From 8bit to 8.1: The rise of the video game soundtrack

Chris Hatherill, contributing technology editor for London’s Dazed & Confused magazine, joins Three Speech to offer his opinions on gaming and the industry in general. First up, he and Vice Magazine’s Piers Martin look at the history and future of in-game music. Kraftwerk and Wipeout sounds like a match made in heaven to us.

As gaming goes mainstream, music is providing a cultural crossover point between gamers and music fans – with the boundaries becoming ever more blurred. Beyond SingStar, PaRappa the Rapper and other music-based games, the industry itself has become far more sound-savvy. The news that the song “Breed” by Nirvana turned up on the soundtrack Major League Baseball 2K7 raised more than a few eyebrows. This was the first time a track composed by grunge deity Kurt Cobain had appeared in a game, a move seen by some die-hard fans as bordering on sacrilege, especially after Cobain’s widow Courtney Love told Rolling Stone magazine that when it came to exploiting Nirvana’s publishing catalogue, “We’re going to remain very tasteful”. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is that anyone even cared about this at all.

Music publishers actively send out discs of songs to the big games companies in the hope that their talent will end up soundtracking the latest blockbuster shoot-’em-up – it’s one surefire way to recoup the massive advance publishers pay their musicians. Because many bands consider games to be ‘under the radar’ of the majority of their fans, they have no qualms about selling their songs in this manner.

Certain record labels can use games as a legitimate form of promotion – and one that they get paid for, too. Leading US indie Sub Pop licensed twelve of its bands’ songs to 2K Sports’ NHL 2K7 hockey game, while another heavyweight US label, Matador, gave the same company’s Major League Baseball 2K6 game a number of tracks from its catalogue. In an extreme example of insane self-promotion mixed with an unstoppable Messiah complex, rapper 50 Cent gave us Bulletproof, a game in which the player becomes Fiddy himself and gets into all sorts of gang-related scrapes. It didn’t set a good example to his impressionable fans and was panned by critics and gamers alike.

While adding music to games has become an industry in itself, it’s not all a one way street. Video games and systems have influenced numerous electronic music artists, a recent example being the 8-Bit Operators compilation, which sees artists like Virginia-based Receptors using Nintendo Gameboys to create quirky electronic Kraftwerk covers.

“I often play computer games when I’m making a track,” says Andy Jenkinson, a young rave producer from Essex who records under the name Ceephax Acid Crew, “because I have to listen back to the music tons of times before it’s finished. It’s something fun to do in the meantime, but it means tracks often get linked to particular games in my mind, which is wicked because the sounds of the track often become linked to the colours and graphics and feel of a game which can end up changing the track itself.”

As music and gaming cross over more and more, the audio element is becoming as crucial as the gameplay, graphics and storylines. Sometimes, the soundtrack becomes the game’s main selling point. The Wipeout series prided itself on the cutting-edge electronic acts that graced each game. The first PSP version, Wipeout Pure, for example, boasted exclusive tracks by keen gamers Aphex Twin and LFO – techno pioneers who aren’t exactly short of a few bob. Expect to find many of these, including a Kraftwerk track, on the new Wipeout HD title.

Games developer EA, meanwhile, set another milestone when it started selling music from its games via iTunes, with artists including Jet, Franz Ferdinand and Scissor Sisters – which gamers may have first heard while playing titles like Burnout Dominator and Def Jam Icon. In the latter, your character in the game actually uses music as a weapon. With Sean Combs, E-40 and The Game not only providing the soundtrack, but a crucial part of the gaming action, it marked a new development in the interaction between music and gaming – a relationship that seems set to get even cosier in the future. Following the release of the Vice City, Rockstar released a then unheard-of seven CD boxset featuring music from the various radio stations featured in the game. Details leaked about the forthcoming GTA IV hint at further advances in sound, including the possibility that the character will feel the bass from passing cars. With everyone from Philip Glass to Ukranian singer Ruslana lined up for the soundtrack, it might not be long before it’s games – not the radio or MTV – that record companies turn to to break new artists.