Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	Conan the Barbarian
Entry tags:	game music

Ahh, memories...
Today I remembered two interesting firsts - my first video game experience, and my first video game music experience.

Game - Way back when I used to live in West Philly (please don't sing the song, I'm running out of places to hide the bodies) we lived next to a big shopping center across the street. One of the stores there was some kind of an ice cream shop, I think it was named Hillary's. Well the interesting thing about this place was that the tables themselves were Pac Man arcades! How they managed to keep these coin-ops working underneath inevitably dripping ice cream, I'll never know. And in fact, they stopped working after a while anyways. But it was a sweet idea, pun intended. And for reference, this was all before the Simpsons showed up on network TV, so we're talking late 80s. I had no game systems of my own until Gameboy when I was in 7th grade, and PSX when I was in 9th.

Game Music - This one's a bit surprising. Truth is, I had never heard or even would've recognized the ubiquitous Mario theme until very late in high school, after I'd already started writing my own stuff. Final Fantasy 7 was my first RPG, and the first soundtrack that inspired me to write my own game music. Tons of people have that same story, I'm sure. My first memorable experience with game music, however, goes back a few years before that, to....

....WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO.

Ironically, my first game music experience was with a soundtrack that wasn't game music at all. In a somewhat anachronistic feat of game audio, this 1995 title had an entirely licensed soundtrack - instead of the MIDI-based tracks that everyone else was doing at the time, the CD-ROM version of this game used Smithsonian recordings of world music from each of the respective countries that the player would visit. Surprisingly catchy little 30sec clips that'd play on loop while you were searching for clues or planning your next trip.

Well fast-forward a decade or so, and now I'm writing my own stuff. But I really think I owe a lot to that soundtrack for broadening my mind to world music influences; I don't do it so much now, but back in the day I wrote a few RPG tunes that were directly influenced by some of the clips I'd heard. Maybe there's a world music influence in the stuff I write today, too! Or, maybe not. Either way, it's cool to find out that my most influential game soundtrack wasn't a Final Fantasy like everyone else.</b>