As he sees it there's mutual benefit: games can promote music sales, and likewise music can boost games.Īs he explained to me, he doesn't feel the problem lies with developers, and some are even pushing models to easily sell music to gamers.Īll game developers I've met are really interested in the idea of insta-buying music directly from the game. Pulkkinen's belief is that publishers, licencing agencies - an issue in Germany, particularly - and creatives need a structure to easily and fairly sell game music to the consumers that he believes will drive demand. While the Guitar Hero and Rock Band craze showed how licensed music could drive sales, and a spot in the latest FIFA can be a major breakthrough for music acts, the market for game soundtracks is severely underdeveloped. Pulkkinen, through his official website and AriTunes business, does sell some soundtracks (he has plans to launch AriTunes Records as a brand, too) - the issue is that these are an exception to the rule. These are sentiments that will find a lot of agreement, though a large part of Pulkkinen's lecture at the festival was addressing the ongoing disconnect between music, its popularity with gamers, and its availability. Yet still, music is still and will always be the biggest emotional aspect in any game. We don't have professional actors, even though we have great actors in games like The Walking Dead that was an example with voice-over that was really good - they can be immersive. When you play the game you feel the soul and emotions that it's sending out - music is one of the best ways to create emotions in games. With audio branding you need to be unique with that I mean the music and sounds are custom made to fit the game. I get a lot of offers, but I look for innovative and unique projects. He described this to us as audio branding, emphasizing that music in a game needs to resonate with the gamer. Though offers to produce a number of soundtracks like others he's produced often come through - we imagine Angry Bird-clone developers make regular enquiries - his focus is on creativity and delivering a unique experience for gamers. To begin with, Pulkkinen makes clear that his philosophy in producing a soundtrack is that it must match the artistic vision of the game and, above all, be unique. That aside, Pulkkinen's presence at the festival wasn't to talk about Angry Birds, but about the challenges facing musicians and composers in the game industry his focus is to help publishers, developers and creatives make the most out of a game's soundtrack. His biggest success to date is in one of gaming's most powerful brands his music has been engrained in the minds of over a billion players that have a copy of Angry Birds.Ĭhatting to us at September's Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, Pulkinnen also explained that he did voice work on Rovio's blockbuster, doing around half the sound effects for the Angry Birds pigs and birds - "I did the voice-over directly with the Rovio team in that way I've been laughing at over 2 billion people when they fail in Angry Birds". ![]() Wii U eShop fans may have enjoyed his work in Trine 2: Director's Cut - Pulkkinen also produced the music in the original Trine - while his projects on other systems include Outland, Dead Nation and, in a brilliant recent example, PS4 launch title Resogun. ![]() ![]() One of the most influential of this band of composers working in games is Ari Pulkkinen, CEO of AriTunes and a familiar name to those following the game music scene. In fact, such is the advancement in technology and the number of talented musicians / composers moving into the games industry, that the lines in soundtrack quality between high and low-budget games are blurring. This is applicable across any genre, arguably, and right across the spectrum from retail triple-A games to download titles. ![]() Nintendo has successfully riffed on iconic themes for decades, while still producing terrific new soundtracks in its current-day efforts that can only add to the excitement of the gameplay. There's surely little debating that music is absolutely integral to a video game experience.
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