Interactive Music In Games

Music is becoming an increasingly significant part of computer games, and this is an industry that composers/musicians should certainly be keeping a close eye on. One Montreal-based game studio in particular is now taking game music interactivity to a new level…

Sounds Like A Challenge

Phosfiend Systems are a game development company based in Canada, set up in 2011 by Richard E Flanagan. Along with Henk Boom and Quynh Nguyen, Richard is currently working on a very interesting music-based puzzle/strategy game called FRACT.

The game is essentially a first-person 3D environment, where the player has to navigate a landscape of damaged futuristic machinery and solve musical problems. The gameplay is linked to the underlying concepts of electronic music synthesis, and set in a colourful, engaging universe that is reminiscent of Tron, or old-school virtual worlds given a modern day facelift…

When I first saw this video, I was reminded of a variety of 3D games from the 80s/90s that I played on the Atari ST, such as Virus, The Sentinel, Interphase and Tower of Babel. Interestingly, my memory of these games is of a much more graphically rich and immersive environment than they actually are when I look at them now. My memory of Tower of Babel, for example, would be of a game on a par (if not above) that of FRACT in terms of visual environment – which seems incredible when I went back and found this video of the game as it actually was…

This is probably a testament to the quality of gameplay these games provided, but also a significant indicator of the power of imagination, and the unreliability of memory. I wonder if my memory of these games has been upgrading the remembered graphics in line with the improved graphics I perceive in modern games…

At any rate, FRACT seems like an intriguing concept, and I am looking forward to trying it out for myself. It’s an ambitious project, which certainly has few tried-and-tested formulae to fall back on, but it’s good to see someone pursuing their passion and taking both games and music in a new direction…



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