The music dies for once popular 'Guitar Hero' video game
By Michael Martinez, CNN
February 9, 2011 8:36 p.m. EST
Los Angeles (CNN) -- The video game "Guitar Hero," once believed to be helping revive rock a few years ago in the hip-hop era, will jam no longer.
Activision Blizzard Inc. announced Wednesday it will cease publishing the game this year.
"Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing's 'Guitar Hero' business unit and discontinue development on its 'Guitar Hero' game for 2011," the company said in a statement.
The decision was "based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world's best interactive entertainment experiences," the firm said.
The cancellation came as the Santa Monica, California-based company announced a record operating cash flow of $1.4 billion in 2010. Its revenues last year from digital channels grew more than 20 percent to $1.5 billion.
Read the story with media and links at CNN
Showing posts with label games/gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games/gaming. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Sunday, August 16, 2009
While My Guitar Gently Beeps: Beatles Go Gaming
The New York Times Magazine has a huge article on the coming Beatles Rock Band game, and the potential business changes it may influence:
Music games are also a serious business. Together, Rock Band and Guitar Hero have earned more than $3 billion. The money comes not just from initial sales but also from a continuing stream of new songs that can be downloaded for about $2 a piece. The Rock Band catalog contains more than 800 songs by bands as disparate as the Grateful Dead and Megadeth. Early on, artists noticed that people were discovering music in games and then buying it elsewhere. On iTunes, downloads of the 1978 Cheap Trick song “Surrender” tripled after it appeared in Guitar Hero 2, and sales of a 1994 Weezer song from Guitar Hero 3 increased tenfold. Increasingly, games are also seen as a significant distribution platform in their own right. In its first week, Motley Crue’s 2008 single “Saints of Los Angeles” sold nearly five times as many copies on Rock Band as it did on iTunes, and at twice the price. Next month, Pearl Jam plans to release its new album simultaneously on CD and in Rock Band.In perhaps the surest sign that the music industry has started to take games seriously, feuds have erupted over which parties are stealing the others’ profits.
At the moment, the game companies decide which music to sell, and there is a bottleneck of record labels pushing to get their artists into the games. But last month Harmonix announced that it will license software tools and provide training for anyone to create and distribute interactive versions of their own songs on a new Rock Band Network, which will drastically expand the amount and variety of interactive music available. Already the Sub Pop label, which released the first Nirvana album, has said it plans to put parts of its catalog and future releases into game format. The Rock Band Network is so potentially consequential that Harmonix went to great lengths to keep its development secret, including giving it the unofficial in-house code name Rock Band: Nickelback, on the theory that the name of the quintessentially generic modern rock group would be enough to deflect all curiosity. After a polite gesture in the direction of modesty, Rigopulos predicted, “We’re really going to explode this thing to be the new music industry.” People who have never played a video game will buy The Beatles: Rock Band, he said, and once they do, they’ll want interactive songs from their other favorite artists. “As huge as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been over the past few years, I still think we’re on the shy side of the chasm,” Rigopulos maintains, “because the Beatles have a reach and power that transcends any other band.”
Read the full article HERE.
Music games are also a serious business. Together, Rock Band and Guitar Hero have earned more than $3 billion. The money comes not just from initial sales but also from a continuing stream of new songs that can be downloaded for about $2 a piece. The Rock Band catalog contains more than 800 songs by bands as disparate as the Grateful Dead and Megadeth. Early on, artists noticed that people were discovering music in games and then buying it elsewhere. On iTunes, downloads of the 1978 Cheap Trick song “Surrender” tripled after it appeared in Guitar Hero 2, and sales of a 1994 Weezer song from Guitar Hero 3 increased tenfold. Increasingly, games are also seen as a significant distribution platform in their own right. In its first week, Motley Crue’s 2008 single “Saints of Los Angeles” sold nearly five times as many copies on Rock Band as it did on iTunes, and at twice the price. Next month, Pearl Jam plans to release its new album simultaneously on CD and in Rock Band.In perhaps the surest sign that the music industry has started to take games seriously, feuds have erupted over which parties are stealing the others’ profits.
