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Guergana Tzatchkova
Guergana Tzatchkova

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A thought about music in Videogames

Some months I started learning to play the accordion and since a couple of days I am learning to play the beginning of Frederic Chopin's Funeral March. After playing the first part repeatedly I realised this is the same music in the DOS game "Digger", from 1983.

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Do you remember this game?

I think this is the first computer game I ever played in my life, alongside "Alley Cat".

From the Wikipedia entry:

During normal game play "Popcorn" is used as background music. In bonus mode the Overture to Wilhelm Tell by Gioachino Rossini plays. If the player dies, a rendition of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor (also known as The Funeral March) is played, accompanied with a picture of a RIP gravestone. Digger used a pulse width modulation sound system which was unusual and advanced for 1983.

Early computer games didn't have high end graphics like the ones we have today. But they were conceptually sophisticated in their own way.

This also led me to do a quick search on video game musicians. There seem to be a lot of them. Whenever I think of the making of a videogame I think immediately about developers and graphic designers, I had never given a thought to the fact that there is someone behind the music as well. I guess music has become so ubiquitous that it is not so immediate realising that there's someone working to make it happen.

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Jess Lee

I love Nobuo Uematsu (final fantasy composer)

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