Where are all of the memorable melodies? Like a grade-schooler’s summer vacation; like a fart in the wind; like your favorite band’s underground status… they all seem to be gone. While the production value in video games has gone way up generally, I find that’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Sometimes bigger explosions and fancier lighting effects don’t always make a game better, nor do fully orchestrated scores mean that a game is fun to play. Plus, with the latter, we hardly ever hear any truly original melodies anymore. None worth remembering, anyway.
Now I’m not saying that the more modern, orchestrated music isn’t great. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it, or that it can’t make a huge impact in a game – anyone who has played Journey or Destiny knows that the orchestral scores are so much of what makes those games great. I just feel like the music isn’t as memorable as it used to be. There aren’t as many game-defining melodies as there used to be, and I bet if I played the average gamer a battle theme from Destiny and from Uncharted 4 back to back, the majority wouldn’t be able to say for sure which song belonged to which game.
I started thinking about this when Nintendo was celebrating 30 years of Super Mario Bros. At the end of Nintendo’s infamous E3 Direct last year, a promotional video aired for its anniversary celebration. Throughout the course of that video men and women, girls and boys, from all over the world sang along to the Super Mario Bros. theme music, which is arguably one of the most well-known melodies in the world. It was pretty amazing, and that’s a tune that you could start anywhere, in front of anyone, and I guarantee that someone can finish it and tell you what it’s from.
I really started missing the simple melodies the first time I saw a trailer for Dragon Quest Heroes . Hearing that incredible “Overture March” recreated and performed by an orchestra really hit home for me. I remember getting my wife to the computer to watch the trailer again with me. I cranked it up and, fighting back a lump in my throat, I tried to explain to her what the series and that music meant to me, but words failed me. That melody hasn’t changed since the ’80s, and they just don’t compose music like that for games anymore. Today it all seems like the same, one-note, try-hard, epic monotony.
That’s just my grumpy old man opinion. Epic, orchestrated music is wonderful, but you don’t find yourself humming the music from Destiny or Dark Souls 3 while you’re at work, do you? For your listening pleasure, and in honor of the good ol’ days, here’s the Overture March from the original Dragon Warrior ( Dragon Quest ):