Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 125)

Trigger Happy
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underpowered audio chips, and these strictures resulted
in a flood of remarkably inventive videogame music. If
polyphony—the number of notes it is possible to play
at the same time—was restricted to, say, four notes, the
musician might write a piece characterized by
deliciously floaty buzzing arpeggios. And because the
microcomputer’s sound chip didn’t have much inbuilt
information to speak of—unlike a modern synthesizer,
it didn’t boast banks of ready-made instrument
noises—the composer also had to invent the quality of
each of the sounds he used. The star of this era was the
musician Rob Hubbard, whose excellent soundtracks
for old games—with their airbrushed, joyfully artificial
aesthetic that mixed robotic beats with hummable
tunes—have now been collectively preserved on a
commercially available compact disc.
Nowadays, videogame soundtracks fall into
two main classes: the compilation of licensed pop
tracks, or the specially composed score. Slapping
an existing pop record over a videogame, or a
film, is a rather hit-ormiss affair: as we have seen,
it worked wonders for early PlayStation games
like WipEout, but it can equally be grindingly
inappropriate, the French heavyrock songs on V-
Rally 2 being an emetic case in point. The
alternative of a specially written score is now