This morning I found a CD my friend Marty made me at least seven years ago. On it were 12 variations of “Terra’s Theme” pulled from in the game, random orchestral albums and a handful of remix communities. I hadn’t listened to the CD in years; I had forgotten about it, actually.
I put it in my car and listened as I drove the same route I drive every day to work. It was very nostalgic. It made me remember my first love, my first video game music crush. It made me realize how important 16-bit music was to me, so much that for a very long while I dreamed of scoring for video games. Final Fantasy XIII, I told myself back in ninth grade. That would be my game.
It’s almost here and it wasn’t.
That’s okay, though. It never really bothered me that I pushed back my dream of video game composition. Even after 13 years, even though I don’t make music like I used to, I still listen to it. I still have my favorite game composers. And I still squee over Yasunori Mitsuda, vowing that one day I will meet him face to face (with a translator of course) and tell him how much his music meant to me as a teenage girl.
I never got into 8-bit music, despite growing up in the beginning of the 8-bit era. Mario didn’t do it for me. Zelda didn’t either. Bubble Bobble, Marble Madness, Spy Vs Spy, none of the music mattered. Background noise. All of it. It wasn’t until later that I started to pay attention to what was going on behind the graphics. This was when the 16-bit generation started.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the first game I really started to hear. I remember getting chills the first time I listened to the Light World dungeon theme. Then Secret of Mana came. “Dark Star.” I remember sitting in front of the TV with my sister’s microphone recorder, recording all the songs I loved (which was almost every song in the game) so I could play them back later any time I wished.
In 1994, that Christmas, I received the Final Fantasy VI US soundtrack Kefka’s Domain. I don’t know how my mother found it. I must have showed her a catalog or something because we didn’t have a computer back then. I loved those CDs, so much that I would crank all my favorite songs, sit in front of my Yamaha keyboard, and play along by ear. I learned so much about piano by just picking apart video game music. Eventually I would learn more.
By the time I got the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack four years later, I had grown up a little and couldn’t find the time to be sitting in front of my keyboard for hours on end. I started focusing more-so on my writing and a little less on my music. The 16-bit era had come to an end, and with that my fervor for creating the music I so loved at the time waned.
I will always have a spot deep inside my heart for 16-bit music. Forever. It reminds me from time to time of the possibilities I hold within myself, just waiting for the right moment (or the right trigger) to spring forth into the world, and perhaps change it with a limited amount of channels and a fixed set of instruments.
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