Imagine finding yourself in the corridor of what seems to be an old, polished-up hotel: 1930s wallpaper, precious inlays on the mahogany ceiling, lamps tempering the room with an elegant yet informal warmth. After a few steps inside, this environment changes radically; where there was a wall, the wallpaper now explodes into a fractal, you begin to fall endlessly through infinite variations of that same corridor, and meanwhile an extradiegetic music grows in intensity, modulating perfectly with your progress through the rooms, a metal-symphonic-progressive rush that changes theme and riff according to your advance. This, among a thousand other things, is what happens in a mission of “Control”, a video game developed by Finland’s Remedy and published in 2019 by 505 Games, a work that aims at the player’s continual sensory disorientation, using music as an immersive-dramaturgical element.
In a film, the dramaturgical function of music is to comment, not to accompany, that is, to add narration/poetry where the image alone is not exhaustive of the director’s vision. Since video games are superficially considered similar to films, their music tends to be judged in the same way, when in fact music is born for a different dramaturgical purpose, namely that of heightening the immersive qualities of the gaming experience.
According to this absolutely subjective and open-to-criticism definition of mine, one can already speak of video game music with “PONG” (Atari, 1972). One of the progenitors of the first wave of commercial successes in the field of arcade games (that is, those games that were once playable only by inserting one or more tokens into a cabinet) but conceived for home use, “PONG” is certainly not among those famous for their music, also because technically there is none. In the original 1972 Atari game the only sounds present are tones, a high one when the simulation of the tennis ball hits one of the two paddles, a low one when the paddle fails to reach the ball. And yet there is a gameplay element that indirectly provided a dynamic to the sounds of “PONG”, namely the idea of making the ball accelerate with each contact with one of the two paddles. In this way, the rhythm of both the match and of the sequence of high tones changed, creating a neurasthenic rhythmic punctuation which, increasing in intensity, considerably sustained the tension of the game. “PONG” in fact confronts us with another fundamental characteristic of video game music, namely its function of sensorially delimiting the player’s presence in the virtual world.
There is one video game in particular that brilliantly reflected on this concept, directed by the creator of the famous “Grand Theft Auto” saga, Leslie Benzies, for a small company called DMA, today known all over the world as Rockstar Games, a game that was supposed to come out for Sega Saturn, Microsoft Windows and Playstation, but whose revolutionary level design found a home with the complex and innovative editor of Silicon Graphics, the Californian 3D workstation behind the graphic quirks of the Nintendo 64. “Space Station Silicon Valley” (DMA Design, Tarantula Studios, 1998) is an over-the-top work, as was typical in the ’90s, with the humor of “Banjo-Kazooie” (Rare, 1998) and a game mechanic probably inspired by “Paradroid” (Graftgold, 1985), a great classic of the Commodore 64. The game world of “Space Station Silicon Valley” is an absolute delirium: we are inside this enormous space station orbiting the Earth where a sort of parallel world has been recreated, inhabited exclusively by robotic animals crammed with lethal weapons. A fundamental element of the game is of course the music, strongly inspired by the “Nintendo” canon of Kōji Kondō, author of the music of the “Super Mario” saga, that is, minimal variations of tone on basic chords, thanks to which the player can concentrate on the difficulty of the game, heightening its main characteristics, such as the rhythm and the liveliness of colors and shapes. The cheerful and carefree music of Silicon Valley dispenses a timbral spectrum unheard of for the Nintendo 64, supported by catchy melodies that shaped the mood of the game. Not only that, however: the typical extradiegetic presence of music was here called into question. Since the setting is a completely robotic space station, Benzies had the idea that in the game environment the sounds would themselves be artificial reproductions, and so the music we hear is “produced” by speakers physically present in the level design. Not only does the music increase in volume if we get close to them, but if we destroy them it disappears entirely.
But the geographies of video game music are not limited to the medium itself, and its immersive nature is able to hybridize with other musical forms. Among the most interesting current trends is a revival of an obscure Northern European electronic scene strongly influenced precisely by video game music, though not in a broad sense, rather in the most fantasy variant of the term, that is, all those gaming experiences inspired by tabletop games like “Dungeons & Dragons,” the so-called RPGs (role-playing games). Dungeon synth was in fact born as an offshoot of the ambient black metal movement of the ’90s, developing into a genre in its own right between the second half of the ’90s and the ’00s. Besides the evident influence of the pseudo-medieval music of the ’60s (I am thinking in particular of groups like the Third Ear Band), dungeon synth takes its name precisely from the immersive experience of the “dungeons”, that is, the underground dungeons present in every self-respecting RPG. Behind every corner of a dungeon lurks a danger, a deadly trap or an ambush; the music that took shape was therefore tense, made of long pedals or drones, ethereal yet unsettling, where the notes follow one another like drops falling from stalactites and reverberating in seemingly uninhabited caves. You can well understand that such a product seems tailor-made for the European DIY electronic ambient scene: few means, MIDI keyboards piled one on top of another in a bedroom, PCs of questionable performance, and particular attention to arrangement, to prevent too many lines of sound from overlapping and overloading the software. A music made of long journeys, through frozen and enchanting landscapes (Depressive Silence, “Depressive Silence II”, 1996), in “Arthurian” magical forests (Chaucerian Myth, “The Canterbury Tales”, 2016) or even in a futuristic cyberpunk city (Erang, “Anti-Future”, 2016), which remain faithful to the immersive principle of the video game, carrying the mind away from the repetitive and extremely slow musical patterns, only to fish it back out with a sudden change of rhythm or the dawning of a dissonant timbre.
In 2020 they were 131 million, in 2021 they dropped to 93, and today, at least according to the estimates published on the Minecraft website, there are currently 173 million active players. One of the main competitors of “Minecraft,” “Terraria”, has sold 44 million copies, Rockstar’s latest hit, the Silicon Valley people’s one, has sold 50 million copies (“Red Dead Redemption 2”). Video game music is by now an industry that will soon swallow up the film one, open to experimentation of every kind, in particular with the spatiality required by modern Virtual Reality games. There is no doubt that these generations, raised on the grand themes of sagas like “Final Fantasy” (Square, Square Enix 1987-2023), on experimental works like “Ecco the Dolphin” (Sega, 1993), “Silent Hill” (Team Silent, 1999) or “Quake” (id Software, 1996), and now on the retromaniac pastiche of “Undertale” (Toby Fox, 2015) or that of “Cuphead” (Studio MDHR, 2017), will be generations that identify in music characteristics such as haptic feedback, a veritable sensory dimension to interact with. The next step could be music that responds directly to our nervous impulses, able to change according to our state of mind, which, as in the psychedelic corridor of “Control”, follows our every step while narrating it, redefining the sensory boundary no longer with the virtual world, but between mind and reality.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →