From simple bleeps to the lastest cutting-edge tunes from high-profile artists, we trace the history of music in games and look at what the future might hold.
Paul Rose

WHURRGH. WHURRGH. WHURRRGH. WHURRRGH. Unless you happen to be a fan of Brazilian death metal, early game soundtracks were far from interesting, typically consisting of a single distorted note, continuously repeated at extremely high volumes.

By contrast, the recent Wipeout 3 had its very own musical director. Hired to do the job by Wipeout creators Psygnosis, DJ Sasha brought together a line-up of top international dance music stars, including The Chemical Brothers, Propellerheads, Underworld and Paul Van Dyke. Just how the devil did the games industry develop so much in such a relatively short space of time?

In the summer of 1985, as audiences around the world settled down in front of Live Aid, proudly wearing Feed The World T-shirts while munching on huge sacks of salty junk food, Spectrum owners were busying themselves with the official Frankie Goes To Hollywood game from Ocean. Though a bizarre melange of unplayable nonsense, the game was possibly the first occurrence of proper pop stars becoming involved in the games industry.

From the Frankie tie-in, it was a logical step on for The Bitmap Brothers to rope in then hot dance act Bomb The Bass for 1989's Xenon II on the Amiga. The game's use of the track Megablast won it a heap of Best Soundtrack awards. However, things went quiet - relatively speaking - as the dawn of the 16bit consoles ruled out any possibility of recognisable music being incorporated into games. Things changed with the advent of CD-ROM, and from that point onwards the worlds of music and videogames have moved ever closer until it has reached a point where they exist in a symbiosis. Or something.