> I hope this doesn't fall under gratuitous negativity. I just don't see it. I agree. I love chiptunes and the demoscene to death, but people (nostalgically)

> I hope this doesn't fall under gratuitous negativity. I just don't see it. I agree. I love chiptunes and the demoscene to death, but people (nostalgically) overstate their influence and underestimate the musical ability of early video game designers. The simple fact is that the space of video games and pop music is too damn large to nail down any large veins in 11 paragraphs. Since about 1992, there has been so much activity in this space fueled by technological advances in audio hardware and software driving composition, publishing, synthesis, gameplay, etc. that a dissertation could be written about every five year period over the last 25 years. The VGM world has taken at least three major shifts since SMB. 1. The shift to using whole mp3 tracks, a la PS1. 2. The shift to multi-track recorded audio, instead of chiptune/wave synthesis. 3. The shift to dynamically generated audio (see SSX for great examples). The first quite simply was pop music (with a techno edge). The second certainly lagged pop music. The third one has nothing to do with pop music. > bleeps and blops of the 70s arcade cabinets impressed any musician, agree. > still no adaptive phrasing, AI composition, It doesn't exactly exist, but there is at least adaption through bringing in layers, changing volumes, triggering phrases, scene synthesis through location/reverb, etc. Although this has even less to do with pop music which is still blocks of 3.5 minute audio, although there was a remix/mashup trend a few years ago, it's faded.