Music In Video Games

Studying Play

K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, Neil Lerner, K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, Neil Lerner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134692118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

Chapter 1

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Mario’s Dynamic Leaps

Musical Innovations (and the Specter of Early Cinema) in Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.

Neil Lerner

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Heading into the second decade of the twenty-first century, it has become possible, expected, and indeed rather commonplace for music to accompany video games in an elaborate and dynamic fashion, with complicated sound design and protean musical cues that shift their character depending on what the player decides to do.¹ That ability of the game’s music to respond to things happening in the game makes video game music unlike other genres of music; if the musical gestures are contingent upon player decisions—for instance, a certain melody might sound in conjunction with a player picking up an object or completing a task—then what we might try to describe as the game’s score will be a constantly shifting object, a difficult-to-repeat mix of variable intervals and orderings, depending on what occurs in any particular playing of a game. Even Pong (Atari, 1972), the earliest video game with musical tones, would create in its soundtrack a minimalistic accompaniment that utilized only three notes (a B-flat each time the paddle hits the ball, a B-flat an octave lower each time the ball hits a wall, and a B natural in the higher octave each time the ball makes it past a paddle and scores a point); its rhythmic unpredictability, together with the aleatoricism of its severely limited pitch collection, should remind us of the contemporaneous minimalistic works of composers such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley.

Yet, despite this exceptional property (of a never-to-be-repeated score), the musical styles arising in video games since the 1970s have nonetheless been rooted in earlier musical traditions. Circus (Exidy, 1977), one of the very first (if not the first) games to incorporate recognizable melodies, would sound out either “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” or the opening melody of the third movement of Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata—the familiar funeral music going back to the cinema traditions of the early twentieth century—whenever the player succeeded in clearing out a row of balloons or whenever a clown died, respectively.² Karen Collins delineates between interactive audio (“sound events that react to the player’s direct input”), adaptive audio (“sound that reacts to the game states”), and dynamic audio, which encompasses both.³ The idea of dynamic audio can be traced back rather directly to the traditions of live musical accompaniment for early cinema (roughly the late 1890s through to the 1920s), as pianists, organists, and conductors found themselves improvising their ways through films, generating musical scores that were, in their own ways, unlimited in their variety, contingencies, and ephemerality.⁴ At some point, video game scores began to move from their primitive monophony and (for some at least) tedious looping into the marvel of early twenty-first-century dynamic audio found in so many video games. Nintendo’s two groundbreaking games, Donkey Kong (an arcade coin-op released in the summer of 1981) and 1985’s Super Mario Bros. (also an arcade coin-op, but best known from its inclusion in the Nintendo Entertainment Systems that flooded into so many homes), are both justifiably lauded for their pioneering innovations of the genre of the platform game, but their music also deserves attention. Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. present key case studies in the way video game music was beginning to change in the first half of the 1980s. In their evocation of musical gestures, styles, and techniques associated with the days of early twentieth-century cinema, they look toward the past, yet their ground breaking uses of a series of tonally and motivically related cues point the way toward the future of game audio.

Donkey Kong’s Nostalgia for Early Cinema

Founded as a playing card company in 1889, the Japanese company Nintendo entered the budding video game market nearly a century later, in the mid 1970s; its release of Donkey Kong in 1981 made a deep impression in the U.S. market, as Donkey Kong quickly became one of the most successful games in the midst of the golden age of the coin-operated video arcade game.⁵ The game established not only Nintendo, but also Donkey Kong’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, as major forces within the video game industry. Besides containing several important innovations in game design, Donkey Kong was the first highly successful example of the platform genre, one where characters moved an avatar through a space while avoiding obstacles instead of firing at descending invaders (as in Space Invaders) or navigating through a maze (as in Pac-Man). In addition to containing several important innovations in game design, highlighting a character with no extraordinary abilities (just the capacity to run, to jump, and to grab a hammer), and introducing what would become a franchise character for their company (Jumpman, a carpenter who would later see his name changed to Mario and his career to plumber), Nintendo’s Donkey Kong also stands apart from its contemporary arcade video games for the relative complexity of its musical accompaniment.⁶

Nintendo’s promotional fliers for the game make but brief mention of Donkey Kong’s music, speaking of the “foreboding music” that “warns of the eventual doom that awaits the poor girl.” Donkey Kong’s commercial success was such that it prompted the publication of “how-to” manuals such as How to Win at Donkey Kong, published in 1982.⁷ The introduction to this 32-page treatise mused on the reasons for Donkey Kong’s popularity, pointing to the music as one of its many charms:

Most people will talk about the fantastic animation, with Donkey Kong beating his hairy chest, grabbing the damsel in distress, and dragging her to the top of a building. Others might talk about the sound effects, the growling ape, the honky-tonk music.⁸

The music described as “honky-tonk” in Donkey Kong hearkens back to early film music accompanying strategies, ...