Trigger Happy underpowered audio chips, and these strictures resulted in a flood of remarkably inventive videogame music. If polyphony—the number of notes it is possible to play at the same time—was restricted to, say, four notes, the musician might write a piece characterized by deliciously floaty buzzing arpeggios. And because the microcomputer’s sound chip didn’t have much inbuilt information to speak of—unlike a modern synthesizer, it didn’t boast banks of ready-made instrument noises—the composer also had to invent the quality of each of the sounds he used. The star of this era was the musician Rob Hubbard, whose excellent soundtracks for old games—with their airbrushed, joyfully artificial aesthetic that mixed robotic beats with hummable tunes—have now been collectively preserved on a commercially available compact disc. Nowadays, videogame soundtracks fall into two main classes: the compilation of licensed pop tracks, or the specially composed score. Slapping an existing pop record over a videogame, or a film, is a rather hit-ormiss affair: as we have seen, it worked wonders for early PlayStation games like WipEout, but it can equally be grindingly inappropriate, the French heavyrock songs on VRally 2 being an emetic case in point. The alternative of a specially written score is now
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