How did CD consoles change video game music?
Once CD media arrived with the PSX and the SegaCD, a lot of people were able to start relying on the format to get away from these bottlenecks. For example, if gameplay was entirely resident in RAM, and there was enough space for a streamer, one could just encode full orchestrations as Redbook files and call those during gameplay. …Or you could have bank after bank of unique sample data, downloaded on demand by the game. In some cases, I think Redbook made for pretty spectacular soundtracks, but it couldn’t turn on a dime the way that scripted audio calling discrete voices could. There was always a time lag, and many times this wound up IMVHO hurting the overall gameplay. The Sega Saturn and Atari Jaguar attempted to bring back some synthesis capabilities, but never made enough of an impact in the marketplace to change production styles and techniques. There was another push going on – we realized that we had the film industry in our sights, and many of us wanted badly to make our ga