At the moment, the game companies decide which music to sell, and there is a bottleneck of record labels pushing to get their artists into the games. But last month Harmonix announced that it will license software tools and provide training for anyone to create and distribute interactive versions of their own songs on a new Rock Band Network, which will drastically expand the amount and variety of interactive music available. Already the Sub Pop label, which released the first Nirvana album, has said it plans to put parts of its catalog and future releases into game format. The Rock Band Network is so potentially consequential that Harmonix went to great lengths to keep its development secret, including giving it the unofficial in-house code name Rock Band: Nickelback, on the theory that the name of the quintessentially generic modern rock group would be enough to deflect all curiosity. After a polite gesture in the direction of modesty, Rigopulos predicted, “We’re really going to explode this thing to be the new music industry.” People who have never played a video game will buy The Beatles: Rock Band, he said, and once they do, they’ll want interactive songs from their other favorite artists. “As huge as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been over the past few years, I still think we’re on the shy side of the chasm,” Rigopulos maintains, “because the Beatles have a reach and power that transcends any other band.”
Read the full article HERE.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Professional Video Gamer, Washed Up at 23
LAT
On the Edge
Once on TV, now just another gamer
Yazan Ammari, 23, earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars as a professional video-game player. Now he's back at Mom and Dad's.
By P.J. Huffstutter
6:41 PM PST, March 6, 2009
Reporting from Granada Hills, Calif. — YAZAN AMMARI, Gamer
How did the renowned "clowN" -- dreaded, revered and awesomely lethal with a SG552 commando high-powered assault rifle -- end up back home with Mom and Dad?
ClowN, not so long ago, was a hero to every kid whose parents ever nagged that computer games were a waste of time.
He earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars over three years as a professional player of "Counter-Strike: Source" -- your ultimate run-around-and-shoot-everything-in-sight-before-someone-blows-you-up kind of game. It's played by about 10 million people.
But these are tough times -- canceled tournaments, dwindling prizes, sponsorless players adrift like wandering samurai.
"Suddenly, I'm Yaz," said the 23-year-old college senior as commandos scrambled across his computer monitor. "Just Yaz."
Yazan Ammari -- tan and lanky, with a huge, cheeky grin -- is back in his old room with a neon-green gaming trophy doubling as a lamp and foam-board prize checks leaning against the wall.
The Marina del Rey apartment that he lived in rent-free while playing in a now-defunct DirecTV series on gaming is gone. His family had to help him pay off $6,000 in credit card debt. He is about to graduate from Cal State Northridge in business marketing and has no idea what he's going to do.
"There's nothing to do but move on," Yaz said.
The atmosphere at home these days is laden with a certain I-told-you-so kind of feeling. While his mom and dad -- Roxy and Monty, both Jordanian immigrants -- are proud of their only son, they're also worried.
In the living room, they watched CNN as headlines scrolled across the bottom of the screen -- mass layoffs, squatters taking over foreclosed homes, people committing suicide over financial troubles.
Yaz was practicing in his bedroom. Got to stay sharp.
"He has to finish school and start working," Monty said to Roxy, ignoring the occasional sound of explosions from their son's room. "There is a time to move on."
Father and son have talked. Yaz admitted that he's terrified to graduate. His father said he could always work at the family's tow-truck business.
Yaz stood up to stretch his legs and grab a snack. He grimaced as he walked past his closet. Inside, shelves were crammed with software, hard drives and video graphics cards he had won over the years. Somewhere, he thought, was a pair of diamond earrings.
His BMW M3 with loads of extras is long gone. He's embarrassed to say what he spent on the 19-inch deep-dish customized black rims. "Stupidity," Yaz said. "Sheer, utter stupidity."
Now, he's grateful to be driving the used Toyota Highlander that his father bought him. His father had warned him to be frugal. " 'Buy what you need, not what you want,' " Yaz recalled. "Parents know everything."
So, he is spending less time playing and more studying and helping his father. He's launched a website, Gamerworld.net, devoted to professional computer game players and fans. Maybe he can make some money off it.
