Sounds like...

My first memory of what I would call "good" music in games was probably International Karate. I was around 11 or 12 and listened to a lot of strange music as a child. I should say it was strange music FOR a child, not strange to listen to. I'd grown up with hardly any television and an awful lot of cassette tapes with music like The Doors, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, Cockney Rebel, The Stones and many other 60's/70's psychadelic-ex-hippie-style music! When I was around 7, my scene became dancing in a retarded style in our living room window; much to the amusement/chagrine of our neighbours... Somehow, on that foundation of fantastic music, my musical taste built into a fantasy themed Heavy Metal obsession!? It was a handful of years into my Iron Maiden era, that I first played IK on my friends portable black & white TV. The melody and structure of that chip based tune on the MSX quite literally left my jaw agape and many years of listening to game music on badly recorded cassettes began...

The next times that I was as impressed with game soundtracks were upon hearing the soundtrack to 720degrees, the Skateboarding arcade conversion, and then The Last Ninja on the C64. The soundtrack to 720 was given away with some 8bit games magazine around the time the game was released, as the B-Side of the Outrun soundtrack. I listened to it over and over. It became so ingrained into my subconscious that I unknowingly wrote two or three songs about 12 years later that you could say "borrowed" a little from that cassette... It was Skate Punk before modern Skate Punk existed. It preceeded all the Extreme sports themed punk/metal that would soon follow in it's wake. This may have been the Nostradamus of the music world (bearded and full of shit?). Look at that man, would you believe a word he said? Now that I look again at him, I think he's actually the man with the finger in his eye from my last blog entry, sinister looking fucker! I should also add that bearded doesn't necessarily mean full of shit, but then again, I DO have a goatee beard, and this blog... Well... Ahem!

The Last Ninja however, took the idea of a games soundtrack to almost cinematic levels; obviously excluding the technical limitation of chip driven sound at the time. The game had at least seven fully seperate pieces of music for the six levels and the loading screen. Each one of them was masterfully programmed and had a genuine taste of the far east. I can actually still listen to it, twenty-three or so years later, and still be impressed and actually enjoy the tunes. I liked a little bit of Jean Michelle Jarre at around the same time, and hearing his music nowadays stimulates my gag reflex! So my conclusion is that JMJ doesn't age well (and is a bit of a cock), whereas TLN is eternal.

For me, it was a sad day when the first band driven and orchestrated soundtracks appeared in games on CD. Two of the only exceptions I can think of, where I genuinely enjoyed the music were Command & Conquer and Interstate '76. The latter was a damn fine driving game, inspired by the road battles in Mad Max. The soundtrack was a re-imagining of classic 70's funk and was absolutely fucking fantastic! Aside from those two games, I can't think of anything that I would actually listen to outside of the games themselves.

There's a massive underground scene for "Chip" music, still going strong on PC's and retro computers/consoles. People playing gigs to a few hundred rabid fans, using only an original Game Boy hooked up to a P.A system. It's not what I'd choose to go and see, but it's certainly a refreshing change to all the production-perfect pop crap that blights our lives nowadays!

I've been writing music for 20 years now, and of all the stuff I've done in the past; the tracks I can listen to the most are the ones where I had the most technical limitations on creating the tunes. The old Atari ST songs are (in my own very biased opinion) my favourites, composed using two samples; bass drum and snare drum with a synth sound editor. Then the Amiga songs with simple one pitch samples and up to 8 (wooo!) tracks and finally the stuff that has aged the worst is the stuff I wrote on guitar... How odd, or rather how typically predictable that the one thing I consider myself the best at, is the one that I like retrospectively the least.

I suppose, thinking on this a little more, that it's really a reflection on my opinion for the whole music scene in general. I'm discovering and re-discovering nothing but old bands. The new bands almost categorically bore me... Long live the old!Amazing; this is actually an O.A.P friendly blog thing site whatever!