12 Things You Didn't Know About Video Game Soundtracks
7. 'Riffology'
In 1984, video game music was in its infancy, and not just as a legitimate genre. At the start of the decade, continuous background music was still a relative rarity in the output of the era, let alone complete, substantial soundtracks. So the suggestion that a game could write its own music on the fly seemed like something bound to the realms of science-fiction.
The Commodore 64's SID sound chip was intentionally designed to not just surpass the sound capabilities of every other machine on the market, but utterly eclipse them in such a manner so that nothing could even approach its proficiency. Designed by engineer Bob Yannes, the chip was a breakthrough for the capabilities of computer game audio, described by colleague Charles Winterble as "ten times better than anything out there, and twenty times better than it needs to be."
Yannes had big ambitions; he was disappointed that all previous computer sound hardware had "obviously been designed by people who knew nothing about music". But he could not have expected just how far some Commodore 64 composers would take the beautiful gift handed to them.
Whilst legendary game musicians such as Rob Hubbard and Chris Huelsbeck carved out their names on the machine - the latter using it to fundamentally invent the concept of sound trackers - Peter Langston employed the hardware to innovate game music in a way never seen before.
Utilising his technique known as 'riffology', the main theme of Lucasfilm Game's futuristic sports-sim Ballblazer was able to procedurally generate itself, ensuring a different soundtrack every time the game was played. Titled 'Song of the Grid', the track arranged itself from a set of 32 pre-defined eight note sequences to produce the lead melody.
The final result was not to everybody's taste; the random nature of the song meant it lacked the sort of compositional clarity of other C64 hits. There's nevertheless little question that Langston's experiment was an able demonstration of the innovative nature of interactive entertainment.