The last four years haven't been a waste, Yaz reasoned. He's traveled. He's negotiated contracts. He's figured out how to do his own laundry.
Sitting back down at his computer, his fingers blurred across the keyboard as he led a team through a sprawling, abandoned train depot somewhere in the Middle East. He threw a flash-bang grenade. The sound of the explosion rattled the room's windows.
His mother peeked into the bedroom and closed the door.
Try as he might, the dream of making a comeback still haunts his thoughts. He's tempted by a fundraiser offering a $50 prize and all the soda he can drink. There's a tournament in Montreal where the cash prize would pay for his airfare and hotel . . . if he wins.
The sums are paltry, but the thought of being forgotten is worse. "It's kind of like those one-hit wonders in a song," he said. "Now people just look at them, laugh at them, they don't even think about them. Nobody even knows their names anymore."
He glanced at his watch and sighed. 7:30 p.m. He had classes the next day, starting at 8 a.m.
"I should call it an early night," clowN told his teammates via headset.
Groans and profanity filled his ears.
"Really?" asked Solange "fireb0mb" LeBreton, 18, from her home in Quebec.
"Loser," said Tarik "rockyte" Elkhatib, 22, in Ohio.
Outside, the moon was rising, bright and fat. ClowN was restless, drumming the desk with his fingertips, eyes roaming the screen. A crackly voice called through the computer speakers.
Lock and load . . . lock and load . . . lock and load . . .
p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com
On the Edge Staff writer P.J. Huffstutter and photographer Genaro Molina are traveling the country, chronicling the hopes and struggles of Americans in this time of economic hardship. latimes.com /hardtimes Find stories from this series and from the Business series "Surviving Recession: A Consumer Guide."
On the Edge
Once on TV, now just another gamer
Yazan Ammari, 23, earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars as a professional video-game player. Now he's back at Mom and Dad's.
By P.J. Huffstutter
6:41 PM PST, March 6, 2009
Reporting from Granada Hills, Calif. — YAZAN AMMARI, Gamer
How did the renowned "clowN" -- dreaded, revered and awesomely lethal with a SG552 commando high-powered assault rifle -- end up back home with Mom and Dad?
ClowN, not so long ago, was a hero to every kid whose parents ever nagged that computer games were a waste of time.
He earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars over three years as a professional player of "Counter-Strike: Source" -- your ultimate run-around-and-shoot-everything-in-sight-before-someone-blows-you-up kind of game. It's played by about 10 million people.
But these are tough times -- canceled tournaments, dwindling prizes, sponsorless players adrift like wandering samurai.
"Suddenly, I'm Yaz," said the 23-year-old college senior as commandos scrambled across his computer monitor. "Just Yaz."
Yazan Ammari -- tan and lanky, with a huge, cheeky grin -- is back in his old room with a neon-green gaming trophy doubling as a lamp and foam-board prize checks leaning against the wall.
The Marina del Rey apartment that he lived in rent-free while playing in a now-defunct DirecTV series on gaming is gone. His family had to help him pay off $6,000 in credit card debt. He is about to graduate from Cal State Northridge in business marketing and has no idea what he's going to do.
"There's nothing to do but move on," Yaz said.
The atmosphere at home these days is laden with a certain I-told-you-so kind of feeling. While his mom and dad -- Roxy and Monty, both Jordanian immigrants -- are proud of their only son, they're also worried.
In the living room, they watched CNN as headlines scrolled across the bottom of the screen -- mass layoffs, squatters taking over foreclosed homes, people committing suicide over financial troubles.
Yaz was practicing in his bedroom. Got to stay sharp.
"He has to finish school and start working," Monty said to Roxy, ignoring the occasional sound of explosions from their son's room. "There is a time to move on."
Father and son have talked. Yaz admitted that he's terrified to graduate. His father said he could always work at the family's tow-truck business.
