What We Can Learn from "Classic" Game Music

[Music] all right hello everybody I guess we're live now cool um for those of you who don't know me uh my name is Peter McConnell um I'd like to thank um Damian and Scott for for inviting me to speak um I've been writing music for games now for about 25 years um so I guess that's why I was invited to speak about this subject which is what can we learn from the classic era of game music um and uh the classics we hear a lot about them these days and uh we remember some of these titles fondly oh by the way I didn't talk about what I've actually done I guess well I worked for LucasArts for a bunch of years

and uh after that I scored um in in in Lucas Arts I scored games like or helped to score games like Monkey Island 2 Indiana Jones in the fate of Atlantis uh Grim Fandango Full Throttle um after that uh Psychonauts Sly Cooper series um uh Broken Age another uh another uh the kickstarter from double fine and a HearthStone for Blizzard Entertainment um so I've uh you know been lucky to be doing this for a while and I do have I guess you might say um some kind of a perspective on all this uh that that extends for more time than i' care to admit uh so king's quest Wing Commander seventh guest Mist does does anybody remember these games I mean they were pretty cool and and it

was an exciting time because because it was a really new industry and by the way does anybody know who this guy is over here oh come on okay he ran he announced the longest running TV commercial in the history of Television for the Columbia collection of Classics classical music remember even you even you can can own the petan dances by baradine and his name for extra credit anybody know his name he was Mr French in Family Affair for one time John Williams and speaking at John Williams my my experience in this business started working for um a company owned by George Lucas and not really this George Lucas I think but more like this George Lucas

and uh as I said we did some really some titles that I'm still very fond of and proud of in those days um and you know it was a really it was a really interesting time to to be in the business and I think it's worth if you want to think about now because I do hear a lot of people talk about oh the Golden Age of games you know they just don't make them like they used to you know you know when you had to only work with eight bits my goodness you had to write a good tune and now it's all about the production right I'm sure you've heard stuff like this before and uh you know there's a grain of Truth to some of that uh but I think there's also a healthy amount of salt to throw over your shoulder when you when you hear that kind of stuff and uh uh but it is worth remembering what it was like because some of it is amazingly like now so in those days

games and virtual reality I don't know if you remember virtual reality but it was sort of like Gaines only more exciting sounding they were a niche software market right it was nerd culture it was a very very very few you know kind of in a way Elite group of people who were into it and um you know I did not go to the first GDC but I did go to the second one and uh the second GDC had about 250 people at it and it was at some Hotel in San Jose and 50 of them were us folks from LucasArts which that was about the size of the company then uh and we all wore these little um red fezzes like Morocco Mole guys anybody know Secret Squirrel all right geez maybe there's at least one other baby boomer in here um so we all wore these fezzes and

um that had the Lucas Arts logo on them and it was just kind of a way of saying you know we're pretty wacky and we're all kind of in this cool little team and we all work together and we'd actually go to company meetings and George Lucas would be on stage and there'd be ilm over here and there would be over here there would be um Skywalker sound and over here would be LucasArts with their red fezzes on and no one really knew what to make of us um but it was it was all kind of kind of a reflection of where games were in the big picture at the time they were something that was about to happen they were not something that had really happened yet and space in those days um uh I'm supposed to have a big picture of a floppy disc here but um you can't find floppy discs anymore we shipped all you we shipped the monkey games and in Indi and so forth on floppies and if you can imagine that it and you know we when we worked

on our new sound system the fact that it took an entire floppy disc was this horrible horrible thing we had to we had to really you know just advocate for our new sound system intensely because of the uh what was at the time a huge space um hog right but anyway CD ROMs came along and changed everything they promised vast amounts of storage there were lots of claims about how much data you were going to be able to get on one which sort of turned out to be overblown but they still changed changed the industry tremendously and um audio Hardware The Sound Blaster just being invented right um High basically the state-of-the-art was 2D 2 and a2d kind of like that picture you first saw uh from Monkey Island 2 and 3D was the future um wolf Wolfenstein came out and it was a it was a um you know it was a a game changer as it were Takis we actually called them

