Importance: Absolutely essential
- 1958- Tennis For Two, one of the first video games, had no sound at all
- 1972- Pong was the first video game to feature any sound
- 1972- Mangavox Odyssey had no sound
- 1978- Space Invaders was the first video game to feature a soundtrack
- Not music, but a sound pulse that accelerated in frequency when the aliens got closer to the player
- First instance of non-diegetic sound (Background music amplifying the mood)
- 1980s- Music becomes popular in video games
- 1980- Pac-Man has an opening theme and a theme for cutscenes
- Early games didn't have continuous musical soundtracks due to storage and audio limitations
- Melodies could only be short lines of notes, little to no harmony, and monaural
- 1981- Atari released Tempest, the first arcade machine to use a revolutionary "Pokey chip"
- Pokey chip was a dedicated audio processor that had 4 channels and could control pitch, volume, and distortion of tones
- Allowed 4 "instrument" music to be performed for the first time
- 1985- NES released, first popular home console to support soundtracks varied soundtracks
- Contained many soundtracks popular today still (Tetris, Super Mario Bros., etc)
- Koji Kondo's soundtrack for 1985s SMB indicates video game music moving more towards being like film music and being a storytelling medium
- 1989- Micheal Jackson's Moonwalker released for Sega Genesis, first instance of video game soundtrack collaboration with a pop-culture musician
- Increasing audio/storage technology meant more sophisticated soundtracks could be made
- 1994- Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack for Final Fantasy 3 on SNES featured character-specific leitmotivs and a variety of styles
- Meanwhile on home computers, sound cards came with sound banks of 128 sounds with the ability to play 16 at the same time (MIDI)
- Allowed small files that told the card what sound to play and when to play them
- Played a large role in computer music because they were small in size and games used to be on 1.5 MB floppy disks
- 1995- Sony releases Playstation with 24 channel CD quality stereo sound
- Supported MIDIs, Redbook audio (CD quality sound), and MODs (Near CD quality but smaller in file size)
- 1996- Nintendo 64 released, but uses cartridges instead of CD, so CD quality music not used often due to storage limits
- 1996- Wipeout XL for Playstation featured soundtracks by popular techno artists, allowed players to select which song they wanted to listen to which is common today
- 1997- PaRappa the Rapper released for Playstation, music-orientated game where the player pushed buttons in time with the beat
- Opened way to a new type of game, popularized by DDR in 1998
- 1999- Thrasher: Skate and Destroy and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for Playstation first to feature licensed music from well-known hip-hop and alternative punk artists
- 2000- National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences let interactive games compete in Grammy awards
- Video game music now has the potential to receive substantial recognition
- 2001- Nintendo GameCube released with a Digital Signal Processor that supports up to 100 voices and 64 simultaneous voices of 3D sound
- MiniDVD fomat allows storage for CD quality music compared to N64
- 2001- Microsoft Xbox supports Dolby Digital sound (a first), and 256 simultaneous stereo voices from 64 channels
- 2001- Vib-Ribbon released, player navigates through levels generated by the music playing, players could put their own audio CD inside to make levels based on the tracks
- Innovated music-driven level genre (Audiosurf, Musicracer)
This article focuses less on the hardware aspect of video game music, but makes up for it in it's detail on milestones in gaming, such as the first instance of a soundtrack collaboration with a pop-culture musician. This article is quite informative and serves well for my research.
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