A Different Kind of Recording: Preserving, Emulating, and Analysing Early Video Game Music

When dealing with video game music as musicologists, we can encounter several kinds of Urtexten, all with their specific material-ity: the music being played during the gameplay session; the music in a phonographic form, stored in digital (or analogue) formats and included in a soundtrack album; the music as stored in the original video game files. The latter has not always been found in the form of pre-recorded tracks, because old (pre-1994) consoles employed cartridges that could not handle files as big as audio waveforms. Instead, very light information was stored on the cartridges, and then used to produce music on-board, via sound synthesis. This was a different way of playing music, when recording was not an option, and gaining access to these opens new possibilities for (ludo)musicological analysis. In this paper, I show how these files work, how they can technically be obtained, and how they can be studied with digital tools that are in some cases specific to this kind of "recordings" and in some other shared with those used for analysing traditional digital recordings. Then, I problematise the lack of official ways to access the material, in a context where the hardware capable of playing those files natively has become a rarity and the software is often not to be bought anywhere in its original form, if at all accessible. I therefore argue that the preservation of old video games, and their soundtracks in particular, cannot be left entirely to the actions of "good pirates" who, (mostly) tolerated by video game publishers that still retain the copyright but do not care for their out-of-commerce abandonware, decide to "rip" it from the original sources and make it available for emulation at their own risk.