Takis were a novelty right and you know and you know we were doing the voices ourselves you know Y what I was right and uh so it was very inhow it was we tended to be small as a as a whole and Lucas is not exactly maybe reflective of the entire industry in some ways but in others it very much was small group group of very young people um sort of getting together and inventing things from their bootstraps and what this meant was first of all budgets were tiny uh we went lowii because we had to I mean if we'd have had um if we'd have had uh surround sound to work with we would have worked with surround sound but what we had was 8bit audio cards and even worse uh the

PC speaker um necessity therefore was the mother of invention right and um we wore many hats right uh I was hired to program to help design and program the uh interactive music system at LucasArts as well as to write music for it and that was you know it was very common in those days unfortun in some cases but for people to wear um you know many hats from being you know programmer to tester to voice actor um and we were in house and this is one of those things where it's not so true now for some of us but it's very true for others of us we were in house so we had time we had time to come up with stuff um and George Lucas actually sort of

explicitly uh went to the board and said of Lucas said you know I don't care what you do for this amount of time just do cool stuff and that was kind of an ideal job to have where someone was telling you hey I don't care what you do just do cool stuff um by the way that changed so one of one of the things that we did with all this time was hey let's make an Interactive music system let's do cool stuff right so the challenge in those days was to basically leap out of a really crappy little speaker and get people's attention and satisfy a really picky Cadre of nerds and I myself I got into games because I loved zorc does anybody remember zorc okay MIT Geeks Who then became infocom and uh anyway a whole different deal now

now we've grown up as an industry uh we're now officially entertainment we used to be kind of like software entertainment not really sure which It's Entertainment I would say now with a heavy software component um it's a huge mass Market phenomenon it's stuff you see every day on the news there's a game section and rolling stone we affect uh major companies bottom lines I mean the idea that Halo or connect affect Microsoft's bottom line to me boggles my mind if you compare that to you know I mean admittedly George Lucas is a big famous guy and he's got a big famous company but we're there's 50 of us you know and we're tinkering on these little things the idea that that would come to where we are now today is is just amazing to me um the cloud now offers direct access to just about everything

in the whole universe you know quite a quite a contrast to the old cdrom um audio Hardware is now a tiny version of Home Theater what you can do on an iPhone with audio blows away anything the most Hi-Fi game stuff could do in 1991 or so and uh wait a minute space is an issue yeah well if you're in mobile games it is and and and um one thing I will say is space is always going to be an issue from the floppy disc to wherever there's always going to be some little thing in our business that is cutting edge and new and is all about getting it onto some even tinier little space than it's been before um low reses looks like I skipped a little bullet point there but low reses 2.5d are now 2D and 2.5d are now hip um and retro and cool and uh but so is 3D of course so what this means is

budgets they might be small and this did anybody see Brian's you guys were here for Brian Schmidt's talk or the the um broad span of projects in this industry is just amazing now and so you may have these little tiny projects uh Little mobile projects or you may have uh you know these ridic ully uh big budget projects um we wear slightly fewer hats than we did again this applies more to some of us than to others um invention means creating your own necessity because we have access to a lot of cool stuff now um I have a studio that I would have killed for back in those days um and we go lowii not because we have to but because we can because it works

for the project because it's cool and we're often out of house and that was an interesting thing in Brian's talk as well we're often out of house now as opposed to in-house we get brought in very quickly sometimes on a project and schedules can be insane and yes they were always insane not sure they were quite this insane um but we still like to innovate we still want to make the music cool we still want to do uh new stuff so the challenge now is to rise from a sea of content vast huge sea of content uh to grab people's attention in the mass market and still satisfy a really picky Cadre of True Believer True Believers right so what was it like I think it's worth when we go back um and look and see if we can learn anything from the

beginning the beginnings of time as it were um what was it like uh culturally well it was a lot like college only more so um when we when I was hired at Lucas they we used to have parties basically where you would try out new someone would people would have ideas for games and they would code them up and then we' have this thing called a pizza orgy where um and this is a real picture of a real Pizza orgy um and uh you know the idea being that if it's not fun at a party maybe it's not that fun and uh so everybody would play the game at these uh things at these and and give their feedback and that was sort of part of the culture there fun was a big huge part of the culture the tools we had to work with were um really rudimentary okay they were consumer and

