The world’s first videogame console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was mute. Its Kubrick-esque logo and smooth curved white and black casing, like the dashboard of a newborn space shuttle, may have been pure science fiction, but it was a system that asked players to simply imagine the sound effects to go with their on-screen actions. 38 years later, the latest videogames feature dynamic soundtracks, often performed by real orchestras conducted by the actions of the player, modifying rhythm and tempo to match the changing visuals.
From the blips and bleeps that marked gaming’s emergence from the primordial soup, the medium’s soundtracks have evolved in various directions, some matching the cinematic splendour of a Hollywood epic, others supporting their playfulness with bounding melodies. The result has been a tapestry of approaches as rich and diverse as the games their composers hope to characterize. The industry now attracts talent from top Hollywood composers, such as Metal Gear Solid/ Modern Warfare’s Harry Gregson-Williams, to chiptune bands such as Anamanaguchi (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game) to independent DJs and producers, such as Baiyon (Pixeljunk Eden).
But despite this hotbed of technical innovation and an influx of respected composers from other industries, the world of game music has to date remained obscure outside of its confines. Could this be set to change? Earlier this year, the prestigious Ivor Novello awards, which celebrate songwriting and composition across various media, introduced a videogame category, a spokesman saying at the time: “The Ivors have always sought to reflect the ever-changing world of songwriting and composing. Writing music for games requires a number of specialist skills such as non-linear and multi-layered composition, worthy of recognition.”
Richard Beddow and his composing team for Empire: Total War were nominated for the inaugural award, something he hope signals that video game composition has entered a new era of acclaim and acceptance on wider stage. “The Ivors in particular is an important award for a composer of any medium because it is an award judged completely by the composing and song writing community – your peers judge you,” he says. “So I’m very happy and humbled to have received a nomination for the award this year.”
Beddow was always attracted to difficult careers. As a child, he wanted to be a fighter pilot, switching to musician when he realised he had a head for amplitude, not altitude. “I knew it was going to be a difficult road to travel,” he tells me, “but I had the bug and just didn’t want to do anything other than music. Everything I did was steered towards improving my musicianship. I took up additional instruments, music theory lessons, Associated Board and Guildhall exams, spending all the money I saved on music technology. I looked for university courses that would not only continue to help me improve as a musician but also provide me with a sound engineering background as I knew with how important technical proficiency was becoming in the area of composition.”
Beddow joined Criterion Studios straight out of college in 1997. Prior to completing his degree, the young composer sent a VHS demo reel to various TV, film, radio and videogame companies in the hope of work. Of those that returned his call, Criterion seemed the most interesting to work with. It’s a route into the industry shared by award-winning composer Richard Jacques, who has scored over 80 games over the course of his 16 years working in the industry, including contributions to Jet Set Radio, Super Smash Bros. and Mass Effect.
“I began my career in the video game industry shortly after completing my music degree; my first role was as an in house composer at Sega,” he explains. “I knew from a very early age that I would be a composer of music to picture, since this is where my passion lies. I enjoy composing for all forms of media, and the video game industry challenges me in many different ways, so it was a very natural fit.”
You can read the rest of this article over at Eurogamer here.
Two years ago I saw the Wu Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah perform at the UK music festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties. There, in a sorry venue at the heart of Minehead’s Butlins, carpet sticky with beer from so many bleak cabaret nights, Ghostface performed to a packed room of largely white, middle-class music buffs and scenesters.
When the rapper invited girls in the audience to the stage to dance behind him, he was joined by a group of bookish hipsters wearing plaid skirts and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, bumping and grinding with Ghostface’s entourage in a scene of palpable awkwardness, one it seemed that nobody involved had quite thought through.
It’s not that Ghostface’s audience was being ironic. Quite the opposite: at least half the room was mouthing along with his rhymes, hi-fiving after each chorus and blap blapping after each song climax. But even so, there was a collective gasp of horror when the rapper politely asked if there was anyone in the audience who wanted to join him on stage for an impromptu rap battle. Oh bollocks, we thought. We are about to be found out.
