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What gets me every time, is listening to the Legend of Zelda theme (Nintendo version)



And then hearing it with a full orchestra, absolutely amazing!

 
My. Favorite. Topic.

I've been researching video-game music for quite a while (because it's the greatest thing evar).
These are a few of my favorite (sound) tracks:

*note: Most of the music I like finds its origin in Japan. This is just the way things turned out and doesn't say much about what I think about western game-music. Also, most of these are RPG soundtracks. I'll gather my non-rpg examples later.

Bravely Default - Revo (Linked Horizon)

If anything, please listen to this. I feel a lot of RPGs try to emulate the style of Final Fantasy games which I believe to be a mistake. Bravely Default features one of the most amazing Fantasy OSTs I've ever heard and I believe it to be vastly superior to anything else Squeenix has ever published.



There is also a live concert by the composer called "Luxendarc Kikou". All of it is amazing.


Persona 5 - Meguro Shoji

I've never heard Jazz and Swing in a video game quite like this. This game is all about 'Style' and the soundtrack knows it. You may recognize kitty from my avatar. Perhaps that's because this is my favorite vg-soundtrack of all time.




Grandia - Noriyuki Iwadare

Released around the same time as Final Fantasy 7 but with a (in my probably wrong opinion) superior soundtrack that truly captures the feel of the adventure.

Funny thing is, the music itself is often infuriatingly simple.




Touhou - Kokyo Active Neets

So, this is technically cheating because the Kokyo Active Neets only re-arrange Touhou music (which I find kinda awful of itself). But boy, do they turn it into magic.



A warning, Touhou is basically a movement of people remixing and re-arranging music from the 'Touhou' games, which are all made and composed by one person. The originals are often kind of basic, but for example the Kokyo Active Neets (and Tokyo Active Neets for their Jazz-oriented brothers and sisters) do amazing things with the base material.


Scott Pilgrim Vs The World - Anamanaguchi

Chiptune! But as far as chiptune is concerned, it doesn't get much better than Anamanaguchi. Except maybe Disasterpiece.





I'll post some more later when I'm not at work ;). I also can't post more than 5 pieces of media at a time it seems.
 
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My girlfriend and I are both composers considering video games. Neither of us plays the games.

As a life-long gamer and a games composer, I feel a bit offended. :(

I understand that you had a disclaimer that you are aware of the learning curve, but in all seriousness, this is like saying that "I'm supposed to score a movie but I don't watch movies. Please recommend me movie soundtracks". How are you supposed to be able to provide quality music suitable for the flow and the pace of the game if you have no idea how it should be done within the context?

First of all- forget "game music" as a genre. There are as many genres of music in games nowadays than there are games. And as already mentioned, it ranges from 30´s jazz to goddamn death metal and back. It's all about the context. Period. The only thing that, say, Cuphead (Kristofer Maddigan) and Doom (Mick Gordon) have in common in musical terms is the fact that the music is instrumental and is used in a game.

Do yourself a favour, and start exploring the genre of the game you're working on immediately, by checking a ton of gameplay videos from Youtube (without commentary) for starters. Then play the crap out of couple of the closest ones to get the idea of how and when the music is implemented when you are making your journey throughout the game.
When you have done that, grab that Winifred Phillips' book and compare your recent findings and mental notes with that- if you have absoutely no idea of game music in general beforehand, the whole book will be rather useless, so I heartily recommend to read it when you have gathered some general knowledge first. Otherwise you will miss a lot of information from the stuff she has written. It's a good book, and I've read it myself as well.

Oh, and when you have survived and succeeded with this gig, I'm pretty sure you might be way closer to become a gamer. There are so much awesome games to explore and enjoy it's impossible to resist this wonderful form of entertainment- especially when you have worked with one, played it a ton in the process and grown a bit more attached to the world of gaming. :)
 
Hah, that's actually true- I got so carried away that I read it way too hastily, sorry.

Nevertheless, my point stands: if you want to score for games, get knowledge on how the music is used in games instead which kind of music is used first!
 
As a life-long gamer and a games composer, I feel a bit offended. :(

I understand that you had a disclaimer that you are aware of the learning curve, but in all seriousness, this is like saying that "I'm supposed to score a movie but I don't watch movies. Please recommend me movie soundtracks". How are you supposed to be able to provide quality music suitable for the flow and the pace of the game if you have no idea how it should be done within the context?

First of all- forget "game music" as a genre. There are as many genres of music in games nowadays than there are games. And as already mentioned, it ranges from 30´s jazz to goddamn death metal and back. It's all about the context. Period. The only thing that, say, Cuphead (Kristofer Maddigan) and Doom (Mick Gordon) have in common in musical terms is the fact that the music is instrumental and is used in a game.

Do yourself a favour, and start exploring the genre of the game you're working on immediately, by checking a ton of gameplay videos from Youtube (without commentary) for starters. Then play the crap out of couple of the closest ones to get the idea of how and when the music is implemented when you are making your journey throughout the game.
When you have done that, grab that Winifred Phillips' book and compare your recent findings and mental notes with that- if you have absoutely no idea of game music in general beforehand, the whole book will be rather useless, so I heartily recommend to read it when you have gathered some general knowledge first. Otherwise you will miss a lot of information from the stuff she has written. It's a good book, and I've read it myself as well.

Oh, and when you have survived and succeeded with this gig, I'm pretty sure you might be way closer to become a gamer. There are so much awesome games to explore and enjoy it's impossible to resist this wonderful form of entertainment- especially when you have worked with one, played it a ton in the process and grown a bit more attached to the world of gaming. :)

You know, I've had this discussion many times with people, and I stand by it:

You actually don't need to be a "gamer" to be able to effectively compose music for them.

There's this weird thing where people think that never playing DOOM or Zelda would somehow impede you from composing effectively for them.

