Music and games history

The hammer dropped, for most of us, in 1995 with the worldwide release of the PlayStation 1, sounding a death knell for bleeps and bloops as well as 2D sprite-based games, leaving them both to be rediscovered by future generations of indie developers reclaiming the cultural styles of their youth.

Video games still had music, but the ineffable “sow’s ear to silk purse” aspirations of video game music were gone forever—except to users of Nintendo’s Game Boy, whose unique considerations of “battery life trumps all” made it a living museum piece of the early days of video game music.

It has fostered a curious musical ecosystem of its own ever since.