Like most other video game nerds, I’m also a huge fan of video game music. Maybe it’s the fact that it hits my nostalgia-bone harder than anything else, but I still get chills when I hear an old, SNES sound-chip-created piece of music.
And so because I love video game music so much, and ostensibly you either do or at least are willing to put up with it momentarily, I’ve decided I’m going to start up a new weekly article where I find and play some of my favourites, both old and contemporary, from the gaming world.
I was debating starting this off with something a bit more contemporary, and not dive head-first into complete, old-fashioned chiptronic nerdery, but fuck that I’m sticking with what I want to do. And so first up, one of the greatest games from one of the greatest times in gaming, this is “Frog’s Theme” from Chrono Trigger.
It was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, though likely with a bit of help from Nobuo Uematsu, who if you don’t know is basically the godfather of video game music. This song was awesome when I first heard it, and it’s still awesome to this day.
The concept of “Video Games as Art” has been a hotly contested topic, with its origins coming into the mainstream only within the last decade. Many see gaming as nothing more than the puerile pursuit of young boys and bloodthirsty, mal-adjusted teenagers, and have been quickly dismissive of the “Games as art” belief. Roger Ebert himself wrote that he believes games could never be as artistically worthy as literature or cinema. Many others, myself included, beg to differ, and can attest that there are moments within video games that have struck us with such sadness, passion, or joy that no other word but art could possibly describe what we had been playing.
To be fair, the definition of “art” is a bit…murky, and depending who you ask could mean any number of things. And to be even MORE fair, there are an exceeding number of games out there which are most certainly NOT art… at least from my opinion. For every “Shadow of the Colossus” that gets released we get dozens upon dozens of forgettable first-person shooters. But the point of this article, as I fumble to get back on topic, is to display a couple of games, in no particular order, that I feel are unequivocally “art.” These are solely choices of my own opinion, and if you disagree with my opinions, or are absolutely horrified that I missed your favourite piece of gaming art, feel free to call me a moron.