Yaz stood up to stretch his legs and grab a snack. He grimaced as he walked past his closet. Inside, shelves were crammed with software, hard drives and video graphics cards he had won over the years. Somewhere, he thought, was a pair of diamond earrings.
His BMW M3 with loads of extras is long gone. He's embarrassed to say what he spent on the 19-inch deep-dish customized black rims. "Stupidity," Yaz said. "Sheer, utter stupidity."
Now, he's grateful to be driving the used Toyota Highlander that his father bought him. His father had warned him to be frugal. " 'Buy what you need, not what you want,' " Yaz recalled. "Parents know everything."
So, he is spending less time playing and more studying and helping his father. He's launched a website, Gamerworld.net, devoted to professional computer game players and fans. Maybe he can make some money off it.
The last four years haven't been a waste, Yaz reasoned. He's traveled. He's negotiated contracts. He's figured out how to do his own laundry.
Sitting back down at his computer, his fingers blurred across the keyboard as he led a team through a sprawling, abandoned train depot somewhere in the Middle East. He threw a flash-bang grenade. The sound of the explosion rattled the room's windows.
His mother peeked into the bedroom and closed the door.
Try as he might, the dream of making a comeback still haunts his thoughts. He's tempted by a fundraiser offering a $50 prize and all the soda he can drink. There's a tournament in Montreal where the cash prize would pay for his airfare and hotel . . . if he wins.
The sums are paltry, but the thought of being forgotten is worse. "It's kind of like those one-hit wonders in a song," he said. "Now people just look at them, laugh at them, they don't even think about them. Nobody even knows their names anymore."
He glanced at his watch and sighed. 7:30 p.m. He had classes the next day, starting at 8 a.m.
"I should call it an early night," clowN told his teammates via headset.
Groans and profanity filled his ears.
"Really?" asked Solange "fireb0mb" LeBreton, 18, from her home in Quebec.
"Loser," said Tarik "rockyte" Elkhatib, 22, in Ohio.
Outside, the moon was rising, bright and fat. ClowN was restless, drumming the desk with his fingertips, eyes roaming the screen. A crackly voice called through the computer speakers.
Lock and load . . . lock and load . . . lock and load . . .
p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com
On the Edge Staff writer P.J. Huffstutter and photographer Genaro Molina are traveling the country, chronicling the hopes and struggles of Americans in this time of economic hardship. latimes.com /hardtimes Find stories from this series and from the Business series "Surviving Recession: A Consumer Guide."
Thursday, June 19, 2008
'Virtual Maestro': An Orchestral Guitar Hero?
Reuters/MSNBC
Play a 'Virtual Maestro' on the Wii
'Virtual Maestro' lets players use Wii controller to conduct orchestra
By Chloe Fussell
Reuters
updated 5:33 p.m. PT, Thurs., June. 19, 2008
LONDON - You may be a wicked axe man thanks to the "Guitar Hero" videogame by Activision Inc, but are you ready to take on a whole orchestra?
Two U.S. professors have created "Virtual Maestro," which allows a player to use the Wii console made by videogame company Nintendo to conduct the Verbier Festival Orchestra... well, a recording on a 42-inch plasma screen of them anyway.
But if you want to play, you'll have to get off the sofa and get down to a classical concert.
The game was brought over from the United States for trials and was a hit this week with audience members in the foyer of London's Barbican centre.
Young concert-goers waved the console around — some wildly, others shyly — to Rossini's William Tell Overture, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 5.
"It's pretty fun to use, but also great to watch others play it," said Barbican visitor Owen Powell, as he watched gamers leap about in the throes of conducting.
"For so many people, classical music is about a crusty music hall," said Ann Drew from banking firm UBS, which sponsors the game and the Verbier Orchestra. "The design was intended to bring a new, different experience to concert-going."
The game will tour Europe and organizers hope to set it up in venues before concert performances.
The company which created "Virtual Maestro" is aiming to develop it further, but the sponsors say there are no plans to allow budding Karajans and Gergievs to play it on their Wiis at home any time soon.