After what seemed like a lifetime of silence, a gangly kid in skinny jeans tentatively raised his hand. A faintly concerned smile broke out across Ghostface’s, er, face as the crowd hustled the young man forwards toward the stage. We were caught somewhere between relief that someone had answered the rapper’s call and keen terror that this young man was fronting and about to embarrass everyone.
Boom, clack. Buh-boom-boom, clack. The room holds its breath. The boy, well aware of the pantomime scene he is now a key player in, lets out a Disney villain laugh and, bar four, launches into a majestic pitter-patter rhyme, all London twang and lithe eloquence. Like a featherweight boxer he bounces around Ghostface, whose smile is now as broad as his shoulders in the face of this unexpected talent.
It was a magical moment. And it’s one that, in part, you can now recreate in the comfort of your own living room, courtesy of Def Jam Rapstar.
You can read the rest of this reviw over at Eurogamer here.
The Majin is everything that Ico’s Yorda is not. In Fumito Ueda’s classic, you lead the waif-like girl-child along a castle’s craggy ramparts, crying out to her to follow your footsteps, catching her by her wrist when she falls, and batting away the black ghouls that tug at her bright white dress. It is a game about custody, about caring for someone weaker than yourself at the expense of the speed of your progress – a rare theme in a medium obsessed with the relentless exertion of power and dominance over others in search of the quickest route to a goal.
Ostensibly, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom shares the theme. Here too you play as a gangly boy, Tepeu, thrust into a hazy pastoral world beset by fighters made of wispy blackness. Within 20 minutes you’ve freed a companion from captivity and begun the work of guiding him to safety.
But in contrast to Ico’s Yorda, the Majin, a Muppet-like rendition of one of Shadow of the Colossus’ moss-covered giants, is a physical powerhouse. For all his loveable stupidity and lumbering gait, he heightens your effectiveness with his thumping arms, which are able to prise open 10-ton gates and hurl your character over ramparts. Yorda’s brilliant uselessness is overturned: rather than holding you back, the Majin is a companion without whom you could not progress.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Once the pinnacle of console military simulations, the Ghost Recon series’ slide into soft-edged mediocrity has been inexorable and somewhat tragic. Ubisoft, in redefining the solemn squad-based franchise as a mainstream rollercoaster ride of set-pieces, may have succeeded in moving Ghost Recon closer to the tone and character of the more successful Call of Duty, but it’s done so at the cost of its distinctive identity.
In this Wii release, the first entry to the series in three years, named simply Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, the publisher seeks to overwrite the memory of the series’ sober beginnings by way of a Time Crisis-style on-rails shooter. The result is a game that shares the family name but, aside from the drab urban environments, muted colour palette and military briefing interludes between levels, not the likeness.
The story is a hotchpotch of Clancy-isms, a phoned-in premise concerning a group of ultra-nationalists who have taken over Russia and are beginning their advance on Europe. Dalton Hibbard and Joe Booth are two of the allied soldiers sent to Norway to halt the advancing occupation. Stepping into their boots, you must liberate Russia via 12 missions lasting 20-odd minutes each, in which you click a button to advance through a series of corridors, stopping every now and again to take down the identikit attackers.
You can read the rest of this article over at Eurogamer here
Ignore the title: Shaun White Skateboarding has surprisingly little to do with the sport. Not in the sense that the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, with its physics-defying stunts and 5000-metre grinds, was a world away from the bruising realities of skateboarding. But rather, the story, themes and systems that underpin Ubisoft Montreal’s game have little to do with trucks, tricks and grip-tape – the game instead drawing its primary inspiration from the stoner-athlete world-view of the sport’s practitioners.
The premise is an Orwellian-meets-hippy fairytale. White’s city has been drained of all colour and vibrancy by The Ministry, a dour, suited government that frowns upon individual expression and tramples down any shoots of creativity that emerge from the cracks of its concrete domain.
The Ministry has imprisoned the titular skateboarder because his deck has the power to reverse this desaturation of the world, returning life and colour to the streets with its magical wheels. Before being thrown into his cell, White passes the deck over to you, charging you with returning the city to its former vibrancy through the medium of, er, tricks and grinds.
