History

I've been playing games for years, all the way back to the Atari 2600 and even the venerable Odyssey2. But I never really paid attention to the bloops and bleeps that passed for music in these older games. It's embarassing to admit this, but my fascination with PC game music began with 3D Realms' forgettable and vaguely offensive 1997 game, Shadow Warrior.

Pardon me sir, have you any wang?

The music in Shadow Warrior was a collection of uninteresting songs that did nothing but get in the way of the more useful combat sounds. Adding insult to injury, they were MIDI format. Back in the bad old days of 1997, most people owned basic soundblaster-class sound cards with MIDI playback that was one small step above a $9.99 Radio Shack synthesizer— in other words, painfully bad. The developers, to their credit, knew how things stood. They realized that most people would probably just disable the music, and included a funny little easter egg in the game. Upon disabling the music via the menus, you are treated to a little Lo Wang sound clip: "What matter.. you don't like music?"

We were playing a LAN game at the time, with the sound cranked. A bunch of guys overheard this little sound bite, and we practically died laughing. It was really funny; the one memory I have of that otherwise unremarkable game. I won't dig into the perverse psychology of making fun of your own game, but give George Broussard some credit. He's right. Most game music is just crap. A checkoff item. Can't have a game without music, right?

But this little inside joke, as innocuous as it was, made me stop for a second and think about what I was doing. Why was I disabling the music? I realized at that moment that I really did love game music— just not this music.

Part of that can be blamed on the limitations of MIDI. The advent of the CD-ROM as standard PC equipment circa 1996 was the defining moment in the history of PC game music. All of a sudden, the sky was the limit: anything music composers could dream up could be mastered onto the game CD as a standard audio track. And best of all, redbook audio sounded exactly as composed. Not just for gamers with high-priced sound cards, but for every gamer with a CD-ROM drive.

Wicky-wicky wild wild west

Which brings me to the other seminal event of 1997— John Romero's review of Outlaws , which he posted to the Ion Storm website. In the review, John waxes eloquent about the game's CD audio soundtrack. I believe his exact words were (as memory serves), "If you play with music disabled in Outlaws, I will personally come to your house and bitch-slap you." No, I'm not kidding. Yes, there was a time when John Romero was not an industry laughingstock. Regardless, John was right. Outlaws is a fantastic first person shooter. As testament to its greatness, there are active fan sites for the game to this day, over three years after it was released.

But what's most remarkable about Outlaws is how unique and effective the CD soundtrack is. It's a homage to classic western movie music; music you've probably heard subconsciously when watching a late-night TV showing of The Outlaw Josey Wales. But why watch Josey Wales.. when you can be Josey Wales? The music really took the game's immersion to the next level. And it didn't skimp, either, with two full CDs of fantastic western-themed songs.

What Makes a Great Soundtrack

Thanks to John Romero, Outlaws was the first truly great PC game soundtrack I encountered. From that point on, I was hooked. I couldn't help listening to every new PC game with a critical ear to see if it approached the greatness of Outlaws. I began keeping games I would otherwise give away or sell, based on the quality of their soundtrack.

But what seperates the great soundtracks from the also-rans? I began to formulate a couple rules based on experience.

• Unique. A unique soundtrack stands out because it doesn't resemble music in any other game. For example, the funk of Interstate '76 or the classical riffs of Total Annihilation. We haven't heard those genres of music in any other games to date. But create a techno soundtrack and you're automatically competing with dozens of other similar sounding games. These soundtracks, even if they aren't your cup of tea, at least took the time to try something different. That automatically moves them up several notches on the scale.
• Memorable. A memorable soundtrack has a visceral association with the game it appears in. For example, the Tie Fighter music, which was dark and brooding, but instantly recognizable as Star Wars. Or, the creepy, haunting strains of Dungeon Keeper's ambient tracks. These are the soundtracks that you absolutely, positively do not turn off while playing the game. They don't just add atmosphere— they are the atmosphere. Even if you never played the game, the minute you hear these soundtracks, you get a strong feeling for what the game was trying to accomplish. After hearing the soundtrack to Outcast , several people I know actually went out and purchased the game on the merit of the music alone, trusting that the rest of the game would be of similar quality.
• Well known. Music isn't a popularity contest. But it's hard to get people excited about the soundtrack to Big Red Racing, no matter how good it may be. Some soundtracks become popular because the game itself is wildly popular. For example, every recent Blizzard game will come up in discussions of great soundtracks. And they are all quite good. But compared musically, some are clearly better than others, particularly Diablo I and Diablo II.

