From Pac-Man to Pop Music

Interactive Audio in Games and New Media

Karen Collins

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138459632
• eBook ISBN: 9781351217729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Digital interactive audio is the future of audio in media - most notably video games, but also web pages, theme parks, museums, art installations and theatrical events. Despite its importance to contemporary multi-media, this is the first book that provides a framework for understanding the history, issues and theories surrounding interactive audio. Karen Collins presents the work of academics, composers and sound programmers to introduce the topic from a variety of angles in order to provide a supplementary text for music and multimedia courses. The contributors cover practical and theoretical approaches, including historical perspectives, emerging theories, socio-cultural approaches to fandom, reception theory and case study analyses. The book offers a fresh perspective on media music, one that will complement film studies, but which will show the necessity of a unique approach when considering games music.

Part 1
Industries and synergies

Chapter 1
The new MTV? Electronic Arts and 'playing' music

Holly Tessler

In October of 2004 I attended the Music Works conference in Glasgow, Scotland. In several days' worth of seminars, discussions and question-and-answer surgeries, the most memorable talk came from Steve Schnur, ostensibly an outsider to the world of music, as he was in attendance as a delegate representing video game publisher Electronic Arts. I call Schnur's presentation memorable because it was dazzlingly multimedia-focused. He showed promotional clips of soon-to-be-released video games with new and exclusive music from big-name artists; in this instance, Snoop Dogg's version of 'Riders on the Storm', licensed for use in Electronic Arts' (EA's) Need for Speed Underground. Schnur's talk was high in what Scott Donaton calls 'emotional capital': intellectual property designed 'to elicit emotion and create connections'.¹ Indeed, that is precisely what had taken place in this half-hour demonstration/promotion/advertising sales pitch. To me, and to others, who, having grown up on Frogger and Pac-Man, at first only saw a seemingly peripheral relationship between video games and popular music, Schnur's talk was convincing. Beyond the audio-visual pyrotechnics, Schnur's MusicWorks presentation was compelling, if not outright provocative, for another reason as well. The clear message put across was not just in Glasgow, but also at trade shows such as MIDEM,² as well as in trade publications like Music Week and Billboard and broadsheets like the Financial Times and The Guardian. Schnur has called video games 'one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of the music industry ... What MTV used to be: ushering in trends and creating the new "cool".'³ Schnur reasoned that 'music video first appeared in 1981, and, since then, a generation has been raised with an expectation of visuals attached to audio.'⁴ He continued that video games, like MTV and rock' n' roll music:

Fight many of the same battles ... [They] continue to develop with the same fierce spirit and 'screw you' swagger. They court the same controversies. They ... hold great festivals. They can empower us, obsess us and, hopefully, continue to always surprise and challenge us. And no matter how old you are, your parents will still never understand.⁵

Schnur extended this analogy even further, drawing parallels between the technological advances of popular music and video games:

The Atari can be considered the gramophone of our culture. Our Sega and Nintendo game cartridges are another generation's 8-track tapes and LPs. Sony's original PlayStation may seem as quaint and almost prehistoric as an Elvis movie today ... The themes from 'Pac-Man', 'Donkey Kong', 'Super Mario' and 'Zelda' are as crucial to our consciousness as the riffs from 'Johnny B. Goode or 'Satisfaction' ... 'Def Jam Vendetta' remains as conceptually groundbreaking as the Who's 'Tommy'. We remain the same force for change. Today, games can be our Beatles, our Sex Pistols, our Nirvana ... So are videogames the new rock'n'roll? I say absolutely, yes, videogames are the new rock'n'roll. Videogames are the new hip-hop. They are the new house, heavy metal, R&B and punk. They are our culture. They are us ... Videogames will become the new radio ... [and] the new MTV.⁶

To support this rhetoric of the importance of video gaming, Schnur made reference to a number of interesting statistics. For instance, he argued that 60 per cent of all North Americans and 40 per cent of all Europeans play video games.⁷ He asserted that there will soon be a worldwide household penetration rate near to 70 per cent for video game consoles and, interestingly, he cited a consumer survey which determined that Americans, on average, spend about 75 hours more per year playing video games than they do watching rented videos/DVDs, watching television or listening to the radio.⁸

It is undeniable that video games are big business, with worldwide sales estimates of around $28 billion (USD) each year,⁹ but does that really make gaming the new MTV? The new rock 'n' roll? The new hip-hop? Beyond the catchy rallying cry, which is undeniably seductive, the argument Schnur is ultimately making is that video games are new cultural and industrial intermediaries, forging new customer-motivated and consumer-driven business partnerships, EA has become so embedded in various entertainment industry deals and initiatives, the parallel to MTV is especially clear in one particular aspect: it becomes difficult to determine if video games exist to promote popular music, or, if the EA model is fully extrapolated, if popular music exists to promote video games. The most evident comparison which can be made between video games and music video remains implicitly unarticulated by Schnur or any of his counterparts: the impact of the video game industry on the vertical integration of the music industry. Drawing similarities between music video and video games in this regard makes for some interesting discussion. For instance, Banks has written 'Music video functions at the major record labels can be divided roughly into three areas: production, promotion and retail distribution.'¹⁰ I would assert that video games can be understood as following a similar trajectory. Each of the following sections will detail key developments spearheaded by EA, which first underscore the centrality of video games in all facets of the contemporary popular music industry, but also aim to evaluate whether the EA strategy is unique, reproducible or even sustainable within the contemporary entertainment and cultural industries climate.

