Game music finally gets a Grammy nod
This is kind of older news now (well, last week, I think), but for those of you who haven’t heard: the theme music from Civilization IV, Baba Yetu, has been nominated for a Grammy award, in the “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists” category.
What has this to do with Ultima? Absolutely nothing. It’s just an important milestone for games, in general.
It’s sometimes easy to forget, because it’s not the primary focus of a game, that many AAA-rate games feature excellent music, worthy of any movie soundtrack and eminently listenable in their own right. It’s no accident that I have a good half-dozen game soundtracks on my iPhone right now; some darned fine music has been produced to accompany many of the games I have enjoyed playing in recent years.
The Grammys air…eh, sometime in February, 2011; tune in and see if Christopher Tin (Baba Yetu’s composer) manages to make a bit of history.
I just can’t leave this post uncommented…
Game industry income now surpasses the one from film industry (source: Google… me thinks). Grammy ought to provide, at least, one video game category award.
Sidenote: As a big VGM fan, I strongly recommend Shadow of the Colossus soundtrack.
It still slightly depends on how you account profits, but yes, in general, it’s safe to say that the North American game industry out-grosses Hollywood, year-to-year. Lots of reasons for that, I suppose.
But yeah, it is rather silly — given the large body of really great music that is being produced for video games — that the Grammys fail to include VGM in any capacity. I mean, even this nomination isn’t VGM-specific; it’s a 2005 song being nominated in a general category because it was released on a composer’s 2010 compilation CD.
It’s still a first, and important…but equally, it’s very much a “not there yet” kind of thing. Which, really, makes no sense.