Given my natural interest in the topic, it's only natural that the website I founded, GameBasement, would end up hosting a PC game music radio station sooner or later.

A Few Questions

I get asked this question a lot: why PC games? Why not (insert favorite platform here)? Well, there are two reasons. First, I do almost all of my gaming on the PC, so it is the platform I am most familiar with. Second, there are literally dozens of web sites already broadcasting arcade, console, and music from other platforms. As far as I know, we are the sole PC-only game music broadcast in the entire world.

The other question that occasionally comes up is the legality of providing nearly complete game soundtracks in a radio broadcast. I believe this is covered under the "Fair Use" doctrine in US copyright law. "Fair Use" is a limitation to a copyright holder's rights. It allows others to use some or all of another's work under certain circumstances without the copyright holder's approval. There are four factors used to consider whether a use made of a copyrighted work is a "Fair Use":

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I don't think any reasonable person would consider listening to the soundtrack as potentially damaging to sales of the game; it's a small fraction of a product created by a large number of people, not just musicians. The situation would be very different if we were broadcasting, say, a complete Ricky Martin album. In that case, the audio is the entire product!

Extracting the Audio

The first task in setting up any radio station is generating a playlist of songs. For games, that means extracting the audio into the common currency of MP3. Unfortunately, every game approaches audio differently. There are three broad classes of music that all games will fall into: MIDI, digital mixing, and CD Audio.

1. MIDI
   Generally only found in older games. MIDI files are like sheet music; they only specify what notes and instruments are to be played back. The difficulty with MIDI is twofold: first, the quality of the audio will depend on the playback device, and second, you must capture the playback into a digital file in order to create a MP3 file out of it. After months of searching fruitlessly, I was fortunate enough to stumble across a fantastic utility that addresses both issues: timidity++. There's a nice walkthrough on how to use it at this site. It's still an involved process, so consider yourselves warned, but at least it's possible.
2. CD Audio (redbook)
   Your basic CD-audio soundtrack on tracks 2 and higher of the CD. By far the easiest of the three to extract. The first thing I do with any game CD is slap it in the old CD player and see if it plays. If it does, any number of free or commercial products are available, which can easily "rip" the CD-Audio tracks to MP3 files. My personal favorite is the now-defunct AudioCatalyst, but I also hear good things about MusicMatch Jukebox.
3. Digital Mixing
   This is sort of a catch-all term for anything that isn't MIDI, and isn't CD-Audio. In this case, the developers decided to take raw audio files and mix them via some proprietary method. In some ways this is the best of both words; it offers the quality of CD-audio, with the possibilities of dynamic arrangements of MIDI. But it's bad news for extraction. There's no good rule of thumb here on how to proceed; it will vary on a per-game basis. There are a few freeware tools that you can use to try a brute force extraction of the audio files, such as GAP. That's assuming the developers are using semi-standard file formats. Like I said, no guarantees here. If the game is popular, it's likely that some hacker has already come up with a way to extract the audio. For example, there are many extractors for Unreal's proprietary audio format, UMX.

Setting up the Server

Attempting to set up a radio station on a web server can be an unnecessarily complex endeavor. There's certainly no shortage of people trying to convince you to use their proprietary streaming software, such as Real's RealSystem, Microsoft's Media Server, and WinAmp's Shoutcast. Some of it is free; some of it costs thousands of dollars, and it's all complicated.

