It’s rare to get purists linked to things moving forward in pretty much every field of human knowledge–or maybe it’s just me realizing that moving forward sometimes means moving… backwards? OK, nevermind–but something tangentially akin to that may be happening right now with the hard-to-miss CRT renaissance pouring out of the retro games community into the outside world. Not that bringing back tube screens per se could be remotely relatable to “progress”, of course, but it’s doing some good to the medium as a whole, instigating modern audiences to reevaluate the craft behind classic game art/design by adding (back to the the current discourse) another layer to it: artistic intent.
Not long ago the conversation revolved solely around technical limitations (aka “clouds and bushes share the same sprite in Super Mario Bros.”) and how smart devs must’ve been to save memory, clock and such with their highly optimized output. It was easy to giggle at an emulation screen grab while muttering condescendingly “oh, the poor artist only had one pixel to dot an eye in the character's face”; but things change dramatically once you realize that pixel used to bleed and glow when shot from a cathode ray cannon to a curved glass screen.
At first witnessing mere *actual* screenshots becoming such a revelatory collective experience may seem silly, but videogames being such a (relatively) recent medium and so particularly affected by (rapid) technological changes make them prone to generational gaps becoming chasms in a blink of an eye–to the point of the Atari 2600’s iteration of Pac-Man being widely regarded as one of the worst games ever due to the ghosts’ sprites flickering without people ever imagining it wasn’t nearly that bad under some (typical) persistence phosphor environment (as I personally first experienced it back then, in even more solid B/W).
As for me, an audio guy, I’m always dabbling with approaches to preserve videogames’ sonic experiences; and just like with video (albeit in less intricate environments) that can be done in a myriad of ways–none of them completely exhaustive. Exactly because of that, this post won’t be conclusive for once–I’ll just leave some preservation works I’ve been messing with below (served with a small case-by-case tech insight) and keep the comments/suggestions box open instead. Meanwhile, I’m back to indulging in some crispy @CRTpixels eye-candy.
1) Capturing straight from the hardware
Maybe the “no bs way to go” method, this can be more relevant for some hardware pieces than others. I decided to do this Strider soundtrack montage after swapping my more recent Mega Drive unit for an old 1st version specimen and realizing its bass was much meatier than I was used to. At first I thought it was an issue with the monster’s audio out, but when I tried capturing from its phone jack the result was just the same. The woofing sound may be a bit too much for some, but on the other hand high frequencies are much less annoying in this setup… Either way, the point is preserving what it is, so no further digital treatment was applied–besides some needed NR (Noise Reduction).
2) Data-mining
The interesting thing about browsing for files themselves is there’s always the chance of stumbling upon unexpected stuff. At times they’re unused tracks, sometimes files in different formats optimized for performance options, sometimes stuff added to the build at the very last minute before shipping, and so on. The hard part is making sense of it all–especially when it comes to smooth looping, since much of that info is implemented on the code side, be it middleware or not–but that’s probably half the fun.
CL!CKR is a South Korean game developed/published by Ntreev Soft in 2010, and it sports some fantastic, very polished sound design (even if some tracks have sound effects baked-in, like what happens with another stellar soundtrack I’ve put together, Giana Sisters 2D). Unfortunately it was pulled from Steam a while ago, so I’m glad I got it before that happened (DIGITAL DOESN’T MEAN “ETERNAL”--I can’t stress this enough).
3) Restoring MIDI files
One particularly interesting niche–roughly related to 90’s PC games–is scavenging for MIDI files and reconfiguring them to produce audio as originally intended. The difference with those is they don’t carry actual “sound” in them, rather being just a set of instructions for a piece of software to manipulate Windows’ sound bank (called GM, General MIDI) itself and generate music on the fly. I always have an eye open for multiplatform games ported to PC because those can hold valuable peek-inside intel when it comes to the more secretive (even more when hardwares were completely different) world of console development, as it’s the case with this Baku Baku: a Sega Titan/Saturn title later ported to PC.
4) Asking around
Believe it or not, sometimes all you have to do is ask. Back in 2010 I was working with a handful of guys in a Gamespot Union dedicated to covering the bursting scene that followed the first indie breakthrough a couple years before (that wave had World of Goo and Braid, to name a few), and as we interviewed devs we were able to poke into their process a bit here and there. In this case the composer Elias Holmlid sent me the files just for my personal “Continuity Soundtrack” folder to become complete.