Music #28

Reminder: These music posts are not about the *best* music and especially not about the most *popular* music. I could just put up music tracks of Mega Man and Final Fantasy and call it a day. But everyone is aware of that, has heard it, and isn’t really illustrative of anything. The purpose of the music posts is to intentionally highlight music not *excellent* by itself but in how it was instrumental to the game’s success. Usual suspects will not be shown as you know those already. This is why Gameboy and Commodore 64 games are targeted the most because they are the most rare on YouTube (WordPress only lets me embed YouTube). No one thinks of the Gameboy or Commodore 64 (or anything pre-16 bit) in any way of ‘music’. It wasn’t a musical Dark Age, not at all!

There is one thing that board games, dice, and cards cannot do as video-games can do (and have to do in order to become a success): the aural experience. Traditional games have graphics. Ornate artwork graces many cards (hello Magic: The Gathering), board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and other dice games. But the magic of video games is tied far more to the sound and music than to the often mistaken notion that visuals and even interface are the primary differentiators of video games.

All parts of the video game age: the graphics most of all, the controls, and the gameplay. But one thing transcends the aging process no matter what hardware it is on: the sound and music. Why is this? We can only guess. But, as for me, my hypothesis is that the sister to video games is not movies or television but radio. For it is the emphasis of radio on the Theater of the Mind.

Spy Vs. Spy

1984

Now THIS is a game. Who would have thought that the comic strip in Mad Magazine’s Spy Vs. Spy could become a video game classic? The same music loops over and over and is not unlike Bubble Bobble’s theme in that the song is integral to the experience and yet, it strangely never gets repetitive.

You may be looking at the video and be wondering “What is going on?” This game is brilliant. Two spies are in a ‘level’. They must search under paintings, in desks, everywhere for money. And they must hide the money and keep the other spy from finding it. Once they have enough money, they can leave and ride the plane out. To aid them from hiding money from the other spy, they have an assortment of traps to lay out. They have swords they stab at each other when they enter the same room.

The game is time based. Dying has you lose time.

As with all good games, the gameplay melts away and becomes Bunton’s view of two people battling psychologically. Also note the speed of the game. Games were not ‘long’ or ‘boring’. They were fast, but we didn’t realize they were fast.

Note how the sound cues are very important. When a trap is placed, a ‘beeping’ is heard to indicate that it has been successfully placed. Another higher pitched beeping is heard when a spy is near a trap. When a spy bites it, the other spy, though it may be hard to see in the video, stops what he is doing and laughs very loudly.

I’ve noticed games seem to fall into either one of two categories: sizzle or plucky humor. Most of the older games are plucky humor. Ever since games like Wing Commander came out, they became increasingly more and more ‘sizzle’ orientated (not that sizzle is bad, but ALL games being sizzle means sizzle can only become non-surprising). Games like M.U.L.E., Sims, Super Mario Brothers, and even Wii Sports are filled with that witty ‘plucky humor’.

Spy Vs. Spy is a game full of ‘plucky humor’. The Spy becomes an ‘angel’ when dying, the absurdity of the black and white clash between the spies, the absurdity of spies dueling with swords in this day and age, the sheer delight of a spy running around with an umbrella because the other spy put an acid bucket on a door- all of these add to the experience. (It was also quite absurd for a plumber in overalls to be high jumping over giant turtles with wings while eating mushrooms to grow large.)

But the music really seals the deal and puts the magic in the game. Looking at it now, I am just amazed at how well designed and crafted this game is (note that this game doesn’t fall into any publisher’s neatly placed ‘genres’. This game has no genre). The game isn’t even split screened! I love how at the end, the winning Spy rides the airplane to outside the frame.

Spy Vs. Spy was enormously successful as it was ported to practically every system at the time. It even had two sequels. Spy Vs. Spy 2 was placed on an island where the spies craft traps from materials like coconuts and tree branches. Spy Vs. Spy 3 was placed in Antarctica in the winter wasteland. The sequels didn’t necessarily recapture the magic the first Spy Vs. Spy did (but how often does any entertainment, game or other, succeed in its sequel?).

The theme to Spy Vs. Spy as up there with such memorable themes like Bubble Bobble. Many gamers haven’t forgotten:

And I cannot end this blog post without adding in a cartoon of Spy Vs. Spy: