The early years of video games were a challenging, strange, and often wonderful Wild West of genre splicing, mechanics inventing, and musical fusion madness. The incredibly limited technology that programmers and composers had to work with paved the way for true innovation that has carved a permanent place in the hearts of gamers old and new. For every AAA single-player experience with groundbreaking graphics and Spielberg-worthy scores, there will always be the 8-bit indie darlings that steal the hearts and imaginations of gamers. This has led to the enduring appeal of Chiptune music. 

Chiptune, otherwise known as Chip Music or 8-bit music, is a synthesized genre that uses the old programmable sound generators (PSGs for short) found in arcade machines, home consoles, and handhelds of yore as the soundboard for their musical creations. Creating Chiptune music, like any early synthesized music, used to be an arduous creative process that typically involved ripping the PSG from an old machine and wiring that through a series of auxiliary modules. As technology has improved, digital PSG plug-ins such as the Tweakbench peach have made chiptune as viable a stylistic choice as any other musical format. Chiptune can be seen influencing genres across the globe now, from the City Pop movement of 1980s Japan through to modern tracks like “wondercore” band Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Atari” (later sampled on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning album DAMN). 

Chiptune has such an entrenched sense of style that it can be hard to innovate. Sure, tracks like “Atari” use chiptune as a flavor, but to actually innovate on chiptune in its purest form offers up a gauntlet of different challenges, balancing authentic tonal form whilst pushing the limits. This is what makes Enrique Martin’s Cyber Shadow soundtrack so captivating.

Cyber Shadow is a 2021 action platformer from developer Aarne Hunziker, published by Yacht Club Games. The game hearkens back to classic NES platformers like Ninja Gaiden, and the whole aesthetic, tool set, and mechanics are that of the punishingly difficult but gloriously gratifying genre of old. This poses an interesting conundrum for composer Enrique Martin who needed to match the style and time period that Cyber Shadow is emulating whilst also creating a soundtrack that is unique in its own right. Enrique walked me through this process.

“My first task was to understand what I was making music for. Cyber Shadow was presented as a retro-inspired, fast-paced 2D platformer with a dark/techie ambience and serious tone. That made me address some important concept decisions: should the sound palette be close to the NES sound chip? Should I follow the NES restrictions using Famitracker or other similar software? Should I use classic ninja-vibe scales or harmonies? Should I try to mimic a particular style or music structures from classic games?”

Enrique continued.

“After a lot of thinking, I decided that I wouldn't follow the NES restrictions, as I wanted to take advantage of modern DAWs (digital audio workstations) and effects. The tone of the music would be inspired by classic platformers like Shatterhand, Sunsoft’s Batman, and Journey to Silius, as well as modern stuff like Fez, Hyper Light Drifter and Celeste.”

In deciding not to play into chiptune’s traditionally restrictive compositional parameters and rebelling against a “world [that] orbits around restrictions,” Enrique has created a score that offers players an experience most chiptune tracks fail to deliver on: depth. 

Whilst restrictions can be a hot bed for creativity, early chiptune tracks sit heavily in the mids and trebles without a driving, spine-tingling bass to keep a piece grounded. Enrique rid himself of these stylistic burdens by using an impressive array of oscillators, texture synthesizers, and amplifiers, injecting that tonal depth whilst sticking to the core, 8-bit aesthetic expected of the genre. The one thing that truly stands out, however, is something that hugely amplifies Cyber Shadow’s appeal beyond the confines of its soundtrack application, as Enrique explained to me. 

“There was also another important early decision—I would use only one drum kit in the whole soundtrack (except for some additional percussion stuff), and all the tracks would be easily playable by a classic rock or metal band. That meant that all the tracks should have recognizable drums, bass, guitars and a main melody that you could sing or whistle.”

In relieving himself of technological hurdles whilst simultaneously focusing his channels throughout a piece to match an acoustic ensemble, Enrique has cultivated a soundtrack that both masterfully captures the feeling of those early platformers whilst innovating the genre into something new and exciting. Cyber Shadow cuts the fat, concentrating on each section of the game to ensure that whilst it does serve as a soundtrack, each piece also has its own identity. This individualism was born out of Enrique’s approach to the composition, a creative process that happened in tandem with lead developer Aarne Hunziker. 

“The music composition process for Cyber Shadow has been pretty eclectic. Sometimes, Aarne sent me a video of an area, and I tried to come up with something inspired by the visuals and the pace of that stage. Other times, he explained to me his ideas or sent me some reference tracks that he was listening to while he was designing the level. Finally, some tracks that were initially rejected for the stage they were composed for ended up inspiring Aarne to create new areas. Both of us had really interesting feedback from the work of the other.”

He continued.

“The action and the music needed to go in the same direction—if you’re gonna die a lot in a particular section, then the music needs to pump you up. If you need to take a deep breath and go slowly through a hard section, then the music needs to inspire that feeling. When you’re facing a bossfight, the music needs to be energetic and make you believe you’re more powerful or skilled than you actually are. It was my job to try transmitting those feelings to the player through the music, and feedback from Aarne was crucial.”

The result of this synchronicity between developer and composer is a game that is so connected with its music that every swipe, dodge, kill, and death becomes intertwined within the kinetic and aural aspects of the gameplay experience. If most video game developments are compartmentally structured like a movie, Cyber Shadow was developed as much more of a cyberpunk ballet. Every moment perfectly flows within its on-screen action and in-ear 8-bit symphony. 

Cyber Shadow is chiptune perfected, approached by a composer who, as he told me, created the “soundtrack as a love letter to all the games I played during my childhood, written in a contemporary language. It looks like a lot of people have read that letter and understood what I intended to tell.”