Is Video Game Music Headed in the Wrong Direction?
It is no great secret that videogames have come a long way in the past few years. No longer are they five minute diversions, but now are vast epics spanning across many hours. Videogame music has changed as well. The simple bleeps, bloops and zings of early videogames have been replaced with huge sweeping orchestral scores. And yet for all that change I can’t help but fear that videogame music might be headed in the wrong direction. For all the grand and ambitious music that’s being written for games lately, much of it has, what I consider, a deficiency. A lot of it is trying to be like movie music. I know that composers want to flex their muscle and show just how capable they are and emulate their movie brethren. However, here is the problem: Videogames, no matter how much you want them to be, are NOT movies. Ergo they should not be treated as such musically. In a movie you’ll never be stuck in one scene for two hours because you decide you want to explore. Likewise you’ll never spend
