Bionic Commando is Love: Atmosphere and Theme in Game Soundtracks
Just two weeks ago, Brandon Sheffield wrote an excellent editorial on the failings of modern videogames soundtracks. As games have become longer, more complex, and, yes, more cinematic, their accompanying music has become more atmospheric than tuneful, more intent on creating a mood than a memorable melody. Sheffield made the point that the beloved songs from gaming’s 8- and 16-bit glory days are remembered first and foremost because players were forced to listen to them so many times. The technology available at the time afforded game composers only so much space and range so their songs were simple and short. Games were also played in shorter bursts and their difficulty was more demanding so repetition was an inherent aspect of sitting down with a game. We remember the Mario theme song not only because Koji Kondo was an excellent composer but because we heard it many, many times. If you were forced to listen to that brief a melody repeatedly while wandering Fallout 3’s nuclear wasteland, chances are you’d lose your damn mind.
Bionic Commando’s music strikes a careful balance between old and new. GRIN’s Simon Viklund, who composed the soundtrack for both the new Bionic Commando and last year’s remake Rearmed, is a man who remembers when videogame songs stuck in your brain. He actually used to hold a cassette player up to his television to record the soundtracks off his NES games. The new Bionic Commando’s doesn’t preserve the NES game’s tunes as faithfully as Rearmed’s club-beat-infused remixes, but it does house almost every original melody inside its sweeping songs. At the beginning of Bionic Commando, music is rare, fitting into the common mode of providing atmosphere. It was quite a disappointment. As the game has progressed though, particularly in its third level The Park, the music has become more constant and tuneful. The music that plays here shifts back and forth between a lilting piano melody and driving alterna-rock with very little dead silence in-between, and it does wonders for the overall tone of the game. The next level, a forest area preceding a boss fight, features a melancholic orchestral reimagining of the theme from Area 5 of the NES game.
Sheffield said in his essay that the key to memorable game music is to defy a player’s expectation with strange music unusual to games broadly, his examples being the licensed period-specific songs in Bioshock and Katamari Damacy’s eccentric J-pop. Simon Viklund has created another solution with his Bionic Commando soundtrack, songs that serve both atmosphere and theme, marrying the best of the past with today’s technology.
Tags: bionic commando, Brandon Sheffield, capcom, fallout 3, gamasutra, grin, john constantine, koji kondo, mega man 2, OST, simon viklund, super mario bros
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“If you were forced to listen to that brief a melody repeatedly while wandering Fallout 3’s nuclear wasteland, chances are you’d lose your damn mind.”
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