Play a 'Virtual Maestro' on the Wii
'Virtual Maestro' lets players use Wii controller to conduct orchestra
By Chloe Fussell
Reuters
updated 5:33 p.m. PT, Thurs., June. 19, 2008
LONDON - You may be a wicked axe man thanks to the "Guitar Hero" videogame by Activision Inc, but are you ready to take on a whole orchestra?
Two U.S. professors have created "Virtual Maestro," which allows a player to use the Wii console made by videogame company Nintendo to conduct the Verbier Festival Orchestra... well, a recording on a 42-inch plasma screen of them anyway.
But if you want to play, you'll have to get off the sofa and get down to a classical concert.
The game was brought over from the United States for trials and was a hit this week with audience members in the foyer of London's Barbican centre.
Young concert-goers waved the console around — some wildly, others shyly — to Rossini's William Tell Overture, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 5.
"It's pretty fun to use, but also great to watch others play it," said Barbican visitor Owen Powell, as he watched gamers leap about in the throes of conducting.
"For so many people, classical music is about a crusty music hall," said Ann Drew from banking firm UBS, which sponsors the game and the Verbier Orchestra. "The design was intended to bring a new, different experience to concert-going."
The game will tour Europe and organizers hope to set it up in venues before concert performances.
The company which created "Virtual Maestro" is aiming to develop it further, but the sponsors say there are no plans to allow budding Karajans and Gergievs to play it on their Wiis at home any time soon.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Rock acts ringing up sales via video games
Reuters/MSNBC
Rock acts ringing up sales via video games
Motley Crue got more downloads for new single on 'Rock Band' than iTunes
Reuters
updated 5:22 p.m. PT, Fri., May. 23, 2008
Games like "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero III" have proved their ability to breathe new life into classic rock sales. But can they do the same for new music?
Last month, Motley Crue decided to find out. The band placed its new single, the title track from "Saints of Los Angeles," for sale as a downloadable track on "Rock Band" well in advance of the album's release date, which has been pushed back to June 24. The only other place to obtain the track was iTunes.
According to data provided by the band's management, Tenth Street Entertainment, the track was downloaded more than 47,000 times via the Xbox 360 version of the game alone in the first week after it became available. ("Rock Band" publisher MTV Networks was unable to independently verify these figures, and total downloads that include the PlayStation 3 version of the game were not available.)
By comparison, the same track received slightly more than 10,000 downloads via digital services like iTunes and Amazon, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
That's a pretty big discrepancy considering that music bought via "Rock Band" can't be transferred to a portable music player or even a computer for later enjoyment. It can be played only via the game.
Tenth Street CEO Allen Kovac shrugs off the gap in sales between formats, pointing out that a sale is a sale. In an age of rampant piracy, reaching fans where they are willing to spend money is the primary goal.
"We do research on every artist we have, and the research said that the people who bought Motley Crue music and tickets play 'Rock Band" and video games ... (so) it was our inclination to go there," he says. "As marketers, it's our job to find the audience. If our audience tells us they're sitting at Xbox and PlayStation, that's our job to do that."
In slightly more than six months, the number of songs downloaded to the "Rock Band" game has surpassed 10 million tracks, according to MTV Networks, while song downloads from "Guitar Hero" passed 15 million, according to Activision. With more than 100 songs available for download via the "Rock Band" platform, that's an average of 100,000 downloads per song sold through the game.
That average, though, is somewhat skewed: Since new songs are added to the "Rock Band" store weekly, tracks available for sale since November have sold more than tracks added just last week. Still, it's an impressive figure.
By all accounts, catalog tracks sell best. Seven of the top 10 best-selling songs available on "Rock Band" are catalog titles; the other three are more recent, but still a few years old. Of all the songs available for download on "Rock Band," more than 75 percent are catalog tracks. The rest is primarily music released within the past year. Only a handful of songs are previously unreleased new music or music from unknown acts using the game to get noticed.
One such example is new metal act Black Tide. When its "Light From Above" album was released November 11, 2007, the single "Shockwave" sold only a few hundred copies per week, barely registering on Nielsen SoundScan. The week before being featured as a downloadable song on "Rock Band" on March 11, the single sold 1,000 downloads. Two weeks later, download sales doubled.