hobbyist level tools um Protools 1.0 came out in 1991 it cost six grand and guess what we didn't have it it was deemed too expensive for the kind of work we were doing um most of the tools we used were in-house uh NIH everybody knows what that means right not invented here if you if you uh if you get something from off the shelf you're not a sufficiently cool Cowboy programmer you need to make it yourself and part of that was a necessity because we didn't have tools to do the kinds of things we really wanted to do so uh the good point about that is you got an intimate connection with the results of what you were doing you didn't it was a very sort of integrated process in terms of creating audio and imp menting it and then experiencing it

and I will get to that in a little more detail in a bit and one of the hats that um we wore as composers was the mechanics hat we would actually you know to use the sports car um analogy we would uh work on the car get out and drive it for a while get out work on the car drive it for a while and that allowed us to create tools that really worked well for us at also uh did mean we spent a lot of time creating tools uh and uh maybe not quite as much time as we would like to have uh been writing music and we do all that as I said because it's cool we're interested in doing something really creative but also because we have to because there's no choice okay now I'm going to actually get into a uh an example here of a tool um we our interactive music system was called use it standing for interactive music and

sound effects the term now is adaptive so sometimes I'm going to say adaptive music and sometimes I'm going to say interactive music I mean the same thing and um uh we had a tool that we used for composers called iMac and um sorry about the confusion this was invented before the iMac was invented and it was just our tool that we ran on the Macintosh to help us do create our music and then actually hear it in in a context very much like the game without having to bother the programmers so what it let you do is create buttons and Associate game states with those buttons and then Place those buttons on a map so you could see how all the pieces of music and the states in the game relate to each other and um that was very useful because it was uh you know it was very Visual and it was very immediate you could TR you would

press a button trigger audio files with behaviors uh which were then entered into an H file and anybody code see in this room wow see in in in in in whatever 1992 I think probably most of the hands would have gone up um so an H file is just something in in in uh the C language and uh what that did is it provided a customizable layer of logic between game states and music States so uh the programmers would be programming the game they would simply be setting State codes we'd be here writing our music and then also implementing this layer which is essentially equivalent to y's or fod now of something that would interpret those game States and then we'd also be using this tool to visualize what we were doing um we could test the interactivity without doing a build of the game I I would write stuff for grim Bango and then um you know basically minutes later

be testing the transitions between uh various pieces in the game and just seeing kind of how it fit together in the score and the thing that was cool about this visual thing is for adventure games which is the type of game we were mostly working on um a mental picture of the universe of all the places you can go because you're constantly going from one place to another in a uh in an adventure game that mental picture is really nice to have a visual for and um again it gave this sort of visceral connection between uh the composer and the actual audio experience the that the listener was ultimately going to have and I'm going to actually um take a little detour here and we're going to go how many of you guys are how many you too young to really remember this screen clearly I

wonder so there is an ancient Mac being emulated uh in my uh modern day laptop here and here's our little tool it's called iMac um and uh when you launch it oh my goodness look at all those errors remember those errors don't worry it's okay it's okay it's all right it's cool so um um this is uh the script that I wrote for year two of Grim Fandango and uh what it what you would do is you would um I think it's under this menu no there it is you could create a button simply by um let's try a new SE sequence now it doesn't doesn't like that right now anyway you would create a button you would enter a little uh code into it then uh the the button would appear on here you could draw these lines so that

just so as a pneumonic device to yourself you could you could remember what rooms connect to which other rooms and then you could play a piece and then play another piece and then listen to the transition actually execute and um when you did this this corresponded to stuff do I want to do it in in an H file right and this is where we would enter all the data just by hand it really wasn't very hard he basically listed all the pieces of music and then uh transition types and there were a bunch of codes that gave information about how the transition was supposed to behave between different pieces of music is that a was that a we're almost oh five minutes holy

crap okay anyway um so very quickly right now this sounds like this which isn't very good oh I don't hear anything oh well oh yeah yeah sorry that's a bug um it works on a G4 but it doesn't work on my emulator but you get the idea of what this was and what it really allowed you to do was to um to uh just you know EXP experience essentially what you were doing without having to code up the game it was a great tool and I wish we had more stuff like it now um uh so let me go back into let's go to here so takeaways five minutes takeaways coming up here first there's stuff to throw out okay no not that

