When Atari's Pong flickered onto the screen in 1972, the machine eked out a hollow blip when ball hit paddle. But with modern console games closing in on a cinematic experience, a hollow blip will no longer do.
Instead, you hear full-fledged soundtracks like the one for the four-wheel racing game Smuggler's Run on the Sony PlayStation 2. To propel the action, Rock Star Games hired a Miami deejay to mix dance tracks from the Chicago house-music label Guidance into a club-style score.
On each level, four pulsing dance cuts play randomly as the player runs smuggling missions across the Canadian and Mexican borders for ruthless gangs.
"The world of electronica lends itself amazingly to the sonic experiences you want to have in a game," said Terry Donovan, chief operating officer of Rockstar Games, referring to the broad genre of dance music that focuses on beats and electronic textures. On its recent Midnight Club illegal-street-racing title, the company enlisted Detroit techno artist Derrick May (best known for the rave anthem "Strings of Life") for a soundscape that reflects "disenfranchised inner-city life," Donovan said.
Rock Star Games is hardly alone in its use of top musicians. Scratch the surface of the gaming industry and you'll find star talent.
David Bowie, Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh and Thomas Dolby are just a sampling of big-name artists who've pitched in on other game labels.
Other musicians, such as Tommy Tallarico, who scored the PlayStation version of Tomorrow Never Dies, are making names for themselves on game music alone.
Game music has grown so much that in 1999 the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences made video-game soundtracks eligible for Grammy Awards, a step that Dolby applauds.
"There have been some specialists, such as Tommy Tallarico and the Fatman, who deserve credit outside the game industry," Dolby said.
Soundtracks are eligible in three categories: best soundtrack album, song and instrumental composition for motion picture, TV and other visual media. None has yet been nominated.
When Radd Price started Radd Radio (http://www.raddradio.com), an Internet station in Lockport, Ill., dedicated to game music, he was surprised by the constant stream of listeners.
"I used to imagine a day when 'video game' would be a section in domestic record stores, and then laugh to myself," Radd said.
He attributes a rising interest in the genre to Internet music sharing and broadcast programs, such as Napster and Shoutcast.
In Japan, however, game music has already become a staple of popular culture. Some of the soundtracks for the Final Fantasy adventure series reached the top 10 on Japan's main pop-music chart, and symphony orchestras play video-game themes to packed audiences.
"Japan has a much more sonified environment than our culture," Dolby said. "Every place you go into is chiming with sound effects."
Japan is also the cradle of video-game music, explained Matthew Belinkie, a Yale student whose historical analysis of game music can be read on the Video Game Music Archive Web site (http://www.vgmusic.com).
Japanese coders built the seminal 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, which shipped in 1985 with a copy of the game Super Mario Brothers. While the NES could only play four tinny notes at the same time, the Super Mario Brothers theme music had a strong impact.
"It was the first [game theme] to be ingrained in popular culture," Belinkie said. "We heard that poppy, minute-long tune repeated over and over again for hours everywhere we went. To this day, we can't stop humming it deep down in our collective subconscious. . . . We think of Mario as this quintessential American '80s thing, but really it's Japanese."
The theme, written by Koji Kondo, employs a mish-mash of styles, including a calypso melody and hip-hop drums made from bursts of static.
At the time, game composers, most of whom worked in-house at Japanese companies, had to collaborate closely with programmers to eke out the sounds they wanted from the primitive consoles. Sometimes programmers wrote the soundtracks themselves and slapped them on at the last minute.
The Sony PlayStation changed everything in 1995. The console's CD-ROM storage allowed games to incorporate recorded audio in addition to programmed music for the first time. At around the same point, CD-ROM games for the PC were gaining in popularity.
Then in 1996, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, an avowed video-game addict, wrote the scream-drenched score to Id Software's first Quake game, helping to dispel some of the geeky stigma attached to game music in the United States.
Japan has developed a separate market for games and game-music albums. In the United States, fans mostly buy pricey Japanese imports on the Internet or in specialty stores. Domestically published video-game soundtracks show up sporadically in music outlets. "Most people -- even those who are frequent gamers -- are surprised to learn that music CDs are available featuring the soundtracks from video and computer games," wrote Adam Corn, editor of Soundtrack Central, a Web site dedicated to game music.
A quick search on Amazon.com turned up traditional "composed" game soundtracks for Riven, Myst, Medal of Honor and Ecco, as well as rock compilation soundtracks released for Road Rash-3D and Grand Turismo 2, among many others.
Rockstar Games' Donovan, meanwhile, bragged that two artists who worked on Midnight Club, Surgeon and Dom and Roland, released their game tracks on 12-inch vinyl.
