I Wrote Video Game Music the Same Way Composers did 30 Years Ago

Channel:

Jack Schooley

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1,400

Published on February 4, 2023 6:00:29 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFRfuMe43QA

Game:

Changes (2021)

Duration: 1:16

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This is how videogame music used to be made! Due to technical limitations, (namely storage constraints,) game developers couldn't simply include audio files. Instead, they would essentially include a basic synthesizer, as well as files that would tell the synthesizer what to play. This process was done using a program called a sequencer or a tracker, and the result would be music that took up much less space -- often just kilobytes. This is a readout of one of those files I wrote in a sequencer. This was a very unique writing experience as I couldn't really visualize what I was writing in the way I would be able to with MIDI or sheet music. You can see and hear the quality of the music improve as the piece progresses and I get more comfortable with the process.

In each of the 10 channels, the first column of data from the left is the note value -- that is what frequency the sample should be played at. The blue value next to it is to determine which sample to play from a sample bank I have just offscreen. The green values are for volume (written in hexadecimal), and the orange and pink do a wide variety of things based on the character in the pink column. These things include pitch gliding, vibrato, panning, tempo changes, etc.

This is an assignment I did for a class in college. The software used is called "MilkyTracker". It's a recreation of a popular DOS program called "FastTracker 2". The soundfont I used is ripped from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 (Explorers). I actually picked and imported all my samples before I started writing, so there were a handful that went unused. Despite this, the size of this entire project is less than 3 MB!

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