Here’s one for the gamers: “Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound” interviews more than 80 composers, sound designers and voice actors in a comprehensive look at its topic. Starting with mechanical pinball bells, “Beep” moves through the bleepy 8-bit sounds of 1980s arcade games to the present, where an entire otaku subculture is dedicated to the live performance of game music.
Although retro ’80s game music is now an aesthetic — see the “chiptune” genre — the film points out its more prosaic beginnings. It was usually made as an afterthought on whatever memory remained of the game creation process — 40 kilobytes in the case of “Space Invaders”— and it had to be simple and piercing enough to stand out amid the cacophony of an arcade.
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