Sound design agency Ithaca Audio celebrates 35 years of video game music.
Just as they commemorated the 50th birthday of the cassette tape back in December, the team at Ithaca Audio thought it pertinent to mark the 35th anniversary of video game music with their latest mash-up, Game Theory.
Ithaca cite 1978’s Space Invaders as the dawn of video game music, though chiptune fanatics will know that experimentation with sound effects in video games began a few years earlier. Synthesised sound was used sparingly in the mid 70s, but titles like Tomohiro Nishikado‘s Gun Fight pioneered basic synthesis in games.
Ithaca do tip their hat to pre-’78 recordings through their inclusion of the Doctor Who theme tune, created in 1963 by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The legendary institution, known for its ground-breaking effects and technical expertise, enjoys its 55th birthday this year and recently reopened after a 14-year hiatus.
Gamers’ ferocious enthusiasm for the medium is certainly not a bad market to tap into. In recent years, composers and musicians have used multi-million selling games and their big-budget cinematic trailers as vessels through which to gain exposure. Note Woodkid’s ‘Iron’ in the teaser for Assassin’s Creed 3: Revelations, or the gruesome trailer for Dead Island, for which composer Giles Lamb has won acclaim at both Cannes Lions and the inaugural Music and Sound Awards.
However, Ithaca reminds us that it wasn’t always that way. Game Theory fuses nostalgic 8-bit and chiptune classics with their (arguably) more epic, high-fidelity modern counterparts. And, as is custom with Ithaca, the visuals tell the same story: low-res 2D fighters are slammed against fictional war-torn New York and Paris cityscapes in high definition.
A nice touch is the rewiring of hardware to enable them to ‘perform’ the mix in the video, bringing an element of ceremony to proceedings. It’s an effort that, while simple (so simple in fact they kindly explain it on their website), will get an appreciative nod from gamers and sound designers alike. Child prodigy Madeon gained international exposure for his live mash-up demonstration Pop Culture while performers including 2manyDJs inject mashed-up visuals into their live sets; Ithaca’s videos are created in order to advertise the company’s professional audio services, but that doesn’t make them any less charming.