PAYNEFUL TRUTHS: A Furor Erupts as Game Trailers Get Musical

Has a one-minute television ad for Microsoft’s latest video game, “Gears of War,” started a revolution in gamer culture?

Touted by many as the pivotal “killer application” of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console leading into the Christmas rush—just as the wildly popular shoot-em-up “Halo” was the game that drove sales of the original Xbox—“Gears” is a violent tactical shooