to take advantage of the sounds that

are hardwired into the console itself. It's a very limited sound library and so you know what what you had to deal with was, you know, your standard and lots of little I still remember the McDonald brought it up, but I still remember the tank sound from combat that right, Yeah, there were there were various beeps and bloops that were at different pitches, so you could make some very very

primitive music. Essentially would program it, hard program it onto the cartridge and that would tell the console, okay, make these noises. So this is still like besides the Gunfight game. These are more like Simon, and as far as music goes, they're more like Simon than they are a computer with a dedicated sound card or system for handling sound files. Yes, just just to to clarify, Gunfight was an our standalone arcade game, and so was the initial version of Pong.

But there were Pong in its many many clones made it into the home and along with the UM But do you know what the the first UH system was that took advantage that didn't have to be hardwired on a home system. UH. If I had to guess, I'd say it was the NES UH. No, Actually it was another system that you probably did not have. I don't

think you've ever mentioned having that. The Odyssey to UH had programmable stop laughing, had programmable cartridges and the programmers could encode sound a sound library on the cartridge itself. Um so, and it also had speech synthesis, which explained why it sold so well. Oh wait a minute, the Intellivision also had speech synthesis usually was pretty primitive. There were normally just a few words that each game would be able to do. I had B seventeen balm or

that's exactly how it's on it too. I'm not if any of you guys had that game out there, you know what I'm talking about. Well, actually, uh, McDonald said that Major League Baseball was the first talking game. Did you have that one with Strike? Yeah? Yeah, I had that game as well. I'm not proud of this, it's okay. Well, you know what. At the time though, it was, it

was a big deal and it's funny. Uh Uh. One of the things that he that McDonald pointed out in his timeline was, um, even though these systems were primitive in terms of sound design and soundscaping, uh, compared to now, I mean what we have now we've got actual songs from regular recording arts that are actually encoded into the game. Um. Well, even without that level of sophistication, they still provided um a lot of context and character and richness for the

game player. Uh. He specifically mentioned Space Invaders because you hear the marching and and as they get closer and closer to the planet, it speeds up, and you hear the sound of it speed up, and then that you know, constant, you know, triggers your panic response. It does. And you wouldn't think, you know, yeah, that's that's kids stuff, that's

no big deal. It really does have an effect, and it has effect on how you feel when you're playing the game and increases your uh, your desire to kill off those little buggers so you can face another wave of those little buggers. And some of the early ar kid games like well, you know, things like pac Man and Donkey Kong had their little, little tiny elements of music to them. It was almost like a jingle for a commercial in the sense that it was not terribly sophisticated,

not terribly lone, but very very catching. Right do do do do do do do? Yeah, you can do that if you if you try that to someone and they do that what Chris just did. That means that they were around in the early eighties and they played a lot of Donkey Kong yes um Unfo Sinately, as I was doing research for this podcast, I got sidelined by VG Music dot com is the video game Music Archive, and it has all those different files that you could

listen to the music from those video games. There's a good hour of my life that just disappeared, and I don't know where it went. Well, let's do you mind if I if I skip ahead a bit. I mean we're talking about a lot of the Arcade games and a lot of the the like Atari bas games. But really the Atari system was pretty primitive. I was just gonna ask you a triviuta, a quick trivia question. Hit me, do you know? Really I'm grouchy. He never says that I will take it out on tyler Um. He had

one thing to do today. Okay, So do you know who wrote the music for Donkey Kong? I do not. It was, in fact Miyamoto San himself, Miamoto, Yes, Shigeru Miyamoto who wrote the music for for Donkey Kong on a small electronic keyboard, according to UH. According to Glenn McDonald, so Miyamoto is a giant the game industry. But I had no idea. And it's it's funny to show you that. That again shows you what how ground level he was.

And this whole thing, well, the reason why I was going to skip ahead, was that if if we want to talk about home consoles, which really, yeah, we eventually are going to be focusing mostly on the console system because you know, the arcades eventually faded from popularity, not that they don't exist anymore, but in the United States they're few and far between, and the development for games tends to be more focused on the home market than

on the arcade market in the United States. There's still places like Japan arcades are huge, but um not in the United States so much. Well, I wanted to talk about the original Nintendo system and how it was kind of a huge jump ahead of everything else. Now, one of the reasons why when I say huge jump ahead, I mean it's primitive compared to today's consoles, but at the time was a big deal. It had four whole

