Sparky: I’m with you — your post, and the series you linked to, were definitely on my mind while writing this.

Brad: I’ve heard several people say that Mario is now more recognizable among kids than Mickey Mouse (though I’ve never seen a source for that, to be fair). Given the popularity of video games, I’d put the Super Mario Bros. up against pretty much any movie theme and bet on it coming out on top, especially among younger generations. (What does it have to compete with, really? Star Wars and The Pink Panther?)

Peter: I have seen that cover, and I love it. That’s an interesting point about noise, especially considering that some old sound boards (like the one in the NES) actually had a “noise channel.” (That’s where the beatbox-esque percussion is in the Super Mario Bros. comes from.)

As for those critics you mention: I suppose they might have a point depending on how you define music, but I think that game music is far enough away from “noise” that it’d be disingenuous to define it as such. The fidelity may have been poor, but I can still write out music from the 8-bit era on staff paper and it’ll be demonstrably tonal.

Tommy: Wow, the man himself! Thanks so much for coming by and clarifying your views. I’m glad to hear that we’re actually on the same page here; it seemed odd that we wouldn’t be, given your work. I hope you didn’t take offense to my misinterpretation; as I said in the post, I have nothing but respect for what you’ve done! Hope to see you at that TBA Boston show for Video Games Live.

I actually agree 100% with you!

I think you’ve possibly misinterpreted my words because of editing. Sometimes when interviews are done they don’t take all the words or parts.

I have always talked about how the “old school” game music was some of the best written because the only thing we really had back then was the melody!

The music from Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Castlevania, Pac-Man, etc. is some of the most iconic music of our generation and should be respected as such. This is why they are always some of the most requested and applauded segments in Video Games Live.

My point in answering the question the way I did was to prove to the interviewer that video game music was not still just a bunch of simplistic bleeps & bloops. Some mainstream media and non-gamers still believe this to be the case… which it is not.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the actually music written now or back then. My words were more focused on the tools and technology.

A lot of people (including me) would even argue that a lot of modern game music sometimes isn’t as good because it doesn’t stand out as much as the older stuff. Some composers are relying too much on the technology and real acoustic instruments instead of the catchy music hooks that we needed to rely on in the old days.

Hope this helps to clear up the confusion and your view on my thoughts.

Thanks,

Tommy Tallarico

President, Tommy Tallarico Studios, Inc. (www.tallarico.com)
Executive Producer/CEO, Video Games Live (www.videogameslive.com)
Founder/CEO/Chairman, Game Audio Network Guild [G.A.N.G.] (www.audiogang.org)
Host/writer/co-producer, The Electric Playground & Reviews on the Run television shows

Have you heard the cover version of Radiohead’s song “Nude,” featuring a band of obsolete electronic equipment? Hard drive heads, a dot matrix printer, and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t originally built to produce musical sound. There’s a video here.

There’s a striking timbral similarity to chiptunes and video game music of that era, which is remarkable since the sounds in the cover version were not intended be musical. Actually, they weren’t *intended* at all — they were incidental sounds, shaped 25 years later into something we understand as music. So video game music in the early 80s was perilously close to noise in a very real sense: its clicks and beeps were almost indistinguishable from the incidental noises of computers!

This boundary between music and noise is hardly unknown territory (cf. John Cage obviously, but also the introduction of cymbals to the orchestra in the 18th century, and especially Bob Bowen’s brilliant unpublished paper on the quasi-soundtrack of Atari’s Missile Command), but it’s easy to forget that the critics of early video game music have a point.

Another factor that comes to mind with video game music is there’s a large bias against instrumental music in general in Western culture (I don’t know about the rest of the world). So it’s already got an uphill battle.

While video game music may aspire to the level of film scores, I don’t think scores get treated very well either. It’s pretty rare for me to find someone who kicks back and listens to film scores and I don’t think they sell that well. But obviously scores are tremendously important within the context of films.

I wonder what a poll of film versus game music recognition would be like. How many film scores does the average person recognize versus video games? It would be interesting to see the reach of the Super Mario Brothers theme versus say the Indiana Jones theme.

I think your Velvet Underground/Celine Dion example can work both ways. I don’t really like “Toxic” as performed by Britney Spears, but when I first heard it I still thought “hey, that’s a pretty good song.” I’ve since found versions of it that I really like — Yael Naim and Nickel Creek both do great covers, for instance.

I do agree, there’s nothing inherently inferior about the music of older video game music, just like there’s nothing inferior about music from the 70s and 80s using cheesy old synthesizers, reverb and drum machines. But the aesthetics are so powerful that I don’t expect most listeners to hear through that.