[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Martin Galway: “Theme from Arkanoid” (1987)
From the album Input 64: A Collection of Commodore 64 Game Music 1984-1989
This music has special meaning for me, as I devoted a good portion of my teenage years to Arkanoidal studies, from the rigorous and unforgiving geometry of ball/paddle interaction to metaphysical speculations on the cryptic, existentially-fraught scenario revealed at the game’s beginning:
THE TIME AND ERA OF THIS STORY IS UNKNOWN. AFTER THE MOTHERSHIP “ARKANOID” WAS DESTROYED, A SPACECRAFT “VAUS” SCRAMBLED AWAY FROM IT. BUT ONLY TO BE TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE……..
Arkanoid (which the vulgar confuse with an earlier game, “Breakout”) was for me an alchemical ladder whose every rung represented a new purification of mind. The asymptotic goal of this spiritual regimen was an absolute unity of forms, in which the player becomes the paddle, and the paddle becomes the ball.
All this makes my later discovery of this music the more serendipitous, as in my memory of the game there is no music, but rather a vast, capacious silence like that of outer space. And though my first video game memories are of the Commodore 64, I discovered Arkanoid only much later, on a PC Nintendo emulator.
The C64 sound chip became a legend and lives on in the present. Listen to this music and hear why.
Played 102 time(s).
September 26, 2009, 11:21am
