Watch Diggin’ in the Carts, a Documentary All About Japanese Game Music

If you ask me, personally, a lot of today's modern game music lacks the simplicity and raw excitement of game music from the 80s and early 90s. Not that composers can't create powerful stuff anymore, but soundtracks lately lean towards these bombastic orchestral productions — more like film scores, in a way. But 20 to 30 years ago? You had lone musicians huddled around a keyboard and a computer, trying to program their machines to produce catchy melodies with limited hardware. That a lot of the music produced during that era is still fondly remembered and even re-interpreted in modern games is a testament to their greatness.

That early game music scene was defined more or less by Japan. Thus, Red Bull Music Academy has filmed a six-part documentary series called Diggin' in the Carts, a celebration of Japanese music from the early arcade days of Space Invaders and Pac-Man to modern marvels. Interview subjects include many musicians inspired by those sounds — like American chip rock band Anamanaguchi, producer and rapper Flying Lotus, and London-based DJ Kode9, and more — as well as the famous composers behind the sounds — Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka (Metroid, Super Mario Land), Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter II, Kingdom Hearts), Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage, Etrian Odyssey), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy, Blue Dragon), Michiru Yamane (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Skullgirls), and so on.

The series is up to Episode 4, with the fifth to be released on Thursday, October 2, and the final on Thursday, October 9. If you are fascinated by game music in any way, you need to watch these.