My philosophy is, when in doubt, keep it simple, stupid. With that in mind, I decided to forgo all the complicated streaming solutions and go with the most basic method: serving individual files via HTTP. We serve playlists for WinAMP and Windows Media Player. The playlists are simply text files, formatted as specified for each player, containing hundreds of standard URL links to songs.

Since this is a web-based project, cross-platform portability is a concern. Fortunately, MP3 files are universally supported on most platforms, as are the URLs used to serve the files. And WinAMP, at least, has clones such as MacAmp and XMMS (for Linux) that can parse the playlist files. So we're set on that front.

Windows Media Player

WinAmp

The other major issue was bandwidth. All the music tracks are standard 128kbps (or higher) MP3 files. These are great for listening to on your local PC, but not so hot for sending across the internet. There are two considerations here.

1. Streaming requirements. All modern media players begin playing the audio files before they are completely downloaded. For this to work, the encoding rate cannot exceed the bandwidth of the person listening to the file. In other words, you can't expect someone on a 56.6 modem downloading at 50kbps to be able to stream a file encoded at 128kbps. A bit like pounding a square peg into a round hole, really. And when that happens, you have to waiting for an entire music track to download before being able to hear anything. This is tedious, as you can probably imagine.
2. Bandwidth costs. 128kbps MP3 files are huge— an average audio track is anywhere from four to five megabytes in size. That is a hefty download, especially if you have 10 or more listeners at any given time. We aren't running a porn site here; even if we were living in some kind of ideal world where every listener has a cable modem or T1 line, I doubt I could afford to pay for the bandwidth we would be using in that case.

The solution to both problems is simple: resample the source files at a lower bitrate. You can resample MP3 files using the freeware tool, LAME (download binaries here ). I did a lot of experimentation and found the ideal bitrate to be 40kbps . Unfortunately, 40kbps MP3 files sound pretty crappy— roughly AM radio quality. Out of frustration, I experimented with alternate formats that both Windows Media Player and WinAMP support, in particular WMA (Windows Media Audio). In side by side listening tests, I found that WMA offers dramatically improved sound quality at the low bitrate I had decided on. Quite a surprise! After researching this topic further, I found many other outside sources that confirmed my results:

• http://www.math.auth.gr/~axonis/studies/audio.htm
• http://www.nstl.com/html/windows_media.html
• http://david.weekly.org/audio/
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/compare/audio.asp

Though WMA offers a definite advantage in quality, it suffers from the predictable disadvantage of being completely Windows-specific. In order to maintain cross-platform compatibility, I would have to maintain two sets of files: one with all the songs downsampled to 40kbps MP3 format via LAME , and one with all the songs downsampled to 40kbps WMA format via AudioConverter . This essentially doubles the amount of work for each track, but it's necessary if we want to serve listeners on non-Windows platforms.

The Music

In building the GameBasement Radio playlist, I tried to evenly apply the three rules I listed at the beginning of the article-- selecting only those soundtracks which are unique, memorable and popular. This is a subjective process. I rely heavily on listener input, as well as my own personal gaming experience. Of course, not every game soundtrack can make the cut. The only sin that is serious enough to warrant exclusion from the playlist completely is the sin of unoriginality. That said, here are my thoughts on some of the more notable games in the playlist.

Personal Favorites

• Interstate '76
  What other game brings the funk? If this music doesn't make you want to move, then check your pulse, because I'll be damned if you aren't dead.
• Total Annihilation
  The first game to set classical music to intense carnage, with brilliant results. I love the smell of charred metal in the morning. The game also was unique in switching from ambient to combat CD tracks in sync with the action on the screen.
• Rocket Jockey
  I will swear up and down to anyone who will listen that this is one of the most under-appreciated and innovative games ever released for the PC. I would absolutely kill to see a modern update of this game with netplay and teamplay. But enough of my ranting. This game has a first-rate, pounding surf guitar soundtrack, even including a track from the king himself, Dick Dale. It works as pure soundtrack, and it fits the brutal, retro sensibilities of the game perfectly. It's sort of like Crimson Skies with brass knuckles, a nasty scar, and a much cooler logo.
• Freespace 2
  For some reason, this soundtrack really gets to me. I'm not sure if it's the operatic wailing, or the stark, pounding synth notes. Short but very identifiable, and utterly unique.

