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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait to get home to play it.

Secret of Monkey Island 2 was my first PC game on a 486SX and VGA monitor. The sound came out of the PC speakers... One day I got an Adlib card and was blown away. Go ahead and download the remake on steam and notice something that kind of doesn't exist in any game (that I know): when you enter the scene on Scabb Island, the relaxed reggae beat changes ever so subtly depending on the bridge, the carpenter shop, the mapmaker, the bar, etc.

For example, you enter the mapmaker and the Wally music comes on, which is the same reggae bagdrop to a clarinet or oboe, the music is a little deeper in the carpenter shop, there's an evil background tone when Largo LaGrande shows up and a more subtle one in the hotel, etc.

With gorgeous hand painted digitized art.

They don't make games like that anymore. Can't wait to see if they actually did.

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> the relaxed reggae beat changes ever so subtly depending on the bridge, the carpenter shop, the mapmaker, the bar, etc

That is cool! They don't receive a ton of attention, but other games do get into some fun stuff with music too. One such game is NieR: Automata. They built a pretty remarkable tone filter that seamlessly turns the playing music into an 8-bit equivalent via digital processing when the player starts hacking: https://www.platinumgames.com/official-blog/article/9581

A more common thing you'll see are games that have dynamic battle music, which will add or remove elements from the soundtrack as the player encounters combat, encounters a boss, or leaves combat.

I'm not aware of other games that have nice little leitmotifs for so many scenes, though. That's great.

Earworm [0], released by JCO and Neuro at the Evoke 2011 demoparty is a game that puts this kind of sound mechanic at its core. The music gets more frantic and changes style as you increase in "level", and as you approach danger the drumbeat gets more insistent, sounding ominous and inducing anxiety.

I still play it to this day, quite a unique experience and a fun game to boot!

[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=57518

FAR:Lone Sails, and Changing Tides also have very dynamic music. I would go so far as to say music is 50% of the experience of the game, perhaps almost all of the emotional experience. Not to detract from the environmental storytelling which was also excellent.

Yes, iMUSE (Interactive Music Streaming Engine) as they called it was genius, not sure whether something like this does still exist these days.

Some games does change things depending on "action" in the game and such, but tends to be very basic variables + actions.

I think GTA V for example actually changes the actual music as the action goes up, like when your wanted level changes.

There is a racing game that does something even more basic (Trackmania maybe?) where they have a low-pass filter that opens up more and more the faster you go.

Nothing like iMUSE I think though.

It was one of my favourite things about Zelda breath of the wild. Some sessions I felt more like a conductor, depending on what I did in game, I could control the music. It was an amazing system to give you a clue on what was in your surroundings.

Pillars of Eternity 2 allows you to choose either letting the songs in the soundtrack play out, or to dynamically chop and change based on the scenes. The sea shanties while you're sailing around the map are a nice touch.

The entire game of Portal 2 is a subtle musical performance. All the devices emit bits of music and their combination changes the song.

The FAR series of games is also really seamless in this respect.

This was exactly my experience, first time I had ever heard sound out of an audio card.

Between these games and everything Sierra ever released, I really fell in love with both gaming, and computers in general. They led me to learn more about programming, and today I'm still at it.

Same here. Monkey Island 2, King's Quest 5 and Wasteland are quite possibly why I ended up in a tech career all this time and so many years later.

The music was great - I used to have the LeChuck theme as an 8-bit chiptune on my old cellphone and it still rocked.

I used to have LeChuck's PC speaker theme as my cell phone ring.

But the concept of a ringing phone has evolved. Originally, the ringing of a phone was supposed to attract your attention, even if you were far away. You wanted a piercing, obtrusive sound.

Today phones are carried around with you while you hang out with a lot of other people who are also carrying their own phones. Rings and alerts need to be unobtrusive, which makes older-style rings inappropriate. :/

Quite true, and yet I'm saddened by it. Currently have my smartwatch at the repair center, so I'm actually relying on ringtones again after years of silence and vibrations, and it kind of annoys me that I can't just blast the tetris soundtrack as a ringtone anymore...

> They don't make games like that anymore

I was delighted to see that this level of love for detail has been upheld by other design studios:

Here is a documentary [0] of the development of the orchestral music done for "Creaks" by Amanita Design, famous for "Samorost" and "Machinarium".

They contracted musicians from the Hidden Orchestra who went on to create music that develops and progresses based on how you progress in the game. Watch the documentary, it's really worth it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67S-rAyku3U

Two other examples I can think of are Pokémon (the fifth edition I believe?) on the Nintendo Gameboy where the game will blend the low hp warning beeps into the music when it gets into the critical zone, but then quickly fade it into the background so it won't be annoying. In Nitronic Rush, the predecessor to Distance, the music will adapt to how cut down the players car is and in what mode it is. Flying, driving upside down and on walls will all introduce their own instrument mix.

Disappointingly, the successors of both games didn't feature those mechanics.

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