As an art form, video game music has grown to the point where major releases are often fully scored and orchestrated, sometimes with a budget on par with Hollywood movies. Great art is everywhere and composers continue create amazing, enduring melodies with the resources available to them.
But I continue to be amazed by those early Nintendo games. How did the composers for those early games create such indelible themes with so little? There are few who wouldn't immediately recognize music from Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda, and those early composers had a tiny fraction of the capabilities of modern soft/hardware. It wasn't even close.
My theory, and I believe most artists would agree, is that limitation breeds creativity. This is the paradox of choice in practice. I've noticed it throughout my career. Drop a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil in front of me and I will stare blankly. Tell me I need to write a 2-minute piece for oboe, violin, and organ, and my creative mind will engage. I noticed in theory classes that I had a wealth of creative ideas when my parameters were defined (say, by the rules of counterpoint). Bach himself seemed to have very clear "rules" he worked with when writing fugues, inventions and choral works.
At a point, too much limitation is constricting. Music from early Atari consoles is pretty much non-existent or completely forgettable. There just wasn't much that could be done with them. The NES seemed to have just enough tools to unlock the creative minds of composers at the time.
Before I dig into the NES music, first a clarifying point: there is really no such thing as "8-bit" music, in the sense that most people tend to mean it. The term 8-bit in this context refers to the capabilities of the microprocessors of that generation of consoles, not the quality of the sound. The capabilities of the music were limited somewhat by the hardware, and that affected the sound, but the term "8-bit" doesn't really tell you anything about the sound of the music. It's an important distinction to make, but I do think "8-bit" is a useful colloquialism for "NES-like" so I won't make too much of a stink over it.
So what are the limitations/capabilities of the NES? The biggest is probably its polyphony, or how many sounds it could play at once. The NES had 5 channels to work with:
1. Pulse Wave 1 (melody)
2. Pulse Wave 2 (more melody/harmony)
3. Triangle Wave (bass)
4. Noise (white noise, percussion, explosions, hits, etc.)
5. Samples (additional sounds/percussion)
Most of the melodies that people recognize are on the first two channels. The third is typically a bass part and drum tracks are usually on the fourth. The fifth track can have samples, but these would have to be loaded on the game cart itself, and storage was at a premium in those days. (the Super Mario Bros/ Duck Hunt ROM is a whopping 82kb, smaller than many emails!) Nevertheless, this track was useful for adding musical variety such as orchestra hits, or the tympani that can be heard in Super Mario Bros 3.
So the composers essentially had 3 voices and a drum track, plus some sound effects. Keep in mind that they also had to cover the game noises: jumping, hitting things, coins. All of these challenges were addressed in often clever ways, and the limitations of the NES were used to make some brilliant music.
Let's start at the beginning, with Super Mario Bros:
Listen carefully and you will notice that the melody often drops out to make room for the sound effects. It is especially noticeable at :35 when Mario gets a bunch of coins in a row. The melodic coin noise is obviously on one of the first two channels, along with the music. Many composers wrote music with this in mind, knowing that parts of it might have to drop out and the music should still carry with fewer parts.
The first thing you might notice about the bass channel is that it is much higher than a typical bass part. This might be due in part to the limited frequency response of most TVs in that era. Lower bass parts just wouldn't be heard. But moving the bass into the upper registers was a way to fill out more parts. Like Bobby McFerrin, the third channel was often dropping a quick bass note then harmonizing or arpeggiating in a higher register. Much like the cellist in a string quartet, the bass part played a larger role in the music than, say, Tom Petty's bass player.
Mario's power-up sound (at :26) is an example of a fast arpeggio, or rapidly alternating notes on a single channel, which was the best way for the composers to make a few tracks sound like much more. Games like Soltice and Silver Surfer used arpeggios to make a huge sound! (both composed by Tim Follin)
Another ingenious trick was to use the first two channels in unison, instead of harmony, with the second track slightly softer and delayed. This created a reverb effect, a kind of audio depth not seen in many video games at that time. It also meant that the composer only had two melodic parts to work with, instead of three. One major benefit of this was that, if the second channel needed to switch to a sound effect, you would only lose the reverb, not any notes. Check out the reverb effect in Mega Man 2, at :08 and especially at the bridge (:22). Anytime the sound becomes reverby you will hear that it is in two parts instead of three. You can also hear how much busier and higher the bass is at those parts to fill out the space.
One of my favorite and earliest examples of the reverb effect is the dungeon music from The Legend of Zelda. Check it out at :45.
Technical issues aside, it is an unusual and brilliant piece; the melody is in the bass, it's seven measures long with an extra beat in the last measure, and there are some unusual note choices in a few places. Pardon this transcription - I believe I did it in high school, but as far as I can tell it's accurate:
The arpeggios keep it from sounding too thin, and the reverb effect is perfect for a dungeon. The curious part is that it does not appear to have been arranged as I wrote it above with a doubled track for reverb. Instead, the alternating 16th notes are on different tracks, creating an echo sound by overlapping. This is done so that the "warning" beep can occur on the second channel when Link's health is down to one heart or less. In that case the 16th notes turn to 8th notes, as can be heard in the clip above from 1:37-1:54. My transcription:
The same effect can be heard in the clip at 8:32, on the overworld theme. The piece is in three parts: bass, melody and a countermelody. When the beeping starts the countermelody will drop out. The other two parts work fine without the inner voice, and it has the added benefit of not sounding overwhelmingly cluttered. The alarm sound gets your attention but isn't too jarring because the dropped part makes room for it.
There is a long list of ways that NES composer used the tools available to them, from using volume adjustments to create an echo effect on one track to reinforcing the drum parts with the bass track. My point in all this is to illustrate the way composers benefitted from their limitations. To artists struggling to create, I would recommend taking inspiration from the early video game designers who created long-lasting memories for millions of people with a fraction of the tools we have available today. To a painter, maybe limit the number colors you work with, just to get the juices flowing. For someone working in design, maybe start with a couple pencils. For a recording engineer, maybe you don't need 200 reverb plugins. Less is usually more. Creativity requires space and boundaries, and if they aren't provided for you sometimes you have to define your own parameters.
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