Musik Horen!

Like films, music in games is used to create all types of emotion from tension and suspense to sadness at the death of a character. However, in my personal opinion games achieve so much more through music than films and even that of artists in the charts. Not only does music help to engage the player into the game but after the emotional effect has passed, the music holds its emotional value even without the game.

Today many games who have dedicated orchestras for their music release sound tracks. Martin O’Donnell, composer of the Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 3:ODST has created music which not only works well with the game, but the music also works so well without the game and can bring excitement or a calm mood depending on what I’m doing or how I feel. It can even be played with other games. Similarly, Nobuo Uematsu, Writer of a lot of the Final Fantasy series’ music, has held many concerts with his orchestra, playing only Final Fantasy music, which are massively popular. Every time I watch one on Youtube I’m horribly envious of the crowd. Funnily enough, my number one “sonic moment” is by Nobuo Uematsu. Quite typically, as a Final Fantasy VII fan, it’s no surprise that my number one moment is when Aerith/Aeris is impaled by Sephiroth’s Masamune and her hair bobble/Holy material bounces down the stairs into the water to her theme, and as the player/I was emotionally distraught, you have to fight off a piece of Jenova to Aerith’s theme tune. *sigh*I’ll never forget how devastated I was...

But swiftly moving on, lol. Besides the emotions that games can create, music from games is massively under rated. I often listen to game sound tracks and people always ask me who it’s by or what it is to look into it themselves, but as soon as I mention the fact that it’s from a game sound track, they either sound disappointed, or shocked. I think this is a reflection of how games are still stuck with the stigma of being for kids, which truly is a shame as the composers of some of these game pieces really do write some fantastic pieces of music that just demand respect and appreciation.