Video games and the production of popular music

Like music video before it, video games as a new medium for popular music have become so noteworthy because of their almost seamless integration into record companies' infrastructure. In terms of production, many major video game publishers, but in particular EA, have become gatekeepers, if not fully-fledged A&R¹¹ functionaries, for both major and independent record labels by presenting new and exclusive music to gamers worldwide. The UK industry trade paper Music Week estimates between 3,000 to 4,000 songs were submitted by artists and labels around the world to Ε A in hopes of inclusion on the soundtrack to FIFA 2005.¹² One-quarter of those songs which made the final cut onto the game soundtrack came from independent labels.¹³ But unlike music video, which polarized the bifurcation between major and independent record labels,¹⁴ video games as a new medium for facilitating the production of popular music embrace tracks from both sectors with equal zeal, as they seek to include artists and songs that 'drive the game while enhancing the gaming experience'.¹⁵ Indeed, Schnur credits EA for helping to break (then) indie acts like Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and The Streets,¹⁶ reasoning that 'Videogames take chances with new music where radio does not.'¹⁷

There is perhaps no more evident case for the power of video games as a new medium and production channel for popular music than EA's series of virtual-world-building games, The Sims. Characters in the games speak to each other in a language known as 'Simlish', purportedly a fractured combination of Ukrainian and Tagalog.¹⁸ Through recording and licensing deals with EA, a variety of well-established musical acts have re-recorded Simlish-language versions of their hits for various Sims games. Howard Jones has remade a Simlish-language version of his 1985 hit 'Things Can Only Get Better' and Depeche Mode have released a Simlish version of their single 'Suffer Well' from the 2005 album Playing the Angel. Both tracks were included in the soundtrack for The Sims 2. Similarly, the Black Eyed Peas have recorded 9 of 15 tracks from their 2005 album Monkey Business in the virtual language for The Urbz: Sims in the City.

The Simlish experience is just part of a larger strategy by EA and other video game publishers to introduce new and previously unfamiliar music to a worldwide audience. Maissa Dauriac, music supervisor at Syncope Entertainment, supports EA's involvement with labels to produce new music: 'With a [videogame] soundtrack you need to offer the audience an original song that is not available anywhere else but on that soundtrack.'¹⁹ As Stanley suggests,²⁰ video games publishers are, in effect, 'programming the radio station of the future', establishing a partnership that is beneficial to both the gaming and music industries. Record labels get tremendous amounts of promotional airplay for their artists and music, while video games publishers enhance the 'value-added' experience of their titles through the utilization of new music.

Video games and the promotion of popular music

In terms of promotion, it becomes a debatable question whether video games are reliant on popular music, or whether popular music is reliant on video games. Banks wrote of the role of video promotion departments in record labels as being ones that use:

Video clips to get favourable public exposure for their artists. These divisions distribute a label's video clips to music programme services and also plan marketing campaigns for artists that often include promotional contests on MTV or other shows. These executives make arrangements for their label's artists to be guests on outlets like MTV or BET and develop short promotional spots featuring the artist to air on these services.²¹

The parallel between the promotional function of MTV and video games is clear in this regard. Schnur has said:

Our first discussions were based on 'what if'. What if we could break bands? What if we could be a part of your [record labels'] weekly internal discussion where you used to talk about the MTV plan, the radio plan, the touring plan, the press plan? Would we ever get to the point where the labels would talk about the EA plan? I can tell you we're there. The labels vie for a spot in EA games.²²

EA's push to see video games as another legitimate promotional outlet for popular music appears to be succeeding. For instance, one of EA's top-selling titles, the snowboarding adventure SSX3, sold around five million copies worldwide.²³ Average game-play statistics demonstrate that a typical video game will be shared by 2.5 people, who play for 50 hours each, and each song on the title's soundtrack will pop up around twice an hour.²⁴ Based on these numbers, EA estimates each song on the SSX3 soundtrack will have been heard about 500 million times worldwide at the end of the game's lifecycle, which is far more airplay 'than a number one record around the world' will receive.²⁵

EA makes further reference to a 2003 study which indicated that in consumers aged 13-32, '49% learned about - and bought - a CD by a new artist after hearing a song in a game'.²⁶ In support of this claim, EA's release of American football bestseller Madden NFL has proved itself adept at helping to promote new music. Schnur cites the 2003 version of the game for boosting sales of Good Charlotte's song 'The Anthem'. The song was included on the Madden soundtrack in August of 2002, a month prior to release of the band's album The Young and the Hopeless. Epic Records has been quoted as saying the advance publicity for the song and the band through the video game increased sales 'considerably'.²⁷ Blink-182's single 'Feeling This' on Geffen, released on Madden 2004, shares a similar history. The 2004 edition of the game was released three months ahead of the band's radio release of the single and 'By the time it got to radio ... Geffen was in a very confident position that they had a song that was not only a hit, [they] had a song that was going to garner requests. To date it is the most successfully researched record that Blink has put out.'²⁸

It would appear that the shared demog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the contributors
• General Editor's Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 Industries and synergies
• PART 2 Ringtones and mobile phones
• PART 3 Instruments and interactions
• PART 4 Techniques and technologies
• PART 5 Audio and audience
• Selected Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index