Scott Pilgrim had some of the most affecting moments in recent cinematic memory when sampling Nintendo classics - the combination of young adult infatuation and the Zelda wishing-well fairy music was fantastic.
Is it just me, or is the music from SNES RPGs more memorable than any current day RPG music? I'm talking Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy (Kefka's laugh??) -- you don't hear music like this anymore.<p>Music, that when heard, makes you want to play the game or relive the memories.
The fact that he refers to music as "branding" makes me want to put my fist through his face. The soundtracks we all love, the ones from games such as Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy... they're all monumental works of considerable effort and artistic merit. People remember these games, they're such classics because they were ... art. It's not <i>branding</i> in the same way the Mona Lisa isn't branding for Leonardo da Vinci.
At the end of iD's Doom II, the final boss produces a repeated "kafoomBOOM" sound.<p>That sound, like the Wilheim Scream, shows up freaking EVERYWHERE (ok, not quite that bad but it seems that way). Dunno if anyone else notices it, but it has reminded me of that game at least monthly for over 15 years.<p>Yeah, audio hacked this gamer's memory all right.
I recently noticed that two of the most popular Clan Arena maps on QuakeLive (at least on the servers I frequent) both have the same background music, and I've been wondering how much that contributes to the way people pay the game/map and how quickly they learn it.<p>(Some of us are still keeping Quake3, via QuakeLive, alive)
I agree that audio is a very important aspect of games (and other forms of media like video), but do people really play mobile games with the sound on? When I do, it's either to my own soundtrack or none at all.<p>Has anybody actually polled the device volume level and ambient noise level when people are playing their game?
I commented on the site, but I could not agree more with this. We (<a href="http://www.hark.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hark.com</a>) have millions of sound bites, and some of the most popular, without fail, are from video games - either from last week's latest release or twenty years ago.
I recently piped just the audio from a bunch of classic games to a group of people: every game was recognised quickly and spurred distinct memories of the games, though no-one had played any of them for years.