While Namco’s Ridge Racer had set the bar with its brain-meltingly unsubtle take on techno for the Japanese release of the console (see below) it was the European release a year later that got the music/games culture clash just right. Games suddenly sounded great and companies had to step up their game (literally) to provide music that played the perfect partner to the - at the time - stunning new visuals. The revolution was instant and remarkable.
#Playstation singstar full
Now, your audio could be full ‘real’ 44.1kHz audio accessed with a simple ‘play track 1’ command. Massive respect to the likes of Chris Huelsbeck and his early ‘chiptune’ work on the likes of Turrican and Turrican 2 on the Amiga, and Hiroshi Miyauchi’s amazingly complex Outrun for Sega, and also the thousands of others who crammed music code into stunningly minimal memory.īy comparison, post-CD format music was simple. Prior to the advent of CDs in videogames machines, soundtracks were complex code written to play a basic synthesizer chip. The upshift in gaming audio was all thanks to new CD technology and, while Sega had beaten it to it with the Saturn the year before and 3DO with its Multiplayer before that, Sony’s new console - the first PlayStation in 1995 - featured games on a compact disc based proprietary format that - while sleek black in colour - were ostensibly exactly the same as the rainbow-shiny audio version that had revolutionised music 13 years earlier. In an age when flawless 44.1kHz ‘real music’ has replaced the bleeps and bloops of old entirely, it’s difficult to imagine the days when a videogame first sounded ‘great’, but this is really where the twin worlds of ‘proper’ music and videogames were first melded.