I chose this song for today because is entered my head unbidden. Then I got to thinking about how Time has sealed the 'tetris theme' as the Tchaikovsky song dance of the sugar plum fairy (Music 1 on the NES version). In fact, for some the 'Tetris theme' has eclipsed Tchaikovsky as the home of that song. I've certainly heard "Oh, it's the tetris song!" linked with that melody before. To that end, I want to say that the above track was always a nice departure, after having heard SugarPlum Fairy repeat a billion times. Composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, Music 3 is a cool theme and I don't mind listening to a few dozen rotations. It is most certainly not a staple of Russian Classical Music. Incidentally, Tanaka did other compositions for Nintendo, including the oft-paired contemporary of Tetris on the NES: Dr. Mario! Finally, I want to note that Tetris was a Family Fun Time game for me, growing up. It stands as the only game we own that wasn't given for a birthday present, Christmas or from relentless badgering. In fact, I don't remember asking for Tetris, my Dad just really liked it, so he went out and bought it when he was out returning the rental. -D
Bottle Sprite ripped by A.J. Nitro. Everything else from some other source.
Believe it or not, The Matrix became an angsty teenager this year, but I digress even before I able to start. But let's continue. I actually had to look up which pill was the one that put you back in the Matrix and which was the one that brought you out of it. There might be some symbolic meaning behind the specific color choices, red=freedom & blue=ignorance, but if there is, I don't know about it. But lets stay with that blue pill for a while. Ignorance and not knowing are the reasons for this post today and hold onto that thought.
For the past week or two, I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. The week of Halloween, Steam was having a sale on a lot of their "scary" and Halloween-esque games so I decided to take advantage and pick up some AAA titles that I never played due to not having the appropriate system (Xbox 360 or a gaming computer). However, when a game like Left 4 Dead 2 is looking at you with that blank hungry stare and it has a $4.99 sticker on it's forehead, I couldn't pass it up. I also picked up the Penumbra collection, which consists of the three games in the Penumbra series (Overture, Black Plague, and Requiem). Wait, you've never heard of Penumbra? There's the French gothic metal band Penumbra, but we're referring to the game by Frictional Games, the people who brought us Amnesia: The Dark Descent and ~Justine~.
Never having played any of the games in the Left 4 Dead series, you could look up a trailer and get a gist for what the game is about:
However, if you watch the trailer for Penumbra - Overture:
You still don't know what the game is about.
With the Left 4 Dead games, you know exactly what you're getting. I have only a vague idea with Penumbra, and that's something that I really like. I've played about an hour and-a-half and I still couldn't tell you what the story is aside from what I've experienced. But don't get me wrong, having a straight forward story that you know about before even starting the game isn't a bad thing and sometimes it's just refreshing to land in a world and go from Point A to Point B and kill as many zombies as you can without dying. It's also very refreshing to play a game that you know absolutely nothing about.
"This is the first entry in what I hope to be a series of posts about composers/programmers of music in video games. And not just any composers, but composers that we either don't know much about or have miss-attributed soundtracks to. What do I mean by "miss-attribute?" Okay, when you think of the music from the Legend of Zelda series, who comes to mind? Right, Koji Kondo. Except that he didn't write the music for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. That soundtrack was composed by Akito Nakatsuka. Who is that you ask? In short, he also wrote some of the music for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!"
The above was my going into what was originally planned as a series of about nine to ten posts, focusing on individual composers and why some soundtracks are miss-attributed to them. As an avid collector of soundtracks, I had thought that knowledge of video game composers would be about as prevalent as knowledge of film music composers. Granted I only know of a couple by name, and those're some of the big guns: Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, Koichi Sugiyama, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Yasunori Mitsuda, Robin Beanland and David Wise.
As it turned out, this happened to be one of those instances where when you grow up with a particular thing, like a dad who collects and chops/cuts and stacks firewood, that you think that all dads do that. Turns out a lot of dads do not drive out on county roads looking for felled trees or asking people who have had trees cut down if they would mind if their wood was taken out of their gutter. Who knew that wasn't normal? Turns out knowledge of who the composers of video game music are and what games they've composed for is not common knowledge.
I found this out when I put up a survey seeing if 1) If people knew who wrote the music to a particular video game and 2) If they knew, then they were to put down their answer by name. My theory was for example, that if someone would think that because Koji Kondo wrote the music to Super Mario Bros. that they might think he wrote the music to Dr. Mario. Or, as in the first mentioned example of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!.
In the following post I will give the results and my initial analysis of the data that I collected from the survey (which when I last checked was only 20 people). So with this in mind, I will now leave you with a couple youtube-ified tracks from various video games soundtracks that I absolutely love:
Tooth & Claw by Robin Beanland : Killer Instinct
Overworld by Koichi Sugiyama : Dragon Warrior
Sacrifices by Yuzo Koshiro : ActRaiser
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian I Can Just Hear It Now P.S. If you would like to take the aforementioned survey, here is the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XSYPF3N And please do not look up any information before taking the survey as I am/was trying to find out people's existing knowledge. Thank you.
