Many games feature amazing music, but certain games take it beyond even that.
Games like DOOM are known for the “procedural” composition they use to marry gameplay and sound, and not only that, the way the music is a perfect tonal match to what is happening.
What games have you played that feature music that doesn’t just make you notice it, but also pulls you further in?
Breath of the Wild which also does dynamic music that shifts and changes as you play/encounter enemies
Most modern games do this. It’s a little different depending on implementation, but usually there are short loops of music which can transition into one another, and the game attempts to detect what’s going on and make smooth transitions to the appropriate new loops so that the music is seamless but still reactive to what’s going on. When it’s done well, it’s basically totally invisible that anything special is even happening, which I’m sure is irritating if you’re the one who had to do the ball-busting labor of getting it all to work.
Fun fact, LucasArts was already doing this all the way back in 1991, back when video game sound beyond the bleeps and boops stage was still bleeding edge technology. One of many ways in which they were ahead of the curve by about 20-30 years if not more.
Like good CGI. The best work is the one you don’t notice.
Wonder how they did that back then? Shifting the tones up and down?
The wiki article goes into it; the canonical example (if you know to pay attention to it) is walking around in Woodtick in Monkey Island 2, and you can hear how the melody that’s playing is continuous, but some of the backing instruments will insert or change depending on which buildings you go into. You can probably find Let’s Play of the game on YouTube or etc to hear it in action.
Thanks. Read it and yeah, that had to be hard with a limited set of sound channels.
The entire arrangement would have to be smaller chunks that are flowed one into another or swapped out when an event changed.
Considering the memory and code space limitations of the time that was no small feat.