channels for music. Well, when you think about it, was came out in the mid eighties and four channel stereo was kind of a big deal. Yeah, And you've got to remember that most of these game systems had one channel, like, so if there was a sound effect, it had to interrupt the music or so if there's so like when Mario would jump in Dulu, do the they'tle thing it would it would interrupt the music in the middle of it. Um. So, so having a system that would allow you to play

four channels of sound was a big deal. Now, one of those channels was usually used for sound effects, and the other three would be used in various forms for music. UM. I read about game composers who would try and try figure out ways to make a a four note chord, which is hard to do if you've only got three channels. So what they would do is they would do a instead of doing a true chord, they would do essentially

a broken chord. They would play the notes back to back so quickly that to us it sounds almost like they were played simultaneously. So so you would get the effect of the chord without actually truly playing a chord. And then there were other game developers who would allow for music to take over and then when a sound effect comes in, it would drop one channel out of

the four out so the sound effect could take place. Um. Yeah, because typically, uh, you know, I'm sure a lot of our musician listeners are going to say, well, would you know, chord really only requires three notes, but you would want, um, the richness and depth of additional octaves in there too, right, And and I want to mention one guy in particular as really being instrumental, if you will, for you in the development of video game music as far as as

its effect in the game industry. I'm interested to see who this is. Cochi Condo, the composer for both Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda. And that's the reason why I'm singling out Cochi Condo. And please people don't write into me and tell me that I should talk about some other composer, because we're gonna talk about a

few others before the end of this. But the reason why I wanted to single him out and mentioned him is because, uh, he sort of created this this idea in the video games of different environments having different soundtracks, right, so when you moved from one environment into another, you would get a new uh tune playing in the background, and this would enhance your your video gaming experience. That

was Super Mario Brothers. It was pretty simple. There was one tune for when you were above ground, and there was one tune when you were in the dungeon levels, and then I think there was a different one when you were underwater. So the interesting part there is that this this really gave composers for video games that really gave them a shot in the arms, saying, oh, you know, this can be more than just adding a little extra element into a video game. It's more than just the

icing on the cake. There's there's an element here that can be intrinsic to the video game playing experience. Now, at the time, most of the composers for video games were working exclusively with one developer, and in a way, actually some of the earliest video games, the composers were people who were just on staff who happened to also

be musicians. So, you know, in the video game industry when it first started out, they didn't have the resources or the cloud really or the prestige to attract quote unquote real composers. Now, I say quote unquote because I consider the guys who came up with these video game tunes to be real composers, because I mean a lot of these tunes I'm still a big fan of. Yeah, you're you're speaking of people who are dedicated to composing.

That what they do, that's that's their main And then eventually you got to a point where video game developers would be able to hire someone who specifically specialized in music, but even then they were another person in the company payroll. It's not like you commissioned someone to compose music for

your video game. The thing that makes the video game music really interesting that I think uh kachy Condo uh kind of launched was this idea of the interactive experience, and that things that the player does changes the environment in some way, and in this case, it would change the music that's playing in the background depending on where

the player was. And that's fundamentally a different experience than composing music for either a film or just composing music period, like creating a symphony, right because in those it's the audience is passive. There's nothing the audience can do that's going to alter the progressional music sort of causing a scene at a life symphony. Don't do that, by the way, I've done hundreds of years ago. I don't want to

do that anymore. I'm tired of being thrown out of all the symphony halls in the United States though I couldn't you know what to him, but throughout the Opera House in Sydney. So anyway, the there's a goal the it's it's it seems like it would almost be closer to movie music and in a lot of ways than it would be to traditional symphonic music, because it's programmatic, it has a it has a theme to it, and it actually is helping tell the story. Right, It's meant

to help elevate the experience. But even with movie music, you still have a set, uh set series of events. Right,

that's exactly exactly. But but to just to elaborate on your point, the reason why it's even different from that is the second time you watch that movie, that movie, unless you're watching some really weird choose your own adventure thing is going to progress the exact same way, so that the first time clue any and the hundredth time, okay, sure clue the end of Clue for those of you who don't know, Clue came out in four starring Tim

