Video game music (such as the main theme for The Legend of Zelda) is a vital part of gaming, regardless of whether the tunes are 8-bit beeps or grand symphonies. These following video games go a step further, not only building their gameplay around rhythm and melody, but making music a core theme within their stories.
The art of crafting video game music is an under-appreciated and fascinating trade, one that borrows elements from classical orchestration and movie sound tracks while possessing its own unique logic and stylistic flair. A video game composer must be able to create memorable leitmotifs for characters and franchises, while also crafting scores that can repeat in infinite loops but still end decisively whenever a player moves on to the next level.
Many rhythm video games like Guitar Hero, Beat Saber or Dance-Dance Revolution, make music core to the gameplay, a pattern or puzzle that players must solve. These four video games below not only employ rhythm game mechanics, but also integrate the theme of music into their storyline, exploring the nature of music and why it’s so vital to the human experience.
No Straight Roads: A Rock and Roll Rebellion
An upcoming game set to be released in June 2020, No Straight Roads embraces the counter-cultural aspects of indie rock with a story of resistance and rebellion. When the surreal town of Vinyl City is taken over by a copyright-imposing record label, two indie rockers named Zuke and Mayday must weaponize their rock-and-roll prowess to take back their city and take down “The Man.” In the beat’em’up style combat of No Straight Roads, characters deal more damage when they time their strikes to the rhythm of the in-game soundtrack, created by composers such as James Landino, Andy Tunstall, Funk Fiction, Masahiro “Godspeed” Aoki, Az Samad, and Clyde Rabatel.
Chorus: A Supernatural Musical Adventure
Under development by Summerfall Studios, Chorus: A Supernatural Musical Adventure blends together numerous forms of media – the branching narratives of visual novels and dating simulators, the “Once More With Feeling” musical episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, plus the performative structure of ancient Greek tragedies and comedies. As Grace, the guitarist accused of murdering a Muse, tries to prove her innocence to a jury of modern-day Greek Gods, the player chooses both the direction of the story and the tone/lyrics of the musical numbers, composed by Austin Wintory and performed by Laura Bailey.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – “Hey, Listen!”
One of the most famous and beloved installments of the Legend of Zelda franchise, Ocarina of Time is most famous for its titular Ocarina, a magic instrument that the hero Link (and the player, through controller inputs) plays in order to travel through time, alter the weather, teleport between maps, and perform other supernatural feats. The melodies produced by the Ocarina of Time are echoed in the level music composed by Koiji Kondo, whose compositions mimicked the map design in a sort of musical onomatopoeia.
The success of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time also caused sales of Ocarinas to skyrocket.
Crypt of the Necrodancer: Dance and Dungeon Delving
A dungeon-crawler that fuses rhythm games with the Rogue-like genre, Crypt of the Necrodancer revolves around a hero named Cadence and her tomb-raiding relatives, who must venture into a multilayered dungeon of dancing monsters to defeat the Necrodancer and recover their stolen hearts. Gameplay-wise, the player moves between tiles in the dungeon floor, gaining bonuses and boosts if they time their movements and attacks with the dance-floor groove of the level soundtracks composed by Danny Daranowsky. A spin-off game, Cadence of Hyrule, sends Cadence to the world of Legend of Zelda, where she must team up with Link and Princess Zelda to defeat the evil wizard Octavo and the power of his magical golden lute.
There are lots of games which employ music to help players understand and connect with their themes and stories, but these four games go one step further and make players an active part of the music themselves. There are others, as well as fantastic rhythm-based instrument and vocal-controlled titles, but these are some of the best.
