Video Game Music: From 8-Bit Jokes to Grammy Recognition

Key Takeaway: Video game music won. In 2001, my music group wouldn't even let me present on it. Today, Final Fantasy sells out concert halls, Elden Ring soundtracks top streaming charts, and Eddie Vedder wrote a song for The Last of Us. The debate is over.

In 2001, I was a music minor in a composer’s group at my college that met once a week to discuss various issues in music and composing. One day, I proposed to the group that at an upcoming meeting, I’d give a presentation on video game music as a serious, emerging venue for the musical art form.

A couple of gamers in the group got it, but there were many blank stares from people whose impression of video game music had solidified, unfavorably, during the 8-bit era. I put together a short presentation, focused mainly on music from Final Fantasy VII and VIII, but I never got to make it.

I Was Right About Video Game Music

The group had many other things going on, and because it was the thing that the group saw as most expendable, the video game music presentation kept being the thing that was pushed back, right up until I graduated in spring of ’02.

The Table of Contents

From Academic Curiosity to Mainstream Recognition

A lot has changed in the 20 years since then, and if I were to make the same pitch to an undergraduate composing group today, I think it would receive a very different reception. In fact, game music courses are now part of the curriculum at prestigious music programs such as Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory.

This would be true if for no other reason than that the explosion of the casual game market has made video game composing a major new source of work for emerging composers in recent years. But game composing is also gaining greater respect from audiences and critics.

Christopher Tin’s theme for Civilization IV, “Baba Yetu,” became the first game music to win a Grammy Award in 2011 (six years after the game was released, but better late than never, Grammys). The Distant Worlds tour has been bringing orchestral arrangements of Final Fantasy to classical music venues around the world since 2007, and the Minibosses have developed a following for their prog-rock covers of NES-era video game themes. Sheet music is available for many popular games, and video game soundtracks can often be purchased alongside or separately from the games.

Games as Cinematic Experience

This goes along with something I was saying in a post a few weeks back about the increasing cinematic capabilities of video games (and how that can encourage gamers to want a quiet, light-controlled gaming space where they can see and hear the full expressive range of the game during both (story and gameplay sections).

As video games reach the point where they can be featured at film festivals (L.A. Noire became the first game accepted to Tribeca in 2011, and this year’s festival featured The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls), it becomes inevitable that game music will be increasingly widely recognized as comparable to film music.

The Power of Licensed Music

And like film music, not all game music is original – licensed music in video games creates just as vivid impressions as in films. Alan Wake did a great job with this (David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Poe’s “Haunted,” for instance), Gary Jules’s “Mad World” cover was a brilliant choice for the (award-winning) Gears of War commercial (and reappears in the trilogy’s final game), and Kanye West’s “Power” is fondly tied in many gamers’ minds to Saints Row: The Third.

Licensed music also helps establish mood and period effectively and without wasting player’s time, as in shooters from the Vietnam-era “Sympathy for the Devil” in Call of Duty: Black Ops and the nostalgic, ironic use of ‘60s and ‘70s rock in the 21st-century in Spec Ops: The Line, to Bobby Darin’s period- (and setting-)appropriate “Beyond the Sea” in Bioshock or the intentionally anachronistic barbershop quartet cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in Bioshock Infinite, which is set in 1912.

What Makes Game Music Different

As the medium and the technology of video games mature, denying games’ quality as an entertainment and artistic field that can hold its own against (for example) film or fiction looks increasingly ridiculous, and this can be seen in music as well as acting, graphics, narrative structure, or gameplay.

Journey composer Austin Wintory was the 2011 composer-in-residence for the Boulder Symphony, for instance. This post has game music to film music because I think it’s often helpful to understand something by comparing it to something already more widely known and understood. But games also offer new musical challenges and opportunities.

Film music is usually designed to play over a specific scene for a precise amount of time, but much game music has to loop and/or play in multiple situations without sounding out of place. This can be challenging – how to make one song fit diverse scenarios?

How to write a world map song that won’t drive players mad for twenty hours? – but it also provides opportunities to suggest comparisons between two situations that might otherwise seem more different than alike. Video game music is getting more respect than it did over 20 years ago, when I was struggling to convince fellow composers that the PS1 Final Fantasy soundtracks were the start of something important, but we’re still just beginning to discover what music in games can do.

Update: The prediction came true

Since this article was originally written, game music has only continued its rise. Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam wrote and performed "Future Days" for The Last of Us Part II. Major orchestras hold Final Fantasy XIV concerts around the globe. Game soundtracks from Elden Ring and others are topping streaming charts. People now accept game music as a real art form. We no longer ask if it deserves respect.

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