Pong 0:10 Space Invaders 0:43 Pacman 1:19 Donkey Kong 1:53 Defender 2:16 Tetris 3:01 Duck Hunt 3:31 Super Mario Bros 3:57 Super Mario Bros 4:16 Super Mario Bros 4:28 Castlevania 4:46 Contra 5:07 Megaman 5:41 Sonic 5:58 Street Fighter 2 6:34 Mortal Kombat 7:09 Mario Kart 7:41 Doom 8:04 Myst 8:35 Earthworm Jim 9:13 Resident Evil 9:41 Pokemon 10:14 Final Fantasy 10:51 Metal Gear 11:19
Maybe it's changed but Tommy used to always complain about doing music, because back in the 80's you really had to also be a programmer to do video game music, and he was terrible at programming. He's a good composer but he didn't really start putting out music that wasn't terrible until the Sega CD when they could just play back redbook audio that could be recorded to the CD directly and wasn't sequenced playback.
the reasons why sirens go up and down in pitch is so that we can differentiate where the sound is coming from. if there was just one flat tone then it could come from anywhere
The sonic losing his rings sound is backwards. First time i lost my rings at sonic, i thought it was a bonus thing until someone told me "no you're fucking dying dont drop your rings you idiot"
Riffing on what Scott said at 4:04 about dissonance and consonance, you can see how when you collect a ring in Sonic the Hedgehog (at 5:58 ), it's arpeggiating a C major chord 1st inversion (very consonant), and when you lose your rings (at 6:00 ), it plays this cacophony of dissonant intervals played at a dizzying rate, reflecting how in one instant you just lost all of your rings
This video was edited by someone who doesn't know about sound design. The editor didn't know which pieces to leave in or out, so we're left with a random mixture of incoherent, half-finished thoughts.
it's crazy to think the evolution of the video game sound effects. From compressed snippets to the point where we are using heads phones for online FPS to help us locate the enmey from the footsteps.
Some of my favorite sounds/fanfares are: 1 - Power Up Sound in Super Mario Bros 2 - Item found in Zelda Link to the Past 3 - Megaman's pew pew pew sound 4 - Extra life from Sonic the Hedgehog 5 - Intro for Ms. Pacman 6 - Victory for Excite Bike 7 - End of Round for Duck Hunt 8 - Gained copy ability in Kirby Super Star 9 - Cape sound from Super Mario World 10 - Thwomp "Ughhhh" sound from Mario 64
"GRROOVY" from earthworm jim is probably the only one of these sounds that legit makes me smile thinking back to renting the game from blockbuster as a kid...oh the nostolgia!
This is great! The sound designers were not only really informative, they are also very passionate about their field, which made this such a joy to watch.
Space invaders increase was due to the fact that when you had less enemies on screen the chip could calculate instructions faster. It was, in essence, a bug. Much like street fighter introduced combo's with a bug that allowed the player to string attacks together because they didn't have a fail-safe to stopping it from happening :)
Games would suck without sound effects. The whole point of them is to make mechanics feel good. That's why they are in games. No sound, no punch or emphasis.
Yeah, seriously. I'd rather play a game without music than without sound effects. A game can function without music (as a quick example, see most non-boss areas of any given Dark Souls game), but a game becomes way less fun without sounds. Everything feels floaty and weird, attacks lack impact, etc. It's the same reason real boxing and such can feel "fake" since real punches don't RESOUND as much as TV, movies, and games have trained us to expect. Fake punches feel meatier on screen solely because of the sound design, it makes you ignore the fact that in many cases nobody is even actually touched.
For an example of why that's a bad idea, just check out kingdom Hearts 3's e3 2018 trailer. ..it was very bizarre hearing music and voice acting without sound effects.
@@Rynjinivar Lol. Breath of the Wild fits that category pretty well. I think no sound effects could give great emphasis on something in a game, in at most, a few segments. Like, putting focus on suffocating silence of something.
i could hear these guys going all technical up in this shit all night! finding out how they pulled those bleeps and bloops out of hardware limitation is so fucking amazing!
