A Brief History of Videogame Music
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
My favorite gift from last month’s Christmas celebration is a copy of Ghost of Yotei, shoutout my cousin Molly and her boyfriend Ethan. If you’re unfamiliar, the game serves as a pseudo-sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, a 2020 PS5 game that followed a samurai on a warpath of revenge. Ghost of Yotei is much the same, except it follows a woman samurai a few centuries after Tsushima in a different part of Japan all together. She’s out for revenge hunting a gang of Ronin called the Yotei Six, and your job is to make your way through the Ronin until you fight their leader.
If you’ve played these games, you know my explanation of what happens is woefully thin: You spend as much time just wandering feudal Japan, writing haikus, visiting hot springs, climbing hidden temples and enjoying the view as much as seeking revenge, running your katana through evil men’s digestive systems. Ghost of Yotei has a crucial difference from its predecessor: You spend a non-insignificant time sitting and playing shamisen—the traditional lute-like Japanese instrument—to honor your dead family’s memory. It’s a unique use of music in a video game, and it requires you to play the control pad like it’s the frets of the instrument. Here’s what this looks like onscreen:
Like Tsushima, Yotei’s music is beautiful, haunting, and lends to the feeling of immersion you get, standing in a wind-swept field, looking for flowers to pick and calling your horse to go explore more. I mean, listen to this:
It made me think back on musical moments from other video games I’ve played, and how much its evolved. I’ve been playing video games since at least 1989—when my cousins Brian and Sara got an NES—and have basically been along for the ride as music in video games went from limited—there was only so much space on original video game chips, and they needed most of it for the game itself—to these full blown, orchestrated scores that run alongside you. The first video game music I remember clearly is this melody, which I still hum to myself when I’m putting luggage in a car, or fitting groceries into a bag:
Taken from the Russian poem/song “Korobeiniki,” this music fits what was always rumored to be the ulterior motive for Tetris: to convert American kids to communism. It didn’t work on me, but it did mean I bought myself the LEGO Gameboy last year. Take that Kruschev!
By the time the Nintendo 64 came out, the possibilities for video game music exploded: More space on the chips of N64 games meant that the music for things like Super Mario 64 could go viral on TikTok 30 years after its release. And for good reason, too. This music goes harder than any mediative music of the last half century:
By the time the PlayStation exploded, and Xbox entered, with their disc drives with much more data capabilities, music in videogames almost became an afterthought. When anything was possible with no limitations, the music sometimes got lazy. That said, with games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and College Football ’03 introducing a generation of kids to music like De La Soul, Pixies, Rage Against the Machine, and dozens of other acts, was a net positive good, TikTok or Spotify before every house had broadband internet. Then came Grand Theft Auto’s radio stations, which took licensed music, and hired cool musicians to curate it. That was the peak of using non-original videogame music.
There were exceptions, in the ‘00s, to games just getting cool music from record labels (Halo is the peak original in this era), but this era crested, and original soundtracks came back full force. There are multiple vinyl reissue companies now devoted to releasing soundtracks from games like Hollow Knight, Persona 5, Cuphead, and other indie games that have unique soundtracks. But I think the consensus is that the best video game music from the last 10-15 years is from another video game devoted to square blocks:
In the same way that Ghost of Yotei’s music allows you to feel more fully immersed, the Minecraft soundtrack feels like being stuck inside an alternate dimension where everything is square, and where everything feels simpler, slower, and all together slightly askew.
Videogame music doesn’t get considered as much of a genre as it should be: It’s music that its listeners, by necessity, actually live inside of. It’s music that becomes tied to specific sense memories; from the time you got 150 rows on Tetris to that cannonball shot on Super Mario 64. It’s a genre that means so much to the people who care about it but doesn’t get the thought and attention that it deserves. It took really thinking about how much I love the music in Ghost of Yotei for me to seriously think about it, and hopefully you can use this week’s All the Music of the World as an excuse to dive into your favorite video game music too.
-- Andrew Winistorfer
