Music and video games (2)
In barely two decades, technical progress has allowed video games and their soundtracks to evolve very quickly. The music that accompanies them has gone from a few rather rudimentary beeps to true symphonies, offering an unforgettable sensory experience. In this article we look at the games that have taken hold of music in a particularly memorable or innovative way.
Promoting already-known bands: Tony Hawk's gamble
Since the game's release in 1999, the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise – a game with a soundtrack mixing rap and metal – has introduced players to many facets of skate culture, and to metal and pop-punk artists such as Bad Religion, Millencollin, and Suicidal Tendencies. The game lets us live the skaters' lifestyle down to the last detail, and the soundtrack is still what nostalgic players cite first when they talk about the great times they spent with these games.
The bands on the soundtrack had by then existed for ten or twenty years, and were very little known outside the underground rap and skate-punk scenes.
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The Tony Hawk series gave these bands a showcase before the general public, who would never have come across these musical genres otherwise.
The iconic radios of GTA
The Grand Theft Auto series will stay in players' memories. The game's car radio is quite unique, offering players an experience tailored to where they are exploring, letting them listen to real radio stations, with DJs, ads and news reports. Each station has its own musical genre or favourite theme – just like in real life – and they are available from practically every vehicle!
Understanding the success of this seemingly minor detail, the game's creators capitalized on it and kept developing it.
Since around 2015 it has been possible to include your own music by adding mp3 files to a folder – a very simple step within reach of every player.
But it is one of the game's recent updates, Los Santos Tuners, that innovated once more and personalized players' musical experience by introducing a feature that lets them fully customize their radio, mark their favourite stations and access them instantly from the wheel, but above all, by building music into the quest series. Players can create fully personalized playlists by collecting objects scattered across the world map in secret locations, which give them access to exclusive tracks that cannot be obtained any other way.
FIFA, almost a record label?
FIFA is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. Each game in the series features about forty tracks, and a band that makes its way onto the game is assured of unrivalled visibility.
The popularity of FIFA soundtracks exploded in the early 2000s, with rather indie bands such as Bloc Party, Gorillaz, and Franz Ferdinand.
Behind these very carefully built soundtracks are two people – Steve Schnur and Cybele Pettus, two of Electronic Arts' executives and the people mainly responsible for the cultural phenomena these soundtracks have become.
Steve Schnur explains in an interview that “Football doesn't always have to sound like ‘We are the Champions’,” and that he wanted to introduce fans of this popular sport to other kinds of music.
But the bands of the 2000s that were already known at the time do not owe their success to the famous video game, even if their sales rose thanks to the Electronic Arts franchise.
In recent years, the FIFA team has been passionate about still-unknown artists, doing work equivalent to that of a talent scout at a record label.
“This isn't a random effort,” Schnur continues in his interview. “We put a year into defining the soundtrack.”
FIFA 2021 had not even been released yet when a few bands had already achieved worldwide success thanks to the soundtrack.
The band Another Sky, a London alternative rock band whose music is on the FIFA 20 soundtrack, saw its song “The Cracks” become a hit even though the band was almost unknown a year ago. The same goes for the band Pixx.
Ariana Grande and the Rift Tour
But it is probably Fortnite that has innovated the most by building live music into its games. In 2020 several concerts were broadcast live from the game's servers, and given the success of the operation, in summer 2021 Fortnite organized a collaboration with international star Ariana Grande!
The Rift Tour is not only an exclusive concert show by the singer, but also new exclusive skins and cosmetic items, as well as a series of limited-time quests that unlock several rewards.
And classical music?
While orchestras regularly make their way into video game music, that music has started to invade classical concert halls. As Kenji Kondo had already shown, classical music and video games go together perfectly, and what better than a philharmonic hall to host these sounds, at the crossroads of history and modernity?
In 2005, musician Tommy Tallarico and composer Jack Wall organized Video Games Live with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing some of the most famous works of video game music. The event was so successful that it has toured ever since, filling concert halls around the world.
Other classical ensembles, such as the famous Cologne Radio Orchestra, have for their part added video game music to their more conventional repertoire.
In 2018, the British radio station Classic FM also teamed up with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and PlayStation for PlayStation in Concert, offering an exceptional performance – the music of PlayStation games in the prestigious setting of one of the most famous classical concert halls in the world, the Royal Albert Hall.
With pieces arranged by award-winning composer and Classic FM presenter Jessica Curry, this concert – with the participation of the City of London Choir – let audiences discover or rediscover memorable pieces from PlayStation games such as Crash Bandicoot, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Horizon Zero Dawn and the classic Resident Evil.
The limits on live concerts brought by the 2020 pandemic, the new habits formed since, and the speed of technical progress now allow music and video games to feed each other, creating new practices. And with the arrival of virtual reality games, this trend can only continue.
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