Yet sales on "Rock Band" were 10 times that of those on iTunes and other stores. In the six weeks following the "Rock Band" debut, "Shockwave" sold 6,000 digital downloads via online retailers, compared with an estimated 60,000 downloads via the game.
And "Rock Band" isn't the only game hawking new music. Def Leppard chose to release its new single "Nine Lives" as part of a three-song bundle on "Guitar Hero III" on April 24, along with past hits "Photograph" and "Rock of Ages."
The "Guitar Hero III" download totals are unavailable, but first-week figures from SoundScan show that it sold about 7,000 downloads. The album it was meant to promote, "Songs From the Sparkle Lounge," sold only 55,000 physical and digital units combined in its first week.
But Tenth Street's Kovac says "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" sales don't necessarily need to convert to album or digital download sales on a one-to-one basis to count as successful. Today's generation of music fans, he says, may be interested only in buying the game version of new music, enabling an interactive experience that has been sorely lacking lately.
"The resurgence of rock has happened because of 'Rock Band' and 'Guitar Hero,"' he says. "And the reason is because of the interaction with the audience. The more music marketing people look at interaction with the audience as opposed to only radio or a video, the more lasting the experience will be and the longer the artists' career will be."
Rock acts ringing up sales via video games
Motley Crue got more downloads for new single on 'Rock Band' than iTunes
Reuters
updated 5:22 p.m. PT, Fri., May. 23, 2008
Games like "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero III" have proved their ability to breathe new life into classic rock sales. But can they do the same for new music?
Last month, Motley Crue decided to find out. The band placed its new single, the title track from "Saints of Los Angeles," for sale as a downloadable track on "Rock Band" well in advance of the album's release date, which has been pushed back to June 24. The only other place to obtain the track was iTunes.
According to data provided by the band's management, Tenth Street Entertainment, the track was downloaded more than 47,000 times via the Xbox 360 version of the game alone in the first week after it became available. ("Rock Band" publisher MTV Networks was unable to independently verify these figures, and total downloads that include the PlayStation 3 version of the game were not available.)
By comparison, the same track received slightly more than 10,000 downloads via digital services like iTunes and Amazon, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
That's a pretty big discrepancy considering that music bought via "Rock Band" can't be transferred to a portable music player or even a computer for later enjoyment. It can be played only via the game.
Tenth Street CEO Allen Kovac shrugs off the gap in sales between formats, pointing out that a sale is a sale. In an age of rampant piracy, reaching fans where they are willing to spend money is the primary goal.
"We do research on every artist we have, and the research said that the people who bought Motley Crue music and tickets play 'Rock Band" and video games ... (so) it was our inclination to go there," he says. "As marketers, it's our job to find the audience. If our audience tells us they're sitting at Xbox and PlayStation, that's our job to do that."
In slightly more than six months, the number of songs downloaded to the "Rock Band" game has surpassed 10 million tracks, according to MTV Networks, while song downloads from "Guitar Hero" passed 15 million, according to Activision. With more than 100 songs available for download via the "Rock Band" platform, that's an average of 100,000 downloads per song sold through the game.
That average, though, is somewhat skewed: Since new songs are added to the "Rock Band" store weekly, tracks available for sale since November have sold more than tracks added just last week. Still, it's an impressive figure.
By all accounts, catalog tracks sell best. Seven of the top 10 best-selling songs available on "Rock Band" are catalog titles; the other three are more recent, but still a few years old. Of all the songs available for download on "Rock Band," more than 75 percent are catalog tracks. The rest is primarily music released within the past year. Only a handful of songs are previously unreleased new music or music from unknown acts using the game to get noticed.
One such example is new metal act Black Tide. When its "Light From Above" album was released November 11, 2007, the single "Shockwave" sold only a few hundred copies per week, barely registering on Nielsen SoundScan. The week before being featured as a downloadable song on "Rock Band" on March 11, the single sold 1,000 downloads. Two weeks later, download sales doubled.