Dude who composed for The Last of Us is in his 60s and never did a game before then. I don't think Greg Edmonson ever did games before Uncharted. I doubt these guys actually play much of them, if at all and they still made award-winning scores. Nolan North is famous as Nathan Drake, and never actually played the games himself, yet is great at his job.

Regardless you're still going to be seeing the game in action, and the places and situations that need music. If you need to create a dynamic soundtrack but don't know how to use that tech, you can either learn yourself or outsource FMOD and stuff: No gaming experience required.

It's all about composing music within a given context. I don't think it's as different from film scoring or concept albums as some argue.
 
First of all, thanks for the love for Ori on this thread, much appreciated.

To answer the original question, I'll make a few recommendations

Bioshock (Garry Schyman)

No-one can compose like Garry. He has his own language. His work on Bioshock is extraordinary.



Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice (David Garcia & Andy LaPlegua)

This game in particular does an incredible job of marrying dialogue, SFX, ambience and music into a cohesive experience WITH the gameplay/story. It's no surprise that David Garcia is in-house at Ninja Theory. For me it's one of the best audio experiences ever committed to the medium.



Assassins Creed series (Jesper Kyd and many many others)

The series just in general has incredible music.



Remember Me (Olivier Deriviere)

Olivier Deriviere is in a league of his own in matching music with gameplay and implementation. But he is able to combine his integration skills with musicality, which is quite rare.

This score combines live orchestra with glitchscape that ties into the memory fragmentation that is a huge part of the plot and gameplay.



On the jazz side of things, check out LA Noire, and Grim Fandango. Enjoy :)

Lastly, you don't *have* to be a gamer to score a game well. But in the cases of those who don't, they are usually working with an outstanding audio director or music team that is going to take the stems of their recordings and implement / breakdown / re-arrange for them, this was the case in Spiderman, God of War, and many other games, especially at the AAA level where so much music is required.

Especailly in the case of games with any kind of narrative, you need to have a basic understanding of what the player is going through. You simply cannot understand that if you are not holding the controller and taking part in the interactivity in some way. It may be conveyed to you in a video, or even by an audio director, but, that brings me to my next point...

...When you're starting out, good luck getting an audio team that is going to be that dedicated to getting your music to play back properly in the game! You are going to need to do it yourself, or at least have some understanding of what you want so you can give it to a programmer so they can set it up for you. Resources are stretched so thin at the indie level that getting any time allocated for programming is quite hard. The better understanding you have of the game and how you want your music played, the better it'll end up being implemented. You can get this done without having any FMod or Wwise knowledge whatsoever, but you still need to be able to communicate to a programmer what you need.

It is true that it is possible to write music for games and treat it like a film score or a concept album. But this is the bare minimum (and sometimes that is enough depending on the game).

But those doing the best work in our medium are either playing the games or have a great audio team supporting them in their work. It's not music for games, but game music. There is a subtle but important difference, and to be frank, not that many people get this. The more you understand how music can connect to a player when it comes to the gameplay experience the better your chances of delivering great music for the game you work on. How you do this is up to you! But playing the games themselves is in my opinion, by far, the easiest way to gain this understanding.

Thanks for reading if you got this far!:2thumbs:
 
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@Chr!s and @fourteentoone

While I understand your rather similar stances, I think you both are approaching the topic from a bit different angle than me. And you both have extremely good and agreeable points!

But "composing music within a given context" is, in my opinion, completely different thing than "composing music for cohesive immersion throughout the whole experience"- which could be my hasty definition of music used in games.

Being a sort of an "asset machine" only is completely possible and does not make you any worse on creating awesome music for any context. But it may hinder your creative decisions a lot in the process- and you will definitely need that outstanding audio director in order to make the final music files to fit to the gameplay, narrative and flow. And as that's simply not reality in most of the game dev houses, the composer is usually required to be that music director him/herself. Hence my approach on the topic. From that particular (non-AAA) small-team-angle, being "just" a composer just doesn't suffice if you want to make the music really to support the gaming experience.

Naturally, working with AAA titles is completely a different job in that sort of a sense. Which brings a completely new angle to the discussion, as between the one man team and the asset machine mercenary composer there is also the seasoned AAA composer- the person who has the skills to create fitting music for a game AND the team behind him helping with the implementation and design of the music flow. In case you have an audio director, coders and other team members to take care of everything but the actual music composition and production, it leaves a lot of time to do even better and more thought-out music, which serves bigger productions even better.

At the end of the day, we are all just composers doing mostly what we love, which is the most important thing. I have been a devoted gamer for my whole life, and when I got my first job in the games industry fourteen years ago I was almost jizzing my pants. Hell, I still need to be cautious about it even today at times! I understand that for many composers it might be "just a job" when doing music for games- but for me, it combines the two of my biggest passions of all time, gaming and music. It's blood, sweat and endless stream of pixels each screaming your name like it was your job to give them a suitable theme music. And I love every second of it.
 
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Follow up: I don't play games daily anymore but during commutes or still moments i tend to go on spotify and search Distant Worlds (Distant Worlds 2 is my fav) or Video Games Live: Level 6.
 
I'm wondering if you have suggestions about which games to check out to give us a good overview.

Home computer gaming has a history that goes back about 40 years. It'll take quite a while to get a good overview.

There has been good music written for games throughout this time. The thread concentrates mostly on recent games, but go a bit further back and there are gems from all decades. Here are some of my favourites from a few years ago.

Twin Turbo V8 (by Lyndon Sharp, 1989 on ZX Spectrum)
Jet Force Gemini (by Robin Beanland, 1999 on N64)
Jet Set Radio (by Hideki Naganuma, 2000 on Dreamcast)
Jade Empire (by Jack Wall, 2007 on XBox)
 
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