Curry and it was phenomenal and had three different dings. Um. But but apart from that, in most situations, the the eight hundredth time you watch the movie is going to be the same as the first as far as the progression of scenes go, barring director's cuts and all that mess. So in other words, the composer does not have to create musical segues or musical themes that will be incorporated or perhaps mixed in with other themes based upon what

the characters going through. So this is also the era in which I think, possibly because a lot of us grew up with this type of music, but I think this era is also what inspired, um, what would later become. Uh. You know people who play these kinds of video game scores for others as you know, a symphonic piece and things,

because some of this music is just so memorable for us. Uh. And I wanted to mention, um the work of no Boo Boo Yomatsu, is that the guy who did Final Fantasy, because that for so many people, is that's like a big deal, the definitive video game music for a large portion of the players out there. Not me because I like playing games, that makes sense. But you know, people who enjoy Final Fantasy. I don't know what's wrong with you,

but they're all I'm on medication. Yeah, blame it on that direct your hate mail too, Um, but no, they but yeah they Final Fantasy has soundtracks available. Um, and you know, I don't know that when all of this started when the video game craze started, people would have assumed that this's you buy a soundtrack for a video game.

Maybe not, but it happens, and it's not unusual anymore. No. In fact, and and there are live performances video everything from I've seen some great a cappella renditions of classic video game music where they run through several like including Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda, and and and you know the classic games of the NES era all the way up. Yeah. See, that's that's all from

this period. So I think that's this That period is really when it's taken off to the point where it's something that's noticeable, right and then so so the NES really helps set some standards. The next big leap was probably from in n with the introduction of the Sony PlayStation. So I mean this is a big leap, okay, there there there were, Yeah, there were incremental improvements with the systems between the NES and when the PlayStation came out.

Don't get me wrong, Um there were and there were some great video games songs that came out during that time. But when the Sony PlayStation came out, that allowed up to twenty four sampled voices. Yes to play um now again in the in the previous generation, and yes, you could only play discreet sounds capable that that that the machine was capable of sending to the TV. The PlayStation allows you to actually sample music yep, and even and even to let you use effects like looping in reverb

what you you couldn't do before. And it and it also you know, had CD equality c D quality audio since rather than using cartridges as so many of these other games did in the past, we were actually dealing with an optical disc and it allowed for three different types of music within video games. The first one bad

and carible. You could argue that the first one was musical instrument digital interface middi midi uh now miny is it's essentially like a language really uh and depending upon the synthesizer that's in your UM what I was just going to mention, you know, some of them are very tiny and give you the force, good lord, So not the many Glorians, um, I do hate them. Passion that birds brighter than the exploding suns, so so many, so many.

You know. It's it's a like any any device in a computer that has a synthesizer in it can play back the information stored in a MIDI file and um, depending upon the synthesizer, it all sound different in each machine, right, So it's so many is not like a standardized sound as a standardized way of recording, like of presenting music. It's kind of like a piano role an old player piano.

So you have two different player pianos, and one of them is in the style of grand piano, and one of them is in the style of a honky tonk piano, and you put the same role of piano player paper in them. One of them is gonna sound very different from the other, even though they're both playing the same notes. Okay, so the Sunny PlayStation was capable of playing mini music. It was also capable of playing mods or digital modules. Yes,

I remember that now. It's worth noting that some computers had been using these different types of formats for years, but they weren't really common in home video game consoles, probably because the hardware I'm guessing hardware needed uh to do that was probably going to be pretty expensive comparatively

in computer games. This this ability had been there for years because this is the era when we've already got sound cards for computers like sound Blaster and Roland and all those devices that would come out, and you would you would actually install the sound card into your computer, which would give your computer the capability of playing back these kinds of sounds plug speakers and to them, and the need to have that music. This was before computers

would come standard with sound cards. Now, most times if you go out and buy a computer, there's at least some sort of sound card pre installed where it will play back these these file formats. But back in the day, you had to do it yourself. Now, like I said, it took like Chris was saying, it took a while for the consoles to catch up, and Sony PlayStation was

the first one. So so these digital modules. What was interesting to me about these is that it would allow you to record the sound of an individual note of of a particular instrument. So you would record every sound that a tenor saxophone can play individually, each note. You then record every single note that a that a a

piccolo can play. You would record every single note that a violin can play, and so you would have a sample of each of those notes, and then you could build music based on that library of sounds and the various notes they are able to play, and you could um sort of synthesize the sound of actual music and it it was okay, I mean it wasn't you know. It was obviously synthesized stuff. But if you were really good at programming with mods, you could make some some

decent music. Now, the problem is that mods are tend to be larger file sizes. MIDI is actually a very small file size, yes, and so that's one of the reasons why it was so popular in early games, because it didn't take up a lot of space and you

could dedicate that space for things like gameplay. It's also why it was so popular and the mides on people's home pages, yes, because you could host a MIDI file on your homepage and you didn't have to worry about going over your tiny little cap for your web page. So that's why if you visited a web page in the early nineties, early to mid nineties, you had that looping midi that played some irritating tune and it was terrible.

