There was a time when Gaiares was the cutting-edge of game design that CD-ROMs, VR, and flat-shaded polygons began to biff it out as the future of videogames, with CD-ROM multimedia seeming like the most accessible edge, lashing in as it did familiar concepts from other existing media as a bridge. It was like this weird centrist no-man’s-land of design, but like the Democratic Party it knew how to play the PR game up to the very edge of everyone realizing there was no one wearing the suit.
One of the most brain-expanding things that, for me, very nearly led me into thinking, okay, maybe there’s potential for something real in this, is the sudden leap to original pop songs. Not necessarily good ones, but memorable and professionally-recorded ones that opened new corridors in the mind to populate with what-ifs and maybes.
These are the two that leap straight to mind at the moment. Any particularly neat examples I’m overlooking here?
Oh. SotN, King’s Quest VI, FFVIII. Something in my brain thought those were indie games that tried to recapture the multimedia aesthetic.
I think there’s a certain Western exploitation culture angle that needs to be present to quite capture the tone here. Sierra does veer into exploitation on the regular, so King’s Quest feels marginal. I think songs tacked onto refined Japanese or Japanese-proximate design are a little afield, though. So, like, Richard Jacques doesn’t feel quite right, as wonderfully dorky as Sonic R may be.
When DaleNixon convinced me to finally try a Silent Hill game (The Room), I found it odd that a pop-sounding song started playing in that scene where Joseph Schreiber says “Kill him” about four thousand times.
Of course, now I listen to those pop-sounding Silent Hill songs all the time. “Your Rain” is probably my favorite one from the series. I like the changes in intensity, the way it narrates some of what happens in the game, and that it steps at one point into a familiar theme from earlier in the series.
And while I guess it’s not quite as pop-sounding as some others, another of my favorites is the version of “Always on My Mind” from Shattered Memories.
But, yeah, on the other hand Akira Yamaoka does kind of fit somehow??
I think it’s partially this jarring thing where this contemporary pop anthem makes the game feel like it’s trying to work the same way as a movie or ongoing TV show, except interactive.
There is something about The Room in particular, in its, er, room segments, that feels kind of multimedia-esque. Like it has a legacy from D and The 7th Guest more than Biohazard and Alone in the Dark.
The use of Yamaoka’s song in the E3 trailer for Silent Hill 3 made me think the game was continuing in the anthology pattern of the earlier games and focus its purgatory on a self-destructive young woman in the wake of a bad breakup, or maybe escape from an abusive situation. Instead of it being this high-budget continuity jackknife to make the series more consistent as a single story.
While I have never played a Dance Dance Revolution game or anything like one, I’ve always liked to hear the way some of Yamaoka’s songs have been adapted for those titles. This one, for example, which I wish were longer:
this was the first time a song really hit me as ‘this isnt videogame music, this is a pop single to sell the videogame’
when Akira yamamoka had a GDC talk it was the most meandering ‘im just a musician what am i doing here’ talk I’ve ever experienced. i loved it! he spent ten minutes talking about how the length of japans coast makes their music the way it is and spent the rest of the conference playing guitar for people in his hotel lobby
It ain’t a video game, but this terrible earworm that came with a VHS board game does hit the right vibe. We discovered this while researching a Snexploration Squad episode!
In a clear (failed, ultimately) attempt to recapture their own 90’s success and the 90’s successes of elaborate multimedia adventure games in general, Cyan got Peter Gabriel to give them a song for their credits and to market the game with: