Steve Vancouver of the VGM Moments podcast helped pick out some properly sinister tracks as part of our Halloween game music round-up.
Akira Yamaoka’s industrial noise for the Silent Hill series). There are a few different flavours of ‘darkness’ in games (as in other fictional mediums), for instance: ‘ unseen evil lurking in a slimy dungeon’, soundtracked by low bass notes and ethereal scraping noises (as with Jessica Curry’s Amnesia track below) frenzied battles with horrific foes which require more aggressive, percussion-led tracks (like some of Garry Schyman’s stuff from BioShock Infinite) and then the barely-listenable dread racket of psycho-horror (e.g. This mood is pretty straightforward - if a track makes you want to hide behind the sofa and cower in terror, it belongs here. “Mandus Awakes” by Jessica Curry from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs Also Andrew Hale’s incredible jazz score for L.A.Shout out to Normand Corbeil’s (R.I.P.) score for Heavy Rain, particularly Redemption.We recently wrote about “ The anxious calm of Resident Evil save room music” and how the majority of unsettling yet calm Resi save room tracks effectively form their own game music subgenre.What I like about this track by Lorne Balfe from Assassin’s Creed III is that it conveys the weight of the game’s melodrama, whilst keeping things interesting with a variety of instruments and melodic material: Picture our hero having encountered a major setback and they’re pouting about it in the rain or the Big Bad has made off with the Crystal of Wossitsname and will soon summon an unsightly, world-ending tentacle fiend. What does anxiety sound like? In video game music terms, you’re talking long, held minor string chords, usually with a downtrodden version of the otherwise triumphal main theme over the top. “Connor’s Life” by Lorne Balfe from Assassin’s Creed III I’ve blogged at greater length about this elsewhere (including film music picks), but we’re aiming for maximum pith and concision here.Īnd you must please forgive the galaxy-sized hole in my knowledge of Nintendo scores. That said, I still thought it would be fun to briefly run through these moods and my general observations about them. These 18 ‘moods’ are, of course, completely subjective and not a little arbitrary - I pretty much ignored outliers that didn’t neatly fit into my nonsense framework. 6,000 tracks later (there were a lot of rainy Tuesdays), I had identified 18 different moods that were common within game soundtrack music. One rainy day some years ago (likely a Tuesday), I started labelling my digital game music tracks by mood, with the vague notion that I would someday study the characteristics of each grouping. How much time can one spend alphabetising one’s Barbie dolls or digitising one’s collection of 19th Century accordion music? Too much time, that’s for sure. When you have a sizeable collection of something - for example fridge magnets, traffic cones or video game music - it can be a relaxing, slightly mindless pastime just to sit and re-sort your treasured possessions. We run down the 18 (ish) different moods that video game music tends to adhere to, from ‘anxious’ to ‘victorious’.
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