And I had those for me. It was Rule Britannia was one of them, and Yoho a Pirate's Life for me another because I had a page on the British Navy and on a page on piracy, and you'll never find them people, so don't worry about it. I think even if you win the way Back Machine you would have trouble finding it. I can't even tell you what the address is now. It's too long. That's just funny. So we're releasing the Jonathan Strickland find his homepage from

Don't Don't. I really don't want to see that again. But okay, So so it could play the MIDI files, you can play the mod files, I said, I could play three different times of music. The third was referred to at the time as red Book red Book, which is now red Book. Of course, you could make CD equality music, so you could create a song or or a score with a full orchestra if you wanted to record it to this format, and it would play it back like that. But the problem is that it takes

a lot of processor power to do it. And the article I read, which let me let me pull out the title here, it was specific. The article is called do game music Not just kids Stuff? By Matthew blinky Um. He said that engineers at the time called it stealing time from the laser because the lasers meant to let you play the game. I was reading the data off of the CD, and if you were dedicating some of that to audio, it was stealing that time to play

audio rather than to play the game. So um, that was But the PlayStation era really kind of push things to a new level. And uh and since then, we've got much more sophisticated consoles that are essentially just specialized computers that could do it essentially the same thing computers can do. So they can read all the different foul formats that computers can read. So depending upon what the person, what the video game developers preferences, that's what you're gonna get.

And UM, did you want to add anything. I've got a list of some of some composers I wanted to go through, but um, and we've mentioned a couple of them already. I wanted to, uh to mention another note. Um, and this is actually something that sort of came up in our Sega Saga podcast. Um. Do you remember Resident Evil. Yes, it was one of the very first games to start using realistic sound effects, which when you're playing a survival

horror game that's important can be it's very important. Again, it adds a lot of depth and feeling to the game that you wouldn't have gotten with just music. But it's also uh taking us a little that that other step closer to being in sort of an interactive movie environment where things are you you do have some control over it, but it's much more realistic and cinematic than it would have been playing you know, berserk. Yeah, you know, also not zombies, but you know still yes, don't touch

the walls. Um. Yeah. And you know we mentioned earlier about live performances of these. One of the performance, as I should mention, is it's a touring show called Video Games Live. Ah, yes, I remember that. It's an orchestral performance of video game music. And they even do things like they'll they'll do. There's usually a section that walks you through the early early days of video gaming, where like I was saying, you know, the songs tend to

be of jingle length. You know, it might be at most thirty seconds of music that would loop and so, but they'll they'll play that, and and it even begins usually humorously with pong, where the entire orchestra is going bing bong, bing bong. But works its way up to some of my favorites like Elevator Action and Gauntlet Tolude do anyway, So the those that's a fun way of going to to experience this video game music, and they

do work their way up to more modern songs. And in fact, there have been some composers for television and movies who have composed music for video deo games. So, um, I have a quick list of some of the folks that I think would be interesting. Just to mention Clint Bahakian I hope I'm seeing his name correctly. B A J A K I A n. Is the fellow who wrote the music for Star Wars Knights of the Old

Republic as well some other Star Wars. So here's here's a challenge is taking a franchise which already has a very established sound to it, right, so you have to essentially take the foundation that John Williams, the composer for the original movies, that the foundation he created, and then to build on that in a way that is respectful and yet is not just a carbon copy of what's already come before. Um here's uh Mark Barrel, who wrote the music for the Crash Bandicoot series, do a barrel roll,

barrel roll. Uh. David burgoed Ratchet and Clank. Uh. Greg Edmondson who did the music for Uncharted in Firefly. There you go. See, there's that that crossover. Uh. There's Dan ford in he did Mortal Kombat. Get over here. Um. Jason Hayes did the music for World of Warcraft. Uh. Let's see Michael Michael Hinnig who wrote the music for Balder's Gate, one of the games I really enjoyed playing. Um.

Let's see. Oh, Michael Hunter, who did the music for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto four. The theme to Grand Theft Auto four is one of my favorite video game themes to come out over the last few years. It's um, it's the Soviet one and it has this sort of mix between uh, kind of a techno sound in the old Soviet sort of music that that kind of military style music from the Soviet era.

