Video Game Music

You’re sat on the top deck of the bus with your raincoat on, and you’ve unbuttoned the front to get to your phone, tucked in your pocket, and you’ve plugged in your headphones and you’ve sat back to look out the window at all the chicken shops moving past. You’re listening to your music and your mind wanders. You’re five years old again sat in the back of your parent’s car, pretending there’s a giant running alongside the horizon, jumping over sheep and pylons and hills, all of it in time to the music.

And you wait for the moment the doors open and you set your foot down on Turnpike Lane at exactly the same time the beat or chord change or start or end of the song comes. Suddenly you’re starring in your own film that would look SO GOOD if you could ever make this into a film, but it’s better than a film because you’re actually there moving around, passing through the barriers, standing on the escalator, each advertisement for face-cream passing you in time to the beat and if there was an explosion now it wouldn’t be like watching it on a screen. You’d be Thor, you’d be Tarantino. You’d have involvement, immersion. Christ, you’d be the actor and the camera all rolled into one.

If you play games, and you should play games, maybe you’ve played Hotline Miami. It’s intoxicating, it’s extremely violent, but the game is actually much smarter than it lets on. It’s clever in the way it riles you up one moment then undermines those feeling the next. You’ll spend minutes improvising some adrenaline-fuelled murda-tactic, the game's music constantly edging you on, and then the second you’re done, when only corpses remain, the music stops and you have to retrace your bloody path back out of the building in silence. It feels hollow, like eating a Big Mac. And although a lot can and has been said about the game’s treatment of violence, it’s the music which leaves the biggest impression. 

Because what a soundtrack. It’s genuinely good. Not just good in the let's-go-see-a-full-orchestra-perform-the-halo-theme kinda thing, which is really cinematic and everything, but this is better than cinema, better than film. It’s the moment you step onto Turnpike Lane station with something loud and fast in your ears and the rhythm is your rhythm, your steps are the steps of the song. You’re not going to start dancing but it’s the same psychological neck-of-the-woods. 

Rhythm is such an important part of Hotline Miami; the rhythm of dying then trying again and again until you’ve finished the level, so it’s no coincidence that the music has such a strong beat. The rhythm is imposed on your environment, and it gets your imagination all fired up. How you clean out the building is your decision, if you go left you’ll fight in one room, go right and you fight in another. One way is a dog, the other a guy with a shotgun. So although the music stays the same, it feels different each time because of the choices you make. Each time you play the game the music helps make a new flow of events, a new narrative. You might not be deciding between Count Vronsky and Count Karenina, but on some level you’re making your own story.

Or maybe you’ve played another game, something on the opposite end of the violence spectrum, something like Proteus. This is a game where your sole objective is to wander around a pixelated island. You explore the land through four different seasons and that’s pretty much it. You look at the trees, you chase a group of chickens, you wait for night to fall. Beneath this derivative description again lies a well-designed and affecting experience, and again what really lies at the root of these things is the music. 

Here the music of the game isn’t imposed on the environment, instead it’s the environment which imposes itself on the music. Different things have different sounds, so if it rains or if you decide to follow a frog for a while, the music will change to reflect that. Sure the result might be a sort-of chiptune Peter and the Wolf that ends up sounding somewhere between the music of the spheres and a stoned teenager twinkling on a casio keyboard, but it does an amazing job of making you feel immersed in the game. You make decisions, you choose to chase some flies or stand still and watch the sunset. Your movements in the game shape the experience you have, only now the soundtrack changes as well.  

The landscape in Proteus is procedurally generated, which means that it’s different each time you play. With the choice of movement and the element of procedural chance, it seems like there may be a near infinite combination of experiences, a Borgesian library of Babel where all combinations of letters exist to create every possible story. But there are still limitations. There are always limitations. Music needs rules or it becomes noise. Playing Proteus gives you a sense of being able to shape how the whole piece plays out, but it is still a sense. There is still direction. The different seasons each have their own rhythm, and you pass from one season to the other, led towards a circle of glowing lights, just as springs leads to summer, as day leads to night.

This agency; the connection between your choices and the music you hear, the idea of composing your own story, there is always a level where this is an illusion. When you're walking through Turnpike Lane you create a narrative, and listening to different music or seeing different sights will push you towards different narratives, yet the stories you make still have limitations, they are still being led. Proteus leads you to the next season. Hotline Miami leads you to silence after everyone is dead. On the bus you reach your work, and on the underground you walk along tunnels, channelled along a single path that directs you up, past the screens advertising face-cream and through the barriers, out into the world again.