History And Development Of Video Game Music

yo lads.

I’m currently doing my thesis on the history and development of video game music, and was wondering if any of you had any cool info to share, or knew of any good books or websites with info on said topic? Thanks in advance :)

It depends on which areas you want to cover…
Arcade machines?
Home computers?
Consoles?
Each area has its own singularities.
Like in the past music was really considered the lowest important feature of a game so in a lot of cases, musicians didn’t got credits for their work. On the home-computer game market that was the case in the early 80’s. If that was the same for arcade machines, i can’t tell.

Thanks for the reply :)

I am covering the entire range up to the present, so pretty much the entire history. My topic mainly concerns how the need for music in video games has evolved from simple blips ( ala pong) to full orchestral scores, and games that actually allow for you to compose music. I am also going to look at stuff like the chiptune and 8-bit scenes that have resulted due to unique technology and nature of video games.

I know that oldschool tracker formats like .MOD .S3M and .XM were used in quite a few DOS games from way back.

And gba ds and iPhone games of the present.

As with most topics, wikipedia provides a pretty good overview / synopsis which you can then branch off from on individual areas and expand on:

Been playing a lot of snes emulator this week and have been amazed at the quality of the music, so would recommend downloading numerous emulators / classic game roms from different eras to interpret and analyse the audio capabilities and musical development of the machines listed in the article above.

Well, fafa google turns up:


Or the less buggy variant of the above page:
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/vg_music/

Here’s a decent video site, and i’m posting the Nintendo link because this is the first vid i’ve found about it that isn’t completely retarded.

http://www.onnetworks.com/videos/play-value/shigeru-miyamoto

Awesome, thanks guys, should give me enough stuff to work through for a little while :D