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Video-Game Music

Maybe the world's most versatile music

Spider
Final Fantasy VII
Tonic Trouble
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
VGM links
ST music
This page is about video-game music (or VGM for short).

I first discovered VGM on my Atari 520 ST, back in 1986. At this time, the audio hardware of most computers and game systems was very basic and could only produce beep-like sounds. This was mostly why people didn't consider VGM to be a real music style (unlike movie soundtracks, for example). But this is mostly why I really fell in love with it, because the composers who made songs on this kind of hardware couldn't rely a good sound quality to make their tracks good, so they had to be twice as creative in their melody to compensate for this. People like Jochen Hippel (Mad Max), Joris DeMan (Scavenger) or Nic Alderton (Count Zero) made some of the most beautiful beeps ever to come out of a computer.

At this same date, the game system world was made of the NES and the Sega Master System. Those had some tunes that will stand on top of VGM lovers' charts forever like the soundtracks of Zelda, Castlevania, Outrun and Y's.

Then, I discovered the Amiga. This computer had a sound chip unlike anything seen before (and, in a sense, still unmatched) and I was in awe while listening to the music of games like Shadow of the Beast and Turrican. For the Amiga was designed a sound format that would stay the de-facto standard for most computer generated game music: modules.

On the gaming scene, the next generation of VGM came with the SuperNES. The Sega Genesis certainly had a better sound than the old 8-bits game systems, but its FM-synthesis soundchip was not that impressive to me (except in some games like the Streets of Rage series). The SuperNES had sound hardware that was not unlike the Amiga's, but it was backed by all the fantastic Japanese VGM composers like Koji Kondo (Mario, Zelda...) and Nobuo Uematsu (the Final Fantasy series).

And eventually, the computer and gaming worlds were united when the CD-ROM came along. On a CD, any kind of music could be recorded and the era of beeping music was over. Over? Not quite. Because many people had developed such a passion for old time VGM, many sites are now devoted to collecting jewels of the time past for everybody's listening pleasure.

© 2000-2014 Mikael Bouillot (last updated 2001-03-07)