or that that's the real hor version by the way um I think in some ways it's a nice thing that we don't have to wear as many hats as we used to I think those of us who are working on really you know Cutting Edge small projects can appreciate though that it was cool to wear a lot of hats so so just beware of how many hats you're wearing and and you know don't wear more than you have to but don't wear too few either really yeah see that's guys's wearing too many um unnecessary tweaker you know we we were given this mandate to do cool stuff and um you know without uh without a clear fear of the bottom line um there was definitely a certain amount of self-indulgence that went on which we could have done without Penny wise and pound foolish sometimes when you're doing a small project when you're doing a uh you know something by your bootstraps you will economize in PL economize in places where you should not not I really wish we had bought those

protool systems okay would have been nice we had to wait till Grim Fandango to get them I think if I remember right um but good takeaways right the spirit of invention I think is is something that uh is can sometimes be lost when you have a lot of resources and uh one thing that I think uh I'd like to sort of try try to get across is this idea of well if necessity is the mother of invention but you don't have a lot of necessity in the sense that you have a lot of great resources and you have uh you know a lot of possibilities of what you can do what do you do with that well one really interesting thing is to essentially create your own necessity make your own self-limiting decisions that Focus your statement okay so Frank Zappa every year used to send flowers to Edgard VZ now I don't know if you guys know who Edgard verz was but he wrote All of 14 pieces in his

entire life and yet somehow by writing just 14 pieces he had more impact than most composers of the 20th century he was an amazing composer um uh Igor Stravinsky at a time when people were getting totally complex and wrote um you know and writing atonal music eigor Stravinsky decided to write a symphony in C what a great idea he a lot of time used he used to to uh just simply restrict himself by not Choice um and how that translates to us today I think the idea of sort of self-imposed necessity or self-limitation is just remembering that high production values don't necessarily make art right and um in that sense Laura shigihara original Plants versus Zombies composer you know she's a genius

choosing amazing perfect set of sounds which are not big but they're small because the game is not big it's small but it's wonderful that kind of creativity I think is something that you know you only get uh once in a while and it and it reminds me of that time and since a lot of us now are working on mobile projects or we're working on um uh you know independent or so-called casual projects I think that's a great thing to keep in mind nothing wrong by the way with um having big resources I mean I do not think there is a wasted note in the Halo score that is an awesome I don't want to try to get too like reverse knob here um finally there are just sort of cultural things like I said learning to wear the right number of hats I I was glad I did the programming I was glad I did the music I really did prefer to to do the music in the end and I was glad

to be able to finally get the one point one part of things to the point where I could do the other more um so it's great that we don't have to do I'm being cut off be inh house even when you're out house pretend like you are part of the team even when you are working outside of the house because more of us are out of house now than used to be not in the ous as Brian said but out of house and finally um make it fun you know know it's all about I really really look back fondly on the spirit that we had in those days of just fun and I think there's a lot of that still today and we it's something we never want to lose and I'll take questions if we have time anybody has a question they could probably come up to the mic that would be best way to do it 30 bre oh okay think about five

questions cool oh okay so I I didn't have to race like that oh okay well I had some very profound things that I went through very quickly yes uh what do you make of um the whole retro uh Revival um that sort of has been happening where you know a lot of these music for games are starting to sound more like 8 B there do you think something was lost in the high production values why do you think that's happening is there well it sort of goes to my point there about about um you know what do you do in this time when you can do whatever you want right and um I I think it can be great and it can be annoying and the and the thing is to try to it's it's a question is is it done with the right spirit is it is it done with a respect for for the original sound or or or the original intent which may be like for instance Grim Fandango right I was so proud of that game when it came out but I winced every time I heard the stuff

that wasn't live okay we did not have a a a budget for that I am not nostalgic for the fact that we did not have a budget to do an orchestra for Grim there is nothing great about that and and one of the best gifts to me as an artist uh was to be able to redo that with a live Orchestra and you know of course we try not to um get into colorizing film as it were right we don't want to ruin the original um the original feeling but we want to be able to do what we wanted to do so so uh does that answer your question sort of sort of yeah it's like what about the you're talking about like the chip tune thing you know I'm I'm talking about projects kind of like like Fez where it's like it's trying to bring back I guess um a lot of the stuff that was good about I mean the self-imposed limitations you know now it's like we have to self-impose them whereas before you know so I guess I was just I was just wondering your take on it because

