1 Chiptunes
For almost as long as video games have existed, their audio has inspired musicians in myriad ways. One of the most direct examples is the chiptunes scene. Fiercely prolific, wildly varied and not an alien to the charts, it’s a genre defined not just by its sound, but also by the production method. Strictly speaking, chiptunes refers to music crafted using the soundchips of games machines, or emulations of those chips. Or that’s what the purists will tell you. Over the genre’s 30-plus years, it has evolved to include heavy uses of game audio samples and many forms of music that evoke a sense of retro game sounds. In the last 10 years, a hint of chiptunes even started to appear in tracks by the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Nelly Furtado. The genre even saw producer and rapper Timbaland accused of plagiarism, for allegedly sampling chiptune creations without permission in a Furtado LP.
2 Button bashment
There’s much debate about the exact moment digital dancehall – and subsequently ragga – emerged from the gentler pace of traditional dancehall. One thing is certain, though, the day producer King Jammy and musician Wayne Smith committed Under Mi Sleng Teng to 7”, having used a Casio MT-40 keyboard, digitally produced dancehall was established for good. To this day, the Sleng Teng riddim – the rhythm bed to the original tune – continues to enjoy use in new productions. Eventually, a small band of producers turned to game-centric computers to push the dancehall sound in a new direction. To call “button bashment” a genre in its own right might be a push – few others beyond the 2004-founded label Jahtari and its spin-off Jahmiga actively release the music. Certainly, games machines have had their own part to play in digi dancehall’s evolution. And as dancehall fuelled jungle, so have the related chiptunes, with Amiga jungle prospering on Soundcloud.
3 Nintendocore metal
It’s not uncommon to find obscure music genres named in jest only for the title to enter common muso parlance – see flute-drop or seapunk. Nintendocore began as one of those gags, where a playful jibe at the very concept of niche genres rose up as a musical term proper. Horse the Band apparently carry the burden of coining the term, but their status in the genre is arguably outshone by the Minibosses, specialist in game covers. While chiptunes’ proponents are often associated with electronic production, Nintendocore draws together heavy guitar riffs, rock drumming and other elements from the complex heritage of metal with game chip audio and vocal nods to a wealth of games.
4 Orchestral arrangements
For some people, downloading soundtracks isn’t enough to sate their thirst for game audio. Fortunately, touring orchestras such as Video Games Live travel the world delivering elaborate video game covers to dozens of cities a year. The VGL perform to huge crowds, release albums and DVDs, and enjoy prime-time television screenings, arguably fostering a modest industry of their own. And the VGL orchestra isn’t alone. There’s also the German Symphonic game music concerts, one-off arrangement Mario & Zelda Big Band Live, US outfit Gamer Symphony Orchestra and the various Japanese ensembles in the early-to-mid 1990s that delivered the Gamer Symphony Orchestra tour.
5 Digital hardcore
Shortly before breakcore was established as a place for electronic music producers to experiment with fast, aggressive and erratic compositions, there was digital hardcore. Not by any definition “game music” per se, it mixed together industrial rock, techno, jungle and much of the established anti-establishment attitude of punk. The style emerged in Germany in the early 1990s and was spearheaded – even dominated – by Digital Hardcore Recordings. The label’s standout group was Atari Teenage Riot and, as their name suggests, they and their label mates had a habit of referencing game culture and drawing analogies with games in their political activisim. And when Atari Teenage Riot formed a spin-off group, it was named Nintendo Teenage Robots and composed music using Game Boys for all the sounds.
6 Lindsey Stirling
Lindsey Stirling is a violinist who uses performance art and her own spin on the postmodern sampling mindset. The results of her toil are ambitious live performances and ornate videos that have made her a YouTube star. She is perhaps most famed for her endeavours at founding “violin dubstep”, but in the gaming world she is known for covering the likes of Skyrim, Halo and Zelda’s music in full costume and highly animated. She’s also absorbed the limelight as a quarter finalist of America’s Got Talent, but such mainstream exposure hasn’t prevented her from becoming a celebrity of the gamer subculture.
Trendspotting
Unsurprisingly, with the current enthusiasm for propagating gaming virtual reality its associated equipment is also here now and it’s intent on surpassing fad status. The gaming treadmill is designed to let players control games by running on the spot in multiple directions.
Most are of a significant size, consisting of a harness to hold the user, and a platform on which to stride. The treadmills are typically combined with virtual reality headsets, and a range of other gaming controllers. The most notable is the imminently available Virtuix Omni, which raised over $1m through Kickstarter, demonstrating significant consumer interest. Then there is the Cyberith Virtualizer, which is still in development There are plans to design versions that can be 3D-printed in space, to allow astronauts much needed escapism. But for the more mundane frontier of the living room, how many gamers will give over precious space for this huge piece of kit remains to be seen.
Retro rebooted
In 1982 the Commodore home computer began an extraordinary journey that would ultimately see it ship 30 million units. It courted a substantial reputation as a gaming machine and today continues to enjoy newly crafted titles. The C64 is a titan of the period and in the history of gaming and it is rightly famed for its vast software library and elegantly blocky visual output.
Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium (published by Bitmap Books, £24.99) provides a sumptuously produced homage to that style, presented over hundreds of pages of crisp pixel art from the computer’s most famous releases. There are also paintings that served as a covers for 80s Commodore-focused magazine Zzap!64, and insights from industry figures from the time. For anyone who harbours a wealth of 64k-powered memories, it offers a heartfelt pictorial retrospective.
