According to MTV, video game music has flourished last year more than any other time in the history of gaming. And they have good reasons for saying so.
The success of 2005 sleeper hit “Guitar Hero” wasn’t a big hit when it was released back in 2005, but had charted top 10 every month in video games sold this year acceording to NPD Group (which tracks American software sales).
The billboard ringtones chart provides an even more convincing proof. Forget about Bubba Sparxx, Daddy Yankee, MI3, Pirates of Carribeans, Shakira… “Super Mario Bros” theme is still the hottest ringtone nowadays.
This summer, there are two concerts devoted to game music: Video Games Live and Play! A Video Game Symphony.
Later this year, 50 Cent and G-Unit return to gaming with a PSP action game. And Square-Enix will release a spinoff to the much-loved “Final Fantasy VII” called “Dirge of Cerebus,” which features a cameo by Japanese rocker Gackt.
If you still remember E3 2006, Nintendo performed a virtual symphony using the newly designed wii controller. Nintedo DS will feature “Elite Beat Agents”, a music game that involves making animated characters’ lives better by tapping and tracing the DS stylus to the beats and strums of licensed music.
Sony is developing a next-gen version of “SingStar” as a centerpiece of an iTunes-style digital PlayStation 3 marketplace. The idea is for people to download songs to sing to and have rival karaoke matches from one PS3 to another, all around the world.
Even Microsoft wants a share of the pie
Microsoft has a musical agenda as well, not simply in its musician-versus-average-player “Game With Fame” program on Xbox Live, but with “Lumines Live,” a remix of last year’s popular “Tetris”-style PSP game. Downloadable through the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade setup, the game will be enhanced with new music videos and songs that play in the background as the player deals with the blocks that fall in the foreground. At E3, Microsoft showed the game with a Madonna video playing in the rear. The company has not announced which artists and videos will be synced to the game when it is officially released later this year.
And with more music based games such as “Gitaroo Man”, “Traxion”, “Guitar Hero II” and Namco-Bandai upcoming Xbox 360 game that focuses on the dream life of classical music composer Frédéric Chopin due to release this year, gamers and music lovers are sure to get thier hands and ears busy.