Niche Spaces & Unresolved Boss Battles

ARTS & CULTURE | GAMES

Written by Hirimaia Eketone (they/them) | @hiri_music | Contributing Writer

Illustration by Sahana Vijayaraghavan (she/her) | @_sahana.shavij_ | Contributing Illustrator

Video game soundtracks can be the make or break of anyone’s gaming experience. If you’re loading up Rainbow Six Siege or Valorant, you may be more focused on the flashing lights and candy-coated distraction that the gaming industry loves to shove down unmedicated ADHD havers throats (we consume it half willingly.) Heoi ano, if you’re a sane human (unlike myself) you may be settling down in front of your preferred gaming console running games where you focus on exploration, development and experience. Video games create a sense of escapism, a portal to a new world where we are free to discover - the rules are simply at the whim of their creators. I joke about the addictive qualities of games, yet the reality is that games are a product of artistic consumerism, engineered to create a rush of fear or ecstasy through flashing gameplay or psychological torment. The main enabler behind this? The sonic warfare that takes place between your ears as you traverse whatever world you’ve found yourself loading into.

Stretching the boundaries of what music is capable of, video game soundtracks seamlessly blend the art of sound design with sonic synesthesia. Some designers create memorable motifs that will withstand the trials of time - think of any music from the Super Mario soundtrack or the neverending internet obsession with Undertale boss music. Others treat the game as an empty canvas waiting to be filled with serene music that tells its own story - games like Hollow Knight are an amazing example. Christopher Larkin, composer for the game, creates a world in which the player is free to plug in headphones and roam. The game is simply not itself without the serene ever-changing music as you wander amongst creatures and ghouls from another world. The popularity of this game stemmed from the beautiful soundscapes that elevated the seamless animation. The mind is a wondrous thing with the smallest of audio clues becoming cemented in your brain, waiting for the time in which they become useful or applicable. Hollow Knight is no stranger to utilizing this gift to make the player anticipate certain movements or outcomes when engaged in battle or exploration, and it isn’t the only game that achieves this. In 1978 when the first gaming soundtrack was created for Space Invaders, many recognised that the simple soundtrack incorporated an accelerating beat that would mimic a human’s heartbeat, creating more and more stress for the player as you progressed to higher levels. It would be foolish to claim all of Space Invaders' success came from the soundtrack but as the pioneer of video game soundtracks, this was groundbreaking. What did we learn from it? Only that sonic manipulation is a wondrous, terrifying resource for composers and game devs alike. 

To call this role ‘niche’ feels reductive, yet it is no secret that seeking work in such small specific music spaces as a composer feels like a death sentence. Creation for a video game soundtrack falls in a similar space to film composition, with less imagery and more subtlety. I feel like a broken record yapping about the importance of the arts vs the actual payoff from the world but despite its unique position within the game development world, most soundtrack composers will go unnoticed, sometimes uncredited for their work. Game developers seldom seek out smaller artists nowadays, choosing instead to opt for a string of royalty-free sounds on some soulless website (notice I said seldom - if you want to support and check out a very cool music game project, check out Club Ruby’s new game based on their EP, Was God Birthed!?). Due to this, we are seeing less ingenuity in these spaces and more recycling of bland, half-assed ideas. AI has played a neutral role in this movement, with decent sound design programmes becoming more and more accessible and small AI-generated sound bytes feeding into the fever dream of ‘easy’ game development. We went from the smallest sounds creating entire worlds to reduce, reuse, and recycling the offcuts from bigger projects or people. Yet again I ask, where are the creatives? Busy struggling to live off scraps of work, I’d assume.

However, it is not all doom and gloom, the tradition of good video game soundtracks is not going anywhere! I wish for the revitalisation of good indie game devs creating hidden gems alongside their composers, and with our widespread access to information and lightning-fast communication, I feel like I won’t have to wait long. Alas, we find ourselves in the interim now, looking to the horizon for possible glimmers of hope. If you take nothing else away from this, let it be the importance of admiring the sound design worked into every nook and cranny of the games we know and love.