Diggin' In The Carts - Kode9 (Hidden Levels) - Red Bull Music Academy Presents

I actually was teaching video game music for a while. It was a sound design class specifically for interactive media. So we start with the history of 8-bit music and gradually trace as the processors of the machines evolved and got more higher resolution how the music started to change and how the computer game music lost its differentiation and it started to sound like any music. Certainly the limitation of the machines that these guys were working with in the early 8-bit period forced them to be imaginative with limited resources.

I think that's similar to how early hip-hop producers or hardcore jungle producers or house and techno producers worked, where they were working with samplers that had really tiny memories. So they were working within these really strict confines, squeezing the most out of the limitations of their machines and taking them much further than these machines were ever intended for. Like 8-bit was just the limit of the technological capability at that point. It wasn't done to get a specific quality of sound. So it was really an accident that 8-bit sound was so beautiful and pristine and crystalline and crunchy.