Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One - Scorch Minion Re-Score!

More work from the class I'm in. We were given a gameplay video, and were told to score it. Here's how it breaks down:

0:00 - 0:03: Normal level music. It's not that important, I just threw something in for immersion's sake.
0:03 - 0:09: Camera pans away, and the seemless cutscene takes place.
0:09 - 0:16: Boss gets his introduction, and makes scary noises. Still part of the cutscene.
0:16 - 0:19: Player regains control, and begins boss fight. Again, additional music is added for the sake of immersion.

The real meat is from 0:03 - 0:16, but I'm pretty happy with the bookends as well. I also added the sound effects myself, and the robot noises are original effects.

Enjoy!

History of Video Game Composition: Generation II

Welcome back! Today we're gonna dive in to the second generation of video game consoles, where things start to get (a little) more interesting in the music department. Namely, there's actually music! There were actually quite a few consoles released in this generation, but I'm only going to cover what I've gathered to be the top 4: the Magnavox Odyssey2, Atari 2600 (and 5200), Mattel's Intellivision, and the ColecoVision.

The Atari came back swinging in 1977 with the 2600 model, boasting colors and better sound. It was an incredibly popular console, but compared to other consoles of this generation, I personally think it's a bit lacking. It had two monaural monophonic channels. Let's clear this up now; monaural, or mono, means not stereo. Monophonic means one sound at a time. A flute is a monophonic instrument. You can't play chords on a flute, you can only play one note at a time. A guitar is a polyphonic instrument. You can play up to 6 notes at a time. Anyway, it had two monophonic channels, so that means it could only ever play 2 sounds at once, and it only had 4 bits of audio control (meaning 16 volume levels). It had 5 bits of pitch control (32 values), 4 bit control unit to change the timbre of the sound, meaning all sounds were pre-programmed, and you would simply switch between the two you wanted (two channels, remember?). Here's a gameplay video, and here's a list of those sounds, which I found on this great website.

In 1982, Atari released the 5200, which basically included ports of the old games with updated graphics and sound (here's the same game from above, but on the 5200), but it was pretty much a failure because it was difficult to set up, and had a horrible controller. I mean, look at this thing. What the hell? Anyway, the sound is pretty much the same as well, except it had twice as many channels.

This is the Magnavox Odyssey 2, released in 1978. I'd talk more about it, but who cares, it didn't really bring anything new to the table and ended up being Magnavox's last moderately successful home console (Nintendo and Sega pretty much take over in the next generation). Alright, if you really wanna know, it did have a wider pitch range than the Atari 2600, but it could really only handle one sound at a time. That, and it had some serious color and only-so-many-moving-things-on-the-screen-at-once limitations. Check out Killer Bees! if you want to see for yourself.

Okay, now things get interesting. This is Mattel's Intellivision, released in 1979. Yeah, Mattel made a video game console! Who knew? (I did.) It didn't have as many colors as the Atari, but it had no problem displaying all of them at once, and the sound card? Oh man, now we're getting in to some cool stuff. The card had 3 monophonic tone generators, and one noise generator (I never really went in to detail about the noise waveform, but just head back here to find out for yourself). With more channels at the system's disposal, it could actually provide a soundtrack to the games you played on it! Notice how the noise channel is being used to emulate drums, isn't that neat? And notice how the music is written around the technological limitations! With one channel on drums, what remains is one channel for the main melody, and one channel to play bass ... and then switch out to play the harmony for the melody. The bass can't be constant, because there's not enough channels.

So yeah! Music! But there's more! This console also introduced a technology known as Pulse-Code Modulation. I know I just linked you to the wikipedia article, but it's still difficult to understand, so let me take a crack at it. PCM is a way to digitally represent an analog audio signal. Analog as in the human voice, or an acoustic instrument. This is done by taking the analog signal, slicing it up in to segments, and approximating its waveform. The older the technology, the less accurate the approximation (this takes a lot of data space to accomplish), and the human voice isn't simple like a sine wave is. Here, check out this picture:

The red line is a sine wave. Remember sine waves? I hope so, I only told you about them a week ago. Anyway, think of the sine wave as the analog signal. The grey squares are the digital representation of the sine wave. It's rounded off, in small slices, to the nearest value. This results in something close to the original signal, but ... bitcrushed (it's absurdly backwards using that word to describe this process). A great way to think about this is imagining a smooth curve in a jpg file. If you open it in photoshop, and zoom in, you notice it's not actually a curved line, but a collection of small squares (pixels!) that are small enough to fool us in to thinking it's actually a smooth curved line. Now, imagine if the pixels were much, much larger. It would look less like a curved line, and more boxy, right? Well, there ya go. And here's what it sounded like (back then). As the technology improved, more and more data space was able to be devoted to this, meaning playback become more and more accurate, more believable. Anyway, that's the Intellivision, and here's a gameplay video for kicks.

A bit of bonus information I learned: the sound card in the Intellivision wasn't even designed to do PCM! But some crazy computer guys apparently found a way. And that's interesting to me.