So this is a game about urban renewal; about restoring fun and excitement to a totalitarian state. It’s a game about throwing peace, love, happiness and flowers at the drab architecture of capitalism and awakening those enslaved to its daily grind to the wonder of an altogether different sort of grind. It’s a game about reinvigorating the institutionalised with joy and a spirit of adventure – something it arguably hopes to do to its genre, too.
As you skate through the blue-grey streets, your deck emits a restorative pulse and the world around you fills with colour. Flowers bloom. Trees, once clusters of withered polygonal branches, sprout oxygen-giving leaves. Grey walls are daubed with expressive graffiti.
Businessmen and women in colourless suits are transformed into Gap models, trading their suitcases for cameras through whose viewfinders they now see the world with redoubled interest. Identikit stores on the high street are transformed into fast food chains. The message may lack a little coherence but doubtless, the sense of cause and effect is one of the strongest of any game this year: when you press a button to olly, new life is born.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
For 13 years it’s been the critic’s go-to reference point for Bond games and movie tie-ins. Endless review introductions have pondered: ‘Will this be the game to match GoldenEye 007′s triumphs?’ before meandering to their inevitable conclusion that, while a valiant effort has been made, the answer is still no. Double-oh-seven out of ten.
It’s understandable. Rare’s seminal Nintendo 64 first-person shooter popularised a console genre that has grown to become gaming’s most prevalent and profitable. At a time when movie tie-ins were inevitably uninspired cash-ins, rushed through development in order to match their cinematic counterpart’s release date, Rare’s game arrived in its own time, long after the movie was out, treating the IP with unprecedented care.
Those features that weren’t raw innovations were at the very least game-changing improvements on what had gone before. Developed by a company at the height of its expertise and creativity, the shockwaves of the original GoldenEye 007′s influence forever altered the FPS landscape.
Small wonder no Bond game has managed all that since. So after years of trying different approaches, Activision has asked the question: perhaps the secret of its success lay in the name? And in choosing to revisit one of gaming’s best-loved titles, leaves us to tortuously ponder: will GoldenEye 007 be the game to match GoldenEye 007′s triumphs?
It opens in Russia, with love. Arkhangelsk is one of those videogame locations whose layout is imprinted in the mind of every player who ever visited it. Best known for the tall dam from which Piers Brosnan swan-dives at the end of GoldenEye 007′s opening sequence, it has been reconstructed here in meticulous detail. Those players who tailed the delivery truck into the compound in the N64 game will instinctively know when to crouch, how to approach the sniper guard tower and how to take down its sentry with muscle memory that will only be lost at the grave.
It’s an opening sequence lovingly inserted for fans of the original to ease them in, to let them know that, despite the recasting of Brosnan’s Bond as Daniel Craig; despite the recasting of Sean Bean’s 006 as who-knows-who, the wholesale removal of Robbie Coltrane, the new names of the guns and the achingly stylish menu screens that have preceded, losing all of the dated charm of the original, developer Eurocom isn’t going to stray too far from Rare’s hymn sheet.
It’s a feeling that lasts for exactly three minutes. As veteran GoldenEye 007 players duck behind the truck, ready to creep behind it into the compound, Bond’s companion barks an order to climb into the passenger seat. For the next five minutes a Modern Warfare-esque interactive cut-scene plays out, as you roar through the Arkhangelsk base, blowing up petrol tankers before crashing into a barrier and crawling from the wreckage of any illusion this was to be a step-for-step remake.
And who can blame Eurocom? The original GoldenEye’s triumphs innovated in significant ways, but we’re several steps further on in the evolution of the genre all these years later. You only need elect to play a level on Classic 007 difficulty, where Halo’s regenerating health bars are swapped out for the original’s when-it’s-gone-it’s-gone approach, to see exactly how a straight remake would have felt harsh and anachronistic to newcomers and veterans alike. All this beside whatever tortuous narrative and presentational restrictions the developer was subject to in order to avoid stepping on litigious toes.
You can read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here
What a difference a year makes. At the 2009 Nottingham GameCity festival, Keita Takahashi, creator of the joyful Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, seemed lost.