Yet sales on "Rock Band" were 10 times that of those on iTunes and other stores. In the six weeks following the "Rock Band" debut, "Shockwave" sold 6,000 digital downloads via online retailers, compared with an estimated 60,000 downloads via the game.
And "Rock Band" isn't the only game hawking new music. Def Leppard chose to release its new single "Nine Lives" as part of a three-song bundle on "Guitar Hero III" on April 24, along with past hits "Photograph" and "Rock of Ages."
The "Guitar Hero III" download totals are unavailable, but first-week figures from SoundScan show that it sold about 7,000 downloads. The album it was meant to promote, "Songs From the Sparkle Lounge," sold only 55,000 physical and digital units combined in its first week.
But Tenth Street's Kovac says "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" sales don't necessarily need to convert to album or digital download sales on a one-to-one basis to count as successful. Today's generation of music fans, he says, may be interested only in buying the game version of new music, enabling an interactive experience that has been sorely lacking lately.
"The resurgence of rock has happened because of 'Rock Band' and 'Guitar Hero,"' he says. "And the reason is because of the interaction with the audience. The more music marketing people look at interaction with the audience as opposed to only radio or a video, the more lasting the experience will be and the longer the artists' career will be."
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Evolution of Video Game Music
The Evolution of Video Game Music
NPR (with audio examples on NPR radio segment)
All Things Considered, April 12, 2008 - In May 2004, a composer named Nobuo Uematsu joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a single performance of his most famous work. The show sold out in three days. In fact, there was almost a riot at the box office when people couldn't get tickets.
What was the music? Uematsu's soundtrack for the popular video game Final Fantasy.
In the early 1970s, video game music wasn't exactly symphonic. Case in point: Pong. The players hit a ball back and forth across a center line with that now-recognizable onomatopoeic sound.
One of today's top video game music composers, John Wall, spent much of the 1980s pumping quarters into Pac Man machines.
"Playing all those arcade games, I never even paid attention to the music," Wall tells host Andrea Seabrook. "It just sounded like sounds to me. However, you know all the tunes. It's so funny. The bleeps and bloops, they kind of invade your brain."
It's catchy and it's fun, but it's not exactly serious music. However trivial these early video games' soundtracks may seem, they weren't serious for good reason. And there's a study to prove it.
The Function of Video Game Music
Video game composer Tommy Tallarico explains, "If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person's heart rate, and as they're getting closer and closer, people would start to panic. Now they'd do the same studies without the sound, and the people wouldn't panic as much. And it goes to show and prove how significant audio and music are."
Like the purpose of all great music, it's supposed to change your heart rate — to move you and make you feel. Video game soundtracks began to take influence from more serious places, like the Russian folk song in Tetris. But still, video game music was limited by its hardware. That changed with the CD-ROM.
As personal computers became more agile and more powerful, suddenly the music track could handle something resembling real music. It was 1993's Myst that made Wall realize the power of music in a game. He says the game actually aided the player through the mysterious worlds, functioning as clues.
Music Enters the Design
The complexity of the music improved to the point where the score of a video game became almost indistinguishable from the music played in the finest concert halls. Wall went on to score the third and fourth installments of the Myst series, and he based the main theme for Myst III on Karl Orff's Carmina Burana.
Tallarico explains that video game music isn't a passive experience, but an integral part of the foreground. "It's for this reason that I've always said that if Beethoven were alive today, he'd be a video game composer."
Laughing, concert violinist and self-described "video game addict" Joshua Bell says, "Uh, well, that's quite a statement to say that about Beethoven. I would not go so far."
"I have a hard time imagining that," Bell adds. "I mean, Beethoven changed the world as we know it, and I doubt he would have done that through video games. Actually, I think one of the problems with video game music is — at least with film music — yes, you have your restrictions, but of course, video game composers have their restrictions, too. They have to write three minutes here or two minutes there or... with video game music, because it's so interactive, it's actually more of a slave to what happens externally, because one doesn't know what's going to happen in a video game. So for a composer, I would have thought it was quite the opposite."
