Did working with limited hardware make things harder or more simplistic from a design point of view?
Aside from the challenges I’ve mentioned previously, the limited hardware didn’t affect the way I composed from a melodic point of view. A good tune is a good tune, played on a Stylophone or using a full orchestra. That’s something that I feel gets lost in today’s game music. I’m by no means tarring everyone with the same brush… a lot of today’s in-game music is truly fantastic, but equally, there are games that use musical ‘wallpaper’. In the 8 & 16bit days you had to create a memorable melody, you couldn’t rely on the sound palette to do anything major by itself. With CD quality audio, you can have washes of synth pad over a drum loop and you have an instant musical backdrop. Ask people to “hum the theme from game xyz” and unless it’s got a great hook or melody they won’t be able to oblige. When gaming moved to the 16-bit era, and systems like the Commodore Amiga and Sega Megadrive came to the market, a huge step forward was taken in game sound. Gone where the strained beeps and muff