Alright, last stop for the second generation, and ... well ... it's really nothing new, after the Intellivision. This is the ColecoVision, released in 1982. So 3 years later and the technology didn't change much, except now sound cards are meant to have PCM. ColecoVision games had soundtracks, and in 3 channels, like the Intellivision. Though I should mention that full soundtracks were still kind of rare. It was much more common to just have short jingles before play, and this is because, again, there's only so many sound channels. Can't forget about sound effects, can we!? If all 3 or so channels are dedicated to music, then the game's not gonna have any sound! Or the music will have to cut out every time a sound is played, and when there's only 3 or so channels that becomes very noticeable. For example, in Donkey Kong.

You know what's really odd about this generation, though? Really strange, and something that would never, ever happen in today's video game economy? The Intellivision and ColecoVision could play Atari 2600 games. Cross-platform backwards compatibility! Mind blowing! (To me.)

Well, that's that! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned because I'm gonna take this history of video game music all the way up to present day! Cheers!

Sagramore!

It's a bit late, but.... Sagramore is a project I've been composing for over the last couple months. It's an online RPG, and you can find out more by going to http://www.sagramore.com/. This is the main theme I composed for the game.



Good night! And stay tuned for monday's video game music history part 2, now featuring actual music!

History of Video Game Composition: Generation I

So I'm starting a new little mini-series on video game music, where I'll talk about the limitations of the hardware, and the challenges the composers had to face. Why am I doing this? Because I think it's really interesting where video game music came from, and it's fascinating to compare the old with the new, even just between 4 or 5 years.

So today we start at the beginning, the first generation of video game consoles, spanning more or less the years between 1972 and 1976. Popular consoles included the Magnavox Odyssey, the original Atari, the Coleco Telstar, and the Nintendo "Color TV Game."

This is the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972. The unit displayed no colors (instead one could purchase a translucent overlay to place on the TV), and it produced no music or sound. Most of the games were sports related, as were many of the first video games, mostly because with limited technology it was very difficult to convey any kind of story or dialog in a game, so instead game designers stuck with what most people already understood how to play; sports. It also had stored its games on removable cartridges, and was the only one of its kind to do so in this generation. All the other consoles simply released a whole new damn console with a new set of games. How expensive. Since this is a blog about music and sound, there's really not much more for me to say about the Odyssey 1, except this: Check out this amazingly hilarious commercial from the 1970's! Listen to that music that's on the commercial! Look how every single game displayed looks EXACTLY the same! Absolutely Priceless.

Now here's a console every gamer should be familiar with (I hope). This is the original Sear Tele-Games Atari. This is NOT the Atari 2600, or Atari ST, it's the old, old, very old Atari (sorry, old readers) from 1975. Ever heard of Pong? Well, this is where it started. Sure, the Odyssey's games all pretty much looked like pong, too, but the Atari also displayed the score and *gasp* had sounds! Holy crap, right!? How was the sound made? Well, remember trigonometry? Sine waves, square waves, triangle waves, and all that old stuff?

Remember this formula?

Well, in the interest of keeping this blog approachable for most readers, I'll just say "those things make noises." This is an amazing page on an amazing site. Experiment on that page for a bit, and you'll begin to understand how these shapes (sine, square, etc) make different tones. It's a little tough, but try drawing your own square wave. Notice that, the more complete "loops" or repetitions you fit in, the higher the pitch of the noise is! Each of these consoles had a sound engine or some sort, and the game designers would (in some way) program in that formula above to output a certain wave at a certain moment (like when the ball hits the paddle on the screen), and the sound engine would interpret that forumla as a noise and send it out to the speakers on your TV! Now, the technology was incredibly limited back then, so they could really only produce one sound at a time, making music, well, not that feasible.

Alright, this is the Coleco Telstar 6040, the first model of its kind, which came out in 1976. It was very similar to the other consoles, in that it was basically the same game (pong) with slightly better controls and graphics (sounds like today's first person shooters HIYO please don't hurt me). Here's a commercial you can check out. You'll see that, while it's faster and a little more advanced, it's really just more of the same, especially audio-wise. At least to the extent of my knowledge, it is. It's surprisingly difficult to find more information on this console. All I really know is that this console was very popular (over 1 million sold, which is pretty great for 1976), and a TON of different versions were sold over the years featuring new games, and new peripherals, but again ... to a music blog, there's not much else to say. If anyone has more information, I'd love to hear it! Leave some comments!

Which brings us to the Nintendo "Color TV Game." Gotta love those Japanese names. It was released in 1977, and as the name would imply, it was in color! And as this entire blog post would imply, it let you play pong (sigh). But it had color! And okay, new models came out over the next couple years introducing some new games, like birds-eye racing games, and it's own version of Atari's breakout. In audio news, it's really just more of the same, but here's another commercial complete with a hilarious jingle at the end that will show you some gameplay, and what it sounded like (exactly like all the others).

Well, that wraps up generation I for us. Stayed tuned for next week which will be, quite obviously, generation II. Also, it will be a little more interesting. But you can't expect me to cover a somewhat thorough history of video games and completely leave out pong, can you? Come on.

Thanks for reading, and have yourself a good week!

Sneaky Little Update

So I totally forgot to upload a new track earlier today, so I'm sneaking it in now. It's sneaky music! For a retro-1960's-style sneaky game!



(have a nice weekend)

Lost Planet Set

So I've been on vacation, and don't really have anything new I'm ready to share just yet. Nothing big, anyway. So here's all the Lost Planet tracks in a set. There's two very short little stingers at the end that are new, but that's it for now.



Well, stay tuned, next week I'll return in full force, I promise!

Have a wonderful day!