Game music

Ellen was a naughty girl. She listened to the Cinematic Sound three-hour show full of unreleased Michael Giacchino goodies… and now she has her very own copy of said goodies. Naughty. (And she is amazed at how much things change, and yet how much they stay the same… it’s like sitting by your radio with a tape recorder, all over again.)

My favorite of these Giacchino pieces is the 10-minute suite of ride music for Disney’s Space Mountain (which is in the Incredibles mode, but much fruitier. Incidentally, I’ve also fallen for the very cheesy, spacey game music for Metroid Prime, which is by… uh… some Japanese guy.) Game music is something I never really followed until now, but since I am interested in Giacchino, I have to be interested in it now.

It seems to me that a modern-day film music purist could look down on game music: it’s really modern-day “program music.” You could say that it’s an easy, lucrative job for a composer, and that composing some grand, generic symphonic suite for a generic game (or ride) situation is just not as much an art form as the highly collaborative, tricky art of composing for film drama or comedy. So ironically, concert composers of the Golden Age could look down on film composers for having to base their music on films; while today, the art form of film music is so advanced and storied that conceivably you could look down on the game composers for doing what sometimes concert composers used to do.

Don’t get me wrong - a lot of game music is spectacular. There is some excellent stuff being written. But at the same time, as someone who loves film music and all that is interwoven with a good score, there is sort of an easy, empty quality, a lack of completeness… in the sense of a tone poem vs. an opera. The tone poem is beautiful, but it’s just not the same.