Why music is the heartbeat of gaming

Our dance mats were cheap things — squares of slick, colourful plastic we laid on the floor of the living room — but my brother and I loved them. For months of our early teens we honed our ability to stomp on the mat’s four arrows in sync to music by The Cure and Kylie Minogue, among others. The game we played, Dancing Stage MegaMix, was my first introduction to the idea that music in games might serve as more than mere set dressing. 

Music is a fundamental part of every game, but one particular genre goes further, making its soundtrack an essential part of the action. In music games, a player’s movements are bound to the score: you might reshape the songs with your actions, or be challenged to react to every riff, beat and snare.

Rhythm games are reflex-based puzzles where players must tap, step or move in time with a beat. They are scored according to precision, often guided by visual cues which create a synaesthetic experience of play. The first big success in the genre was the eccentric PaRappa the Rapper, in which you played a rapping cartoon dog, and which paved the way for Rez, a sci-fi shooter where each manoeuvre changed the soundtrack, and Vib-Ribbon, a platformer that generated levels based on any music CD inserted into the PlayStation. 

As these innovative titles carved out a niche on home consoles around the turn of the millennium, the music genre was exploding in arcades. Dance Dance Revolution was the first megahit but other popular titles included Samba de Amigo, with its motion-sensing controllers in the shape of maracas, and Donkey Konga, which offered players a pair of plastic drums. These titles demand that you feel the rhythm in your body and respond unconsciously. Their magic is to gamify the pleasure of dance.

One company exemplifies the shifting fortunes of music games in the west. Harmonix co-created the popular Guitar Hero franchise in 2005, which offered players a guitar controller to simulate fingering and strumming along to rock songs by bands such as Deep Purple, Franz Ferdinand and Black Sabbath. When Guitar Hero was sold to Activision, Harmonix created a rival title, Rock Band, which expanded its instrument peripherals to include keyboards, microphones and drums. 

‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Rock Band’ became $1bn successes, driving console sales and inspiring many young people to pick up real instruments

These games, along with singing titles such as SingStar and Karaoke Revolution, were successful because they were inherently social, perfectly calibrated for playing at parties and easy to pick up for non-gamers who found traditional controllers intimidatingly complicated.

During the late 2000s, Guitar Hero and Rock Band became $1bn successes, driving console sales and inspiring many young people to pick up real instruments. In 2009, however, revenue from rhythm games crashed due to market saturation and lack of innovation. A few recent titles, such as VR rhythm game Beat Saber and DJ simulator Fuser, have achieved moderate success, but it seems the days of blockbuster music games are now behind us.

Games naturally encourage experimentation and exploration, precisely the qualities musicians seek when writing songs. While rhythm games use music as a conduit for gameplay, there are also free-form releases intended for original composition rather than achieving high scores. Music 2000 on the PlayStation offered a toolkit that was hugely influential for UK grime producers — a radio clip shows musician Benga using it to create a professional beat. Meanwhile 1992’s Mario Paint has found a surprising new lease of life on YouTube thanks to its music composition tool, resulting in curiosities such as this rendition of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, with a solo made of cats meowing. 

While the first medium that critics typically compare to games is cinema, there is also an argument that they are closer in essence to music. Neither a game nor a musical composition is complete until it has a player, and a single piece can be repeated many times with different results. Both games and music are spaces for play, and each relies on rhythm, whether it’s the tempo of Guitar Hero or the cadence of punches in Street Fighter. 

When I visited a Japanese arcade in 2019 and saw a new version of Dance Dance Revolution, I knew I had to try it. In place of a mat with arrows there was a square bed of LED lights. The game asked me not just to beat-stomp but also to jump, slide and duck, more breakdancing than square dancing. At first I felt self-conscious next to the seasoned Japanese players twirling around me achieving perfect scores. But as I sank into the groove of an amphetamine-paced club track, my mind switched off — my body had trained for this through years of childhood. It knew what to do.