And is I really enjoyed that one quite a bit. Uh. Let's see, there's a well we mentioned cog On though, of course. Um. There is Michael Land who wrote one of my favorite, probably my favorite video game score of all time. Do you know what that is? It's the Monkey Island Games, The Monkey. I actually have the theme to the to the Monkey Island Games on my MP three player because that's how much. That's the only video

game song. No wait, I'm sorry. I also grant the thought of four on there, but those are the only two video game songs I have on my MP three player. Uh. There's Robin Miller, who wrote the music for Missed and Riven. Now you could argue that the music in those games was very much important to the role of the game, to to really get that feeling across. And then I have Martin O'Donnell, who wrote the music to the Halo series, which is very distinctive with the the Men's chorus, and

then later on there's a full chorus. Uh. It's actually really some cool stuff. And what's funny is that, as I recall the original recording of the Men's Chorus were that was actually guys who are working for Bungee who got together in a recording studio and oh, they just they all just sang into the microphones. And I apologize people, I'm sick. I don't know what I'm doing. But yeah, that's that's my my list. Now. I know there's a

Bowels and other video game composers out there. But that's that's just a quick list that I grab together, you know. You know one, I'm surprised you didn't mention who's that Michael Giaquino. Oh, yes, Yes, Michael Giaquino, who who went on to write the music for television like Lost, Yes, and The Incredibles, which is I'm actually more of a fan of his, his his movie music. He wrote for music for Medal of Honor. Right, Yes he did, see it's all up there somewhere there, you go. I didn't

even have that written down. And that's the funny thing too, when you now that now that we have this kind of level of crossover that we we really didn't have before between move movies, TV and video games. I mean, they're all franchising one another. Once you come up with a good title, you try to hit as many variations of media as he possibly can, so their crossovers too. He also, you know, he also did the music for Alias Um. But did the video games too, I mean,

the the the incredible game up Rattui. I'm just looking at some of the video game titles. You can see him on his sight. But yes, he did the whole the U the Medal of Honor series, and also did a Call of Duty Finest Hour UM and some of the other Call of Duty games. So um, it's just it's just amazing too that it has come this far. But wouldn't have been able to do that without the hardware necessary to to make that happen, and you know,

the programming ability to add that in. And there's some games out there that do this, do this ability of this interactive experience of really meshing all the music together in ways that are truly phenomenal. For example, the Red Dead Redemption game. As you know, it's a Western. It's setting it's set in the West, just as the Old West is dying. It's the turn of the century, so it's the early and it has a music that changes

based upon the environment you're in. So when you are in the the Old West, it's kind of that Old West sort of music. When you move into Mexico, it's a lot of like horns and mariachi style music. But it also uses music to songs to a really really good effect. There's a spoiler alert. Spoiler alert for people who have not played Red Dead Redemption yet. When you

first managed to make your way to Mexico. UM as soon as you land, once you get past the big mission that lets you get there, there's a song that plays and it it is shocking when you first hear it, not for the content of the song, but because you had only been listening to environmental music and uh instrumentation up to that point. But then you get into Mexico and an actual song with lyrics and vocals, you know, it starts up and that's it's it's so powerful a

moment that it surprises you. And by the way, don't get off your horse if you want to listen to the song, because I found out the hard way when I saw something like, oh, there's a plant I need to pick up, and I got off the horse and started picking up. The song faded away, and then I got on the horse, thinking well, and maybe it'll come back.

New had to reload. But it was really I mean that that those kind of moments are You can see that that's built on that foundation from any es days, you know, and now we're just capable of making much

more sophisticated music than we were back then. So I expect that the musical aspect of video games will continue to grow in importance, and of course we'll we'll continue to cherish those older tunes that just sort of evoke that feeling that we got back when we were you know, in our our our our teens, early teens playing various video games that was awesome, and we didn't even get into things like the music games. Yeah, like typically like

Guitar Hero and rock Band and Rapper, the Rapper, the Rapper. Yeah, all the harmonics games, mean all the harmonics games. Yeah, there's there's tons of That's the whole podcast to itself, just where music is the gameplay. It's not just to to enrich it, but it is the gameplay. A lot to do another episode on that at some point. So let's wrap this one up. If you guys have any what's you know? Tell us what your favorite video game

music is. Let's know, we're curious. Tell us on Twitter or Facebook, are handled There is tech Stuff h s W or you can email us. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com. So learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.

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