The Art of Constraint
I went over to his office, a converted local warehouse, which had been partitioned and given a quick lick of pale blue paint. It was a cold inert place teeming with coders, graphic artists and game testers and was fully equipped with beds just in case anyone needed to pull an all nighter. I met with the team, who gave me the deadline and the constraints.
They needed music for each level and each boss level. The music was to run in a loop fashion and each tune had to be at least a couple of minutes long. The constraints were both numerous and restrictive. In 1994, memory was a much more valuable commodity than it is today and mp3 compression was still in it's infancy. I was given 6 channels of audio each of which could only play a single note at once, and a small amount of RAM to store my samples; the rest had been used up by the coders.
Think about it this way - a three note chord on one instrument would take up three of my six channels - and typically I would need at least four instruments playing at once including the percussion. I would have to be very careful in managing those channels to make best use of my resources.
The game Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was to be released with the film of the same name later that year. It was typical of the 'walk to the right, jump and smash whatever is in the way' genre prevalent at that time. This was the first chance I had at writing game music and I wanted to make a good impression. I decided to choose a set of instruments and stick with them throughout the game to impart a cohesive framework to the project.
After careful deliberation, I chose a bass guitar, strings, harpsichord and simple percussion for the job. I specifically wrote the bass and drum parts in a funky upbeat style and used the harpsichord and strings to add an air of mystery. I am pretty sure I recall my dad saying something along the lines of "I don't know what this music you are writing is, but it's the best I have ever heard from you".
Well, the film bombed and the game did likewise. It wasn't the worst game in the world, but being tied to a shipwreck of a film didn't help. Yet out of the debris, almost 20 years later, game enthusiasts have dug it up - specifically for my score. I was thrilled to see numerous posts to YouTube of the game music with enthusiastic comments about it.
So what is it that made this such a success? I think it was actually the constraints more than anything. I had very little time to write it, almost no space to store it, and limited hardware capacity to play it. That made me really have to think about what I was doing. Every aspect had to be precisely worked out to fit the genre of the game and capacity of the systems it was to run on.
Since then, I have pursued many other artistic avenues and in all of them, the rule of constraint applies. On the face of it it would seem that restricting creative avenues would result in inferior output. In my experience however, it is those very limitations that make me have to dig much deeper and in the end create better work.
Some music from the game:
Intro Forest and Swamplands Frankenstein Mansion
For more search "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein SNES" on you tube.