Video games are a huge part of our society today. They have been bringing joy to people around the world throughout the years and has seen rapid growth in recent years, making more money annually than movies and music combined. Due to this video games push technology than any other medium, and interactive sound being an important part of any visual content, has seen serious developments with real-time post-processing and incredibly complex algorithms for interactive, which is triggered by player inputs and game states. So in a few blog posts, I would like to tell the history of how sound and music evolved throughout the time and where it is now, 50 years later from the production of the first commercial arcade machine.
The Early 1970’s
Even there were arcades before the production of Atari Pong, this machine was first introduced in 1972 has been a massive commercial hit. The game itself is ridiculously simple - a player controls a paddle in order to hit the moving ball and the first one who fails at hitting the ball back loses and a point is given to a winner, resembling tennis. The graphics were extremely basic - simple white shapes on a black background. The sound was as simple as the shapes themselves - just a square wave (basically bipolar on/off switch), playing a simple pitch with different time intervals when the peddle hit the ball or someone lost. The machine did not even have a dedicated sound chip and the sounds were put in by the programmers themselves. Easy and interactive. But it worked.
But did you know that actually there has been an arcade game, developed before this one, which had actually much superior sound design? It was called COMPUTER SPACE and utilised its’ own circuit boards to generate not only simple square bleeps but also ambient sound, modulated white noise for explosions! It sounds like those old-school sci-fi films with the scenes in machinery rooms. The gameplay was much more advanced as well and the whole system was built just to run this game, making the game quite hard to ‘emulate’, as the machine did not have a CPU or any dedicated ROMs, the only way to play it on modern-day PCs is to simulate the electricity flowing through the transistors and capacitors, what an engineering miracle!
The Invention of a Sound Chip
In 1978 Texas Electronics has started production of an SN76477 sound chip also known as a complex sound generator. It was groundbreaking on its’ release day and have been used in many pinball games, most notably - Space Invaders. The premise of the game is simple but stylish - stop the ever-advancing horde of aliens, as they move closer and closer to land on the soil of our beloved planet Earth and it was the first game to have multiple sound streams playing at the same time - music and multiple sound effects, made possible by multiple outputs going through the mixer, each being responsible for its’ own sound, such as noise generator going through a filter, a VCO and SLF (Super Low Frequency Oscillator), which can play simultaneously or by themselves at any given moment. This was a huge deal! Not only that but the developer of the game Tomohiro Nishikado decided to make the background music interactive as well! You see, as the aliens are getting closer and closer to landing, the tempo starts to ramp up, making the player more nervous, as the game gets quicker and quicker. This literally the first game in history, which utilised interactive music and this was only the beginning!
In the next blog post, we will discuss the evolution of sound chips in the 80s and the transition from 8-bit audio to 16-bit, so stay tuned!