um yeah I don't know yeah I I I think I think retro stuff is awesome and I'm I'm I'm first of all I'm grateful for the attention to stuff at that time because I think you know it we have one of the thing you know Tommy Tarico Video Games Live one of the things he does so wonderfully is he reminds us that we have a culture that we have a history that we have literature now a body of work and part of that body of work is is you know the original Mario theme and part of of that part of that body of work is is god of war and I think that um I I if you're asking well is it kind of gimmicky to do and and yes sometimes it is kind of gimmicky but uh but it can be done right so that it's like hey check this out this is like a body of this is part of our our Canon you know I think that's cool cool thank you hi just out of curiosity um there's a tool called Max MSP and I was curious

if you found that as a suitable substitute for us setting up and kind of coming putting together the room ideas you did you did notice that that resembled Max a little bit yes um max was too geeky for us we found it did a lot of things that we weren't very interested in um and uh I've done performances with Max and uh I have a lot of respect for that whole ear comom um you know tinkering with the electronic music um it's it was a little less grounded in the type of things that we wanted to do though what we wanted to do was basically uh imitate a pit Orchestra there's a there's a performance on stage there's a conductor he's watching the performance and and and he's like conducting he's like measure 32 now right and that's what we wanted to have and that's not Max okay um that's my news cool and fod and y's and a lot of the tools that we have now

and and exact and I mean it's it's uh you know there's been a lot of stuff come down coming down the pipe since then definitely thank you you talked a lot about programs where you had to program themself you program them yourself like iMac is there still value in doing that or would you rather be leaning on Protools in those modern programs of today um I think there is actually still value in doing that um it it's uh it depends on what you think you're going to get out of it right now I mean specifically um well do you mean do you mean do you mean like the the thing I showed you yeah what how I'd like to see that happen today is I'd like to see um wise allow you to create buttons and not have to deal with uh object-oriented programming when you're trying to write music okay sorry guys thank you and uh uh you know I that that's a one thing that we were very big on was

not only getting under the hood and making it cool inside but also having respect for the fact that when you're trying to write music at 3: in the morning and it has to be done tomorrow and you want to do something cool the last thing you want to do is get out of your your uh right brain that's the creative one right supposedly and go to that other brain and and start writing C code so so we wrote C code but it wasn't very much anyway yeah hi what new games are you playing and who do you feel like is pushing the genre of adventure games well I I'm kind of biased on that one uh you know I I think Tim Schaefer is the most amazing game designer who ever Drew breath so that's just my and I have worked for him for many many years so I think that's I um you know uh so it's hard for me to sorry thank

you hi there you brought up you brought up Super Mario um when back to like old school music and that got me thinking about how it seems like there's a recent phenomenon like a certain philosophy of game writers where you have to avoid the repetitive like you have to make sure that if they're going to be stuck in the same spot for like five minutes then you can't have anything that's too repetitive or anthemic otherwise it just gets gring but then you for the same token you also look back on these older games for like like the Nintendo like the Super Marios and the zeldas and the Pokémons and all that like what really makes those is the sort of M is the very anthemic sort of music that goes along with it so I'm wondering like is that style of like very anthemic Melody driven music in game like is that really just sort of like fading out at this point or is that really just some small sector that think it is oh no I don't think so at all I think a lot of people are doing melodic anthemic stuff I mean yes there's there's I mean there's just so much variety now there there are situations for which is just just isn't appropriate you know something that's

more atmospheric or or dark or action oriented there are Parts where you don't want to be a Melody would be distracting right and then there are other parts of the same kind of game that need to be very you know righteous and and thematic and so so no I think I think uh I think uh I'm I'm not I don't really subscribe to oh those were the good old days you know you know you take a guy like Frankie when you have lived and loved like Frankie has now that could sing a tune right there is sort of that feeling maybe about about the old game music and and it's true when you only have a sound blaster to come out of and it's got to sound good on an adlib the tune had better be good that's absolutely true um but that doesn't mean the tune can't be good now and part of the challenge of you know this sort of wealth of of uh of opportunity that we have is to kind of keep that keep that Simplicity in mind and that's sort of where we get back to the idea of imposing your own

restrictions all right thank you all set all right