Still, Bell does see the field as becoming "more cinematic and more interesting," and he says he hopes to play on a video game score someday.
Video Games Hit the Concert Stage
Concert halls around the country took note, and in 2005, Wall and Tallarico launched Video Games Live. The event features some of the world's finest orchestras performing some of the world's most popular video game music. For the first time in years, professional musicians are receiving the kind of audience energy they've craved.
"It's like their field day," Tallarico says. "The one day a year where they can kind of loosen their collars a little bit and have fun. And they're playing to a whole brand-new audience, which is great for everyone."
NPR (with audio examples on NPR radio segment)
All Things Considered, April 12, 2008 - In May 2004, a composer named Nobuo Uematsu joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a single performance of his most famous work. The show sold out in three days. In fact, there was almost a riot at the box office when people couldn't get tickets.
What was the music? Uematsu's soundtrack for the popular video game Final Fantasy.
In the early 1970s, video game music wasn't exactly symphonic. Case in point: Pong. The players hit a ball back and forth across a center line with that now-recognizable onomatopoeic sound.
One of today's top video game music composers, John Wall, spent much of the 1980s pumping quarters into Pac Man machines.
"Playing all those arcade games, I never even paid attention to the music," Wall tells host Andrea Seabrook. "It just sounded like sounds to me. However, you know all the tunes. It's so funny. The bleeps and bloops, they kind of invade your brain."
It's catchy and it's fun, but it's not exactly serious music. However trivial these early video games' soundtracks may seem, they weren't serious for good reason. And there's a study to prove it.
The Function of Video Game Music
Video game composer Tommy Tallarico explains, "If you remember in Space Invaders, you know, as the ships started to come down, the aliens, and as they got closer and closer, the sound got faster and faster. Now, what the game programmers did was that they took the person's heart rate, and as they're getting closer and closer, people would start to panic. Now they'd do the same studies without the sound, and the people wouldn't panic as much. And it goes to show and prove how significant audio and music are."
Like the purpose of all great music, it's supposed to change your heart rate — to move you and make you feel. Video game soundtracks began to take influence from more serious places, like the Russian folk song in Tetris. But still, video game music was limited by its hardware. That changed with the CD-ROM.
As personal computers became more agile and more powerful, suddenly the music track could handle something resembling real music. It was 1993's Myst that made Wall realize the power of music in a game. He says the game actually aided the player through the mysterious worlds, functioning as clues.
Music Enters the Design
The complexity of the music improved to the point where the score of a video game became almost indistinguishable from the music played in the finest concert halls. Wall went on to score the third and fourth installments of the Myst series, and he based the main theme for Myst III on Karl Orff's Carmina Burana.
Tallarico explains that video game music isn't a passive experience, but an integral part of the foreground. "It's for this reason that I've always said that if Beethoven were alive today, he'd be a video game composer."
Laughing, concert violinist and self-described "video game addict" Joshua Bell says, "Uh, well, that's quite a statement to say that about Beethoven. I would not go so far."
"I have a hard time imagining that," Bell adds. "I mean, Beethoven changed the world as we know it, and I doubt he would have done that through video games. Actually, I think one of the problems with video game music is — at least with film music — yes, you have your restrictions, but of course, video game composers have their restrictions, too. They have to write three minutes here or two minutes there or... with video game music, because it's so interactive, it's actually more of a slave to what happens externally, because one doesn't know what's going to happen in a video game. So for a composer, I would have thought it was quite the opposite."
Still, Bell does see the field as becoming "more cinematic and more interesting," and he says he hopes to play on a video game score someday.
Video Games Hit the Concert Stage
Concert halls around the country took note, and in 2005, Wall and Tallarico launched Video Games Live. The event features some of the world's finest orchestras performing some of the world's most popular video game music. For the first time in years, professional musicians are receiving the kind of audience energy they've craved.
"It's like their field day," Tallarico says. "The one day a year where they can kind of loosen their collars a little bit and have fun. And they're playing to a whole brand-new audience, which is great for everyone."
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