In a damp house on the outskirts of Nottingham, he worked with balls of plasticine, lengths of string and piles of bended paperclips in search of the design for a playground — a commission by the city brokered through the GameCity event organizers.
But more than that, he seemed to be in search of his place in the world. Disillusioned with the mainstream games industry and still sore at having being pressured into creating sequels for his games which he always intended to stand alone, Takahashi’s relationship with video games appeared to have soured.
“I’m frustrated with the industry,” he said at the time. “The things I find interesting and enjoyable just aren’t reflected in the popular games of today and, I feel like there’s not much room for my voice because of that.”
Twelve months on, and Takahashi is no longer an employee at Namco. In past few months he’s set up a new company, Uvula, with his wife, launching a website that plainly offers his services in art, music and video games.
Freed from the shackles of corporate life, Takahashi is now free to express his voice separate from worrying about financial targets, key demographics and the pressure of having to turn every idea into a franchise.
But these benefits come with setbacks. Namco’s suits may have made demands on Takahashi that he was uncomfortable with, but they also provided the funding, staff, platform and marketing that amplified his voice and made his games accessible around the world. This new liberty has come at the cost of power. With that in mind, is he happier than a year ago?
“For me now,” he tells Gamasutra, “I find [that] happiness and worry seem to be two sides of the same coin right now. I have mixed feelings. I’m concerned for my future. But then, even if I’d stayed at Namco, I just would have had a different set of worries, right?”
It is the early days for Takahashi’s new venture, Uvula. “To be honest, it’s not really a ‘company’ yet,” he says. “But when I went freelance, I needed a platform of expression, so I bought the domain.”
I ask him where the unusual name came from. “I was going through the dictionary app on my phone and came across the word randomly. It jumped out at me. I didn’t know the word before but it seemed so beautiful to me.”
“In Japanese, if you translate our word for that part of the body back into English it comes out as something like ‘throat penis’, something really ugly. So I like the contrast of this beautiful word in English with the weird, ugly word in Japanese.”
Takahashi reveals that he’s working on two projects at Uvula at the moment, neither of which is video game related. The first is the CD artwork for his musician wife’s next album. Then there’s a development of a new social networking website, although he won’t say who he’s partnering with on this, or what it is about for fear of upsetting them.
But that’s not to say Takahashi’s turned his back on video games. He mentions that he’s had some very early conversations with LittleBigPlanet developers Media Molecule, although nothing firm has come about from that yet.
Asked if there are any games he’s eager to make. “I have a really loose idea for a music game,” he says. “But I don’t think it would sell very many copies. Also, I had an idea for a first-person at IndieCade. It’s something that I’d actually really like to make with [Guerrilla's] Killzone team.”
The idea is rather incongruous to Takahashi’s previous work. “I’d like to make an FPS in which, every time you shoot an enemy, your character grows larger, and every time you’re shot, you grow smaller.”
“It would be interesting if the player got carried away by the fact that they grow and shrink so that, in the end, they forget the original purpose of shooting enemies. It would be beneficial to work with a company that specializes in that kind of game, and the Killzone team seemed like a good fit. That kind of strange mix appeals.”
It’s this kind of innovative, simple brilliance that as always marked Takahashi’s work. But that’s not to say there aren’t recurring themes. A lot of Takahashi’s games are about the player character growing and shrinking, that the idea of a player’s sense of progress is measured by the size of their avatar.
“It’s not intentional,” he says, before adding, with characteristic self-depreciation: “Maybe my sources of inspiration is very limited, which is why the results are so similar.”
Switching from introspection for a moment, I ask Takahashi if there are any game design trends in the industry that frustrate him, that he thinks we’d be better off without. “I especially dislike celebrity games,” he says.
He’s talking about games about the celebrities, like Tiger Woods golf, for example, as well as games in which celebrities do the voices for the characters. “It puts all of the focus on surface elements in order to attract customers, rather than prizing their real strength and appeal. This just misses the point of what games are about for me.”
What is that point then, I ask? “To let players experience something that they can only experience through playing games,” he says, immediately.
Which games have done that for him in the past year, I wonder.
He pauses. “I play with the dictionary app on my phone a lot,” he says with a grin.
