Loose Threads: Handheld game music...

[Fraser]

Nokia's Reset Generation has set a fantastic precedent for mobile games now by enlisting the talents of 8 bit Weapon to score the game. As far as I can recall, no other handheld game, let alone a mobile title, has ever hired a proper counter culture band to do a full score. Sure, games like Wipeout Pure/Pulse and the odd EA Sports effort have a licensed soundtrack comprised of various artists, but it's not the same thing as a proper purpose recorded score.

So, what do you think about this? Is this something you would like to see more of, and if so, what bands would you like to see score which games.

Personally I'd like to see Belle and Sebastian or maybe the Postal Service score LocoRoco 2. Or what about Daft Punk lending their talents to a quirky Digital Chocolate offering?

This is a bit more of an open discussion topic than many of the others we have had over the last few months. So go ahead and get opinionated, that's what forums are for!

[Mandark]

I'm sure that it will become quite common for a band to score the entire soundtrack of a game. It makes sense in many ways. The game can be marketed as having an exclusive soundtrack by an artist and the artist can market the music as being exclusively produced for the game. I can see unknown artists bidding to produce the music for well known mobile gaming brands and unknown game developers trying to sign up well known bands.

[hunter_alien]

No doubt that sooner or later this will become a fairly popular situation. But to be honest I dont think it adds a lot to the value/quality of the game. Until now many games got older tracks, popular ones, but not made specifically for them. And you know what? Never one Burnout game dissapointed me with its soundtrack. Neither the Need for Speed games, often the soundtrack being actually better then the rest of the game combined.

Also, I would not like for a game to have music just from one band. The style would be way to similar, so a multi-band aprouch is better suited for an experience that might lest hours/days/weeks or even months in a row.

[danskmacabre]

Hmmm, the first thing that springs to mind for me is "Quake" and "Nine inch Nails" doing the score for it.
Very atmospheric and worked very well.
I also remember way back a game on the Commodore 64 using a track from one of Jean Michel Jarre's albums for it's soundtrack. I think the game was "Yie ar Kung fu", but I could be wrong. That was a great effort too.

I think using one band/composer or whatever for a game COULD work, but whoever did the soundtrack would need to keep in mind to keep their music appropriate to the game in question.
With most games though, I just turn off the musical accompaniment if possible after the first few times I've heard it coz it just gets boring after a while at best, intrusive and annoying at worst.

[Fraser]

Personally I can't stand the Burnout soundtracks, they are almost always filled with 'respectable music to pretend to hate your parents to' (it's a real genre, honest). I did love the Me and My Katamari soundtrack and I seem to remember that though Miami Vice on the PSP was a bit of a work a day shooter, its soundtrack was particularly atmospheric (I think Mogwai scored the film but I haven't seen it so I don't know if it was the same music in the game or not).

I really think that what 8-bit Weapon did for Reset Generation was a great step forward though, there should be more of that sort of thing going on. Handheld games are still, even today, bordering on being a niche interest, so obscure/offbeat/alternative musical references fit in really well. There are plenty of handheld games that could make smarter use of the soundtrack as a selling point.

I would love to see a band like Battles do the soundtrack for Urban Attack 2 (don't know if there even will be an Urban Attack 2, but there really should be) in a stripped down, blippety blop kind of a way. Blippety blop? That's the second genre I've invented in this post!

[SetsFireToPoshHammer]

I'm with you on the Burnout issue, but I have to say, I don't know how much of a selling point music is for handheld games, even in the case of Reset Generation. They definitely add to the experience and can make a good game even better, but from a development point of view, a soundtrack scored by a hand picked counter-culture artist is a bit of a luxury and most studios will probably be more inclined to spend resources on making their game look better.

Unless you have the sort of development budget that Reset Generation had, putting the necessary research and money into getting the right artist for the job (never mind finding one that will agree to do it) is pretty much impossible, at least in the mobile space. It would be great to see some of the bigger budget DS and PSP titles take a more forward thinking approach to this however. What about some sort of ambient score by Boards of Canada for fl0w or something, that'd definitely work I'd say.