That FINISH HIM sound is not from the first Mk-if theyre going chronologically here, then they should have gone with the actual game's sound, and that 'Finish him' is from the 2000's Mks.
Why did they use "Finish Him" from the new Mortal Kombat instead of the classic old version? All the rest of these sounds are classic old school sounds, then they throw in a Mortal Kombat sound from the 2012 version... wtf.
the first five seconds threw me so far back so quickly I cranked my neck out. Especially on that metal gear alert sound, JFC the ptsd on that - as a kid WOW
A thing I noticed about the MarioKart tones is that the last tone isn't quite a perfect interval with the first tone, which sort of creates a sense of urgency that makes you want to start speed-racing from the start.
"He timed it to the heartbeat" The function of Space Invaders speeding up is widely known as a 'happy accident'. It doesn't play itself out to mimic the heart rate of the player.
I love these sound explanation videos! they feel so close to me. I've always been interested in sound, music, and how they work, where they come from, and how they are manipulated.
_Defender_ not only had the most complex sounds of any game up to that point, but also the most complex GAME (as far as game controls go) up to that time (until the same company - Williams Electronics - released _Robotron_ later). Hard to believe, but at video game shows when Robotron was being shown, attendees voted on the "most likely to succeed" and chose _Rally-X_ of all games. Good game, but better than _Robotron?_ I guess they just felt that it was just TOO hard (and it is very hard!). JW3HH
Yeah. That combined with SO MANY things on the screen all at once and it was an acid trip...without the acid! I wonder how well kids today would play that game... JW3HH
Sorry, my inteligent donkey nature is getting the better of me. You know what an expert is right? Well an ex is a has been, and a spurt is a drip under pressure so an exspurt is......
i can't believe they didn't talk about CRONO TRIGGER that game's audio is amazing, not just the midi score but the effects, attacks, every sound in that game is 100%
Really not going to bring up the fact that the original power up noise in Super Mario Bros is the victory song sped up? I've literally only seen it mentioned once on the entire Internet, and I highly doubt that something like that in one of the most popular games of all time could go undiscovered for over 30 years.
There was no psychology involved in programming the sound in Space Invaders. At the start of the level the game is using every available resource to manipulate the graphics and sound. As enemies are eliminated more and more processing speed is available and the slowdown dissipates. This causes the enemies to appear to move faster and the sound to quicken when in reality both are just moving less slow. The tension that became the game's trademark is just a happy byproduct.
The gameboy doesn't have PSG or FM sound, it has 2 square-wave channels, a programmable wave channel, and a noise channel. The programmable wave channel could do triangle wave or sawtooth wave.
2:34 Try 2k of RAM. Those old cart based consoles ran mostly from the cart itself, and thus console developers tended to supply very little onboard RAM as a cost cutting measure. That RAM was mostly used to do work on whatever currently was on screen, rather than hold data. This approach had its ups and downs, on one hand it was a limiting factor to how much the system could have ready for computation at any given time, but on the other hand running from ROM meant there was virtually no loading time for game assets either, which I believe included samples.
whoever edited this is bouncing back and forth between different consoles and arcade games from different years. there's no cohesion to the commentary. they start talking about defender and then someone randomly says something about nes ram.
Though I'm not familiar with videogames (well, only Sonic), it is very insightful to hear so many aspects and points of view concerning such simple and short sounds. It is amazing the amount of information that a single musical note can carry, depending on timbre, dynamics and other subtle characteristics. I heard about Brian Eno composing a 6 seconds sound for Microsoft, and then experiencing three minute songs as long, complex pieces. Great video!
A little correction to their history of Pac Man. The name was changed from Puck to Pac BEFORE any vandalism happened. It was a preemptive change. There was never any record of someone actually changing the name on any cabinets. :)
Thanks. Now I have a new OCD of being super picky, which starts at 10:43 in the video. As he said; "this is something that the player is going to hear hundreds of thousands of times."
It was actually the 4th. The 1st was Spacewar! in 1961, then Galaxy Game in 1971. Computer Space was released two months after that, the first to be released to the public, and then Pong came out a year later, in 1972. That's what I read anyway.
