A brief history of game audio

The history of game audio has completed one full cycle. In the beginning game sound effects and music used special sound effects chips such as the AY-38610 or SID[5] to produce waveforms, ADSR envelopes and noise bursts. The logic for these "synthesiser on a chip" was hybrid analog/digital, having a rather unique sound of its own, albeit very grainy. Compositions were often written very compactly as permutations on scales or modulus/retrograde systems like in 12 tone music. Key changes and parallel melodies are a strong feature of early game compositions because of their efficient representation. Famous pieces of music and backgrounds like Pac-Man and Space Invaders will be familiar to older gamers. Those were sequenced using time-parameter lists that predate MIDI. At this time soundcards were not ubiquitous and so the sound was often output though onboard computer loudspeakers or encoded into the video signal for use with a normal TV set.