By refusing to be unremarkable, these scores lead the way for future artists to keep making interesting, innovative music in the field. Some artists have overcome this tendency to disappear in the back of the mind by means of Wagnerian leit motifs (think of Zelda themes), others by exploiting that repetition (think of the techno in Streets of Rage), but there’s a few present in the list whose strategy is taking those two paths at once, or following an album structure, or experimenting and hoping the results stick. As a result, added to the cinematic Hans Zimmer-inspired standard stuff (usually in action games where everything is a sequential set piece) there’s also quite a lot of, well, unremarkable soundtracks, not because they lack imagination but because they’re going to replay for hours and hours. Where a film score does not seek to fill the entire duration of a movie with music, I’ve found most videogames’ repetitiveness demands a different approach, one that truly takes to task the nature of background music. One last note: many of these OSTs are long. In other words, if that chase sequence track really did make me feel stressed, even if it was in the middle of two relatively quiet pieces, I didn’t consider the sensation of it being out of place a negative. I believe this helps to keep perspective, since often there’s a few tracks that break the flow of the album because they were conceived for very specific purposes that cannot fit a linear narrative (say, a chase sequence that repeats several times). The selection criteria is straightforward: how does this soundtrack work as an album? Given that games usually take much longer than a movie, not all of them have been ‘tested’ in context (in fact, most of them haven’t) to balance that out, I decided upon what a soundtrack might tell about the game it’s associated to as a secondary measure. This particular situation has brought all sorts of artists to the soundtrack business, and 2016 was a pretty good year for videogames in terms of scoring work perhaps because the boom of the past few years has led them to claim new spaces of artistic merit. tune is still alive and well, whether in the commissions of relatively renowned artists by gigantic corporations or in the smaller-scale collaborations that characterize independent game makers. Nevertheless, the kind of chip-tuning experimentation that brought us themes as remarkable as the Mario Bros. While videogame soundtracks have followed a different path to that of film scores, ever since high quality, non-synth or electronic audio started to become accessible to studios there’s been a stark focus on the cinematic side of sound: bombastic orchestral pieces or easy-listening songs flood interactivity with the spectacles of movies.
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