Audiosurf shows how music can be creative fuel for games
The use of music in games isn’t just about licensing, these days. A new breed of games are exploring the idea of using the music tracks already on the devices on which they’re played (whether PC, console or mobile phone) to ‘auto-generate’ in-game levels or content.
As an example, today I’ve been playing a PC game called Audiosurf, which came out late last month. It’s a PC game that costs £9.99, and is a ‘puzzle racer’. It looks a bit like Wipeout, in that it’s a futuristic-looking 3D racing game, but you have to collect coloured blocks as you zip along the various tracks.
But the interesting thing is the way it uses the music stored on your hard drive to generate unique tracks to race on – with slower tunes creating a gentle uphill ride, and faster songs creating more of a rollercoaster effect. Watch our video hands-on above, and then click below for more info on this, and similar games on other platforms.
What’s interesting about Audiosurf is firstly the community it’s creating around the core gameplay – you can see what score other players got on songs you’ve played. File formats supported include MP3, iTunes, M4A, CD, and OGG.
As yet, there’s not really an angle for artists or labels to make money out of this, since the game just uses songs already owned by a user. Could this change in the future? Perhaps – Audiosurf could become an advertising channel for digital music downloads, for example, or sponsorship campaigns to promote new artists.
Audiosurf isn’t the only game investigating this idea of using tracks to generate levels or content for games, though. For example, Square Enix released a game earlier this year for iPod called Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes.
It’s a fantasy ‘tactics’ game whose main schtick is the way it turns the music stored on a player’s iPod into warriors – with the idea being to find which songs make the strongest characters. A simple idea, but hugely addictive. Here’s a video (not from us) showing how it works:
Again, the game isn’t making any new revenues for artists or labels – it’s just a neat way of using the music already owned by a player to make the game more engaging. You can see how it might stimulate sales though – if a game like this takes off, and someone discovers that, say, a certain Amy Winehouse track makes a near-unbeatable hero, the entire community of gamers might rush off to buy that song from iTunes. Or download it from BitTorrent, obviously…
The third example of this trend is the one we wrote about in the Music Ally Report last week – Nokia’s upcoming Dance Fabulous mobile game, which they say will use the music stored on a player’s phone as the backing track, and may even tie into the Nokia Music Store to buy songs.
There’s no footage as such yet, but here’s a video of Dave Stewart (who’s involved on a conceptual basis) and Cindy Gomez (who’ll appear in the game) talking about it:
Dance Fabulous shows how music can be used to auto-generate gaming content, but can also tie in with a commercial benefit to artists and labels. This is just three games, but they show one direction the games industry is going in its use of music, beyond the pure licensing model used by the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
Tags: audiosurf, dance fabulous, ipod, n-gage, nokia, song summoner
