Mario Paint, the 1992 Nintendo game for the Super NES, remains an accessible environment for musical creativity and sound exploration within its music mode. Although developed for a gaming system, the game’s music mode is a streamlined tool built upon basic music theory and music composition. Through familiar video game sounds and icon and Western music notation, players are able to compose chiptune works and explore the nature of sound through an inviting interface. Similar music composition software upgrades the process of composition established in Mario Paint, allowing for digital distribution and dissemination. Mario Paint continues to inspire new projects in the areas of video games and scholastic studies. Mario Paint and its successors are very reasonable entry-level programs for chiptune composers and fledgling music students.

This study explores the compositional techniques of eight selected Sunsoft games in detail. Included are complete transcriptions from those games which incorporate common and novel techniques. The developments that established the chiptune style during the late 1980s lie in three primary areas: technology, the era of its popularity in video games, and the composers. This dissertation examines each area as it relates to chiptune music. First, it explores technology in the sound chips and sound programming techniques used by the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom. Next, it provides background information on prominent Sunsoft composers and other notable chiptune composers of the past and present. Lastly, it examines musical excerpts from Sunsoft games, other NES and Famicom games, and more recent games with chiptune soundtracks to identify and codify compositional techniques first as sounds and effects and later as larger musical elements. The findings provide the historical context to examine the direction of chiptune music and video game music in general.

This presentation explores surround sound technologies and their application in home console video games. Surround sound technologies began as analog signals which used matrix encodings to downmix multiple channels into two. The first-person shooter, racing, and horror genres lend themselves to immersive surround sound experiences through thoughtful sound design and balance of music and sound effects. The placement of surround sound speakers imitates the three-dimensional placement of sounds in the game world, mixed in real-time based on object coordinates and material types. Over time, the additional feedback to the player from sounds emanating around the player affects how the player approaches gameplay.