Cult Favorites

• Neverhood
  This is, without a doubt, the weirdest music ever in a PC game. I can't think of anything that comes remotely close to this one. It's difficult to even describe. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the soundtrack, which, like the game, is ridiculously difficult to find. It's a definite cult phenomenon. At one point a few months ago, the original soundtrack CD went for over $200 on eBay, and used copies of the game regularly go for $60. If you like the Neverhood songs, check out the web site of the demented mind behind this music... if you dare.
• Dune
  Not the influential RTS game from Westwood, but the original lesser-known RPG game released way, way back in 1992. Like the next title, far ahead of its time in including a fully orchestrated CD soundtrack. The music is a quirky blend of .. well, I'm not sure what to call it. Kraftwerk meets unknown French techno artist, perhaps? Very euro.
• The Dig
  An early LucasArts adventure game. Odd in that it shipped with crappy 256 color 320x200 graphics, but a fully arranged CD soundtrack. Completely the opposite of today's games, which tend to have great graphics and sound, for the most part, is an afterthought. Pseudo-classical in style, and quite haunting. Puts many modern games to shame.
• Outcast
  The entire second CD is music performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. Outstanding stuff. I personally never played this game, but every time I think of it, I recall a particular review which cited the game's depiction of a creature with a lifelike anus as an example of its attention to detail. Ew.

Most Underrated

• Alien vs. Predator
  If you're into movie-style soundtracks, this is it. As authentic as it comes. These guys were so serious about their music that they bundled a second CD with the game consisting of nothing but redbook audio tracks. If you can find a cheap copy, it's worth picking up for the music. Oh yeah, and you get a free game.
• Battlezone
  It's hard to not like the soundtracks of some of your all-time favorite games; and this one is in my top 10. Bias aside, the Battlezone soundtrack has a great ambient space feel with just the right tinge of martial paranoia. Though it's sparse, and rather subtle, it fits the game like a glove.
• NetStorm
  One of the very few games that manages to create a techno soundtrack that is instantly recognizable. This little known online-only game was ahead of its time in more ways than one. Well worth revisiting.
• Fantasy General
  High fantasy has never sounded so good. Amazing stuff; the orchestral chorus still gives me chills.
• Afterlife
  The red-headed stepchild of the LucasArts game library, oddly, delivers some of the best music: quirky, transcendental and trippy audio tracks. Special prize for best use of a sitar.

What's Next

The proof is in the listening. Head over to the GameBasement Radio page, tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Though I may not be a fan of every game in the rotation, every single track was included for a reason. Like children, I love them all in different ways. Some are "special". Some are overachivers. Some are tragically overlooked. But they're all worthy of your time. Each soundtrack in the playlist made the games they appeared in that much more notable.

I recommend listening to the WMA playlist using WinAMP if at all possible. WinAMP offers some crucial amenities, such as being able to sort and randomize the playlist. And unlike most radio broadcasts, we expose our entire playlist to every listener. Radio is a nice format to model our service on, but that doesn't mean we need to inherit its limitations. This means you can start anywhere you like, and jump to any song at any time.

I encourage everyone to listen to the radio broadcast and have fun rediscovering your favorite games, and maybe even find a few that you missed the first time around. And I welcome feedback and suggestions. Disagree with my choices? Is there some brilliant soundtrack out there that I somehow missed? Visit the radio forum and let me know. Who knows? Your favorite soundtrack might be the next one added to the playlist. Enjoy.