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You’d think, being ‘the sound guy’ on the site, I’d have an awful lot to talk about. And you’d be correct in this assumption. You forgot to take into account, mind, how extremely lazy I am, and how easily I get distracted by petty little things, like finishing school, reading Homestuck, and continuing to pretend I’m a musician by making silly tunes through an old PSOne game with a smug facial expression plastered on my face in the process. Thankfully for you lovely visitors (you two over there and adbot), today is the day that changes. And Dio didn’t even need to beat me into submission to knock this up for you. We’re off to a good start already!
Naturally, as this is the Halloween countdown, I needed to think of something appropriete for the season to talk about. Idea’s were coming, but they were idea’s for things I plan to do later in the month, that require a bit more legwork then simply typing shit up in AbiWord. So, as I’m laying there, chilling in bed, jamming to Aesop Rock’s "None Shall Pass" for roughly the 100th time in the last two days, a thought suddenly occurs to me.
"Shit, I could go for a game of Doom right now."
I’m pretty sure that Doom doesn’t need an introduction. If you need a memory jog (or you’re Amish and you’ve somehow stumbled into a Starbucks, onto a computer, and found this site), Doom was a first person shooter released in 1993 by iD Software, that put you in the role of a lone surviving space marine simply known as Doom Guy by the fans, pit against the leigons of hell, as they pour out of portals on both of Mars’ moons as the result of a trans-dimensional experiment gone wrong. Doom played the role of the Ur Example of the typical First Person Shooter, laying the groundwork for the Quake series, developed by the same company, which codified the modern shooter as we know it today. Doom itself was, and still is an increadibly popular game, spawning not only two official sequals, but a strong fan-development community that continues to create maps and levels for the game to this day.
But hey, you didn’t come here to see me ramble about any of that. You came here for me to drabble on about music in videogames.
The specific subject of the following article isn’t just about the music, in a manner of speaking; it’s more of a musing on how a change in sound design can completely change the experience of a game or movie, using Doom as an example. Now, it goes without saying, Doom being as popular a game as it is, console ports were inevitable. Doom was ported to almost every console around that could handle it for the first couple of years after release, all of which had their strengths and weaknesses over each other, but by and large, changes were either so minor that they’d have escaped the casual viewer, like the framerate, or they were ones that surprised nobody, like the rampent censoring of the SNES port (green blood, the bodies of fallen foes vanished after a few brief seconds, etc.).
Then, there was the Playstation port.
On it’s surface, the Playstation port seems relativly standard; some loss of graphic detail in the levels, leaving the levels looking a bit barren, occasional but managable framerate drops and lags, but otherwise was faithful to the original game; and, the Playstation port had both the original Doom and Doom II packaged together, with only one or two levels swapped around or changed for new ones, as a nice little bonus. It’s when you get to the sound and music that things start to change.
Let’s say it’s sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. You’ve never heard of or played Doom before, at least up until the point some sharp-dressed man with a wide smile kicked your front door down, interrupted your morning coffee, thrust copies of the PC and Playstation versions of Doom in your face, and then calmly and quietly walked back out of your house, muttering something about a career as a game show host. You play the PC Version first, because your PC is in your dining room, you’re a legendarily lazy fuck, and pithy concepts like "moving" are dumb and stupid and are for girly manbabies that shit themselves and that like the animu’s and the mango’s, or whatever it is the kids call them. This is what greets you after the startup screen, and the game starts proper:
Music that’s rather metal, in spite of how very MIDI it is. Regardless, it is still pretty damned metal. So metal, it almost reminds you of something you might listen to whilst rebelling against your parents and ‘the man’ back in your teenage years.
There are several songs throughout the game like this. There are also a lot of songs like this:
These evoke a different kind of feeling. These kinda remind you of those old movies from back in the day. The ones with grainy film cameras, characters of an extremely flat disposition, and gore that was as ridiculous as it was abundant. This sounds kinda like the music from those films- a smattering of orchestral flavorings over cheesy synthesizer lines.
And, really, that’s the feel the score gives off; a feeling of cheese, which is arguably what the creators were likely going for with the game as a whole. There is genuine horror there, if you dig deep, but the experience comes off more tongue-in-cheek, and not just because of the fact that the soundtrack is rendered in MIDI. Heavy Metal is a highly subjective genre- or group of genres, really- which quite a large number of people have difficulty taking seriously (no doubt thanks to over-the-top Glam Metal or Black Metal) as it is, usually being associated with angry, rebellious teenagers or men that are trying way too hard to come off as manly and practically bursting with machismo, and the more quote-unquote “atmospheric” tunes ring true of cheesy late-70s-early-80s horror movie soundtracks- the kind filled with cheep Casio keyboards and very sparse orchestration, which are usually more grating or humerous then actually ‘scary’.
After a few levels, you wind up getting stuck, and frustrated, because you’re a very angry and impatient gamer, and you make the wise decision to exit the game and shut down Windows 95 before you launch your computer through the wall in a fit of rage. You stroll past the desk, where the Playstation copy lays, and you figure, fuck it, the Playstation is in the living room, the chairs are comfy, you can put your feet up, may as well see what the deal is with it. This is what greets you;
Beyond the title screen and main menu music, with it’s heavy orchestration and use of angry, distrorted electric guitars, the music is... ambient. Atmospheric. Dark, foreboding, almost bleak. You were going to make a snide comment about how the graphics don’t look as good as they do on the PC, but suddenly, you feel scared that if you do, the game will rip your sexual organs off or out.
You decide to play on, and see if the cheesy charm ever comes back.
It doesn’t.
In fact, you’re glad you didn’t make a snide comment about the graphical downgrade. The sparse design of the levels suddenly goes hand in hand with the dense ambient music. You drop the controller, curl up into a ball, and begin to quietly quiver. You’re not sure if you’re crying, but you do know that you’ve just shat yourself. You were never very good at handling horror, and the smiley bastard in the sharp suit probably somehow knew that. This was probably his plan all along, and he’s probably now nicking all your expensive cutlery and your priceless rare stamp collection. Damn him.
That’s the key difference here; in the original PC version, the whole experience felt more like a shlocky B-Movie with tacky gore effects splattered everywhere. The Playstation versions sound direction makes the whole experience feel a lot more hopeless, bleak, and horrific. It brought out the more horrific and less playful side of Doom. The side that doesn’t fuck about and that will beat the shit out of you if you look at it funny (or look at it at all, really.)
I have no idea what lead to Williams Entertainment- the people behind the Playstation port- changing the music entirely. It may have been an issue with rights, one would think, but they also handled the SNES port, which had arrangements of the original music through the SNES’ sound chip, so that’s not the case. And it isn’t a copyright issue- for all the similarities to Heavy Metal songs a lot of the original songs have, the composer- Bobby Prince- worked as a lawyer in the past, and thus knew how close he could toe the line in song similarity without actually breaking any copyright laws. Really, it probably did just come down to design choice on William’s part, and regardless of the reasoning, Aubrey Hodges score did exactly what it set out to do: scare the piss out of you. Really, this youtube comment has put it best (and it did it in far fewer words):
“I find it funny that they were able to make the same game so different on other systems. The PC Doom makes you feel like nothing can stop you. PSX Doom makes you feel like a little pussy just trying to stay alive.” ~ UnknownShadow718
I’m not trying to say either version is the definitive version with this article, mind you, as whichever soundtrack or gameplay experience you’re going to prefer over the other is obviously down to personal preference. The point of the article was simply to exemplify how easy it is to change the experience of a game through the use of sound alone. Both versions of Doom we’ve looked at have excellent scores and sound design of the highest quality with the tools laid out for the composers and sound effects guys, but they go about setting the mood in two entirely different ways, and they intend to provoke entirely different feelings and emotions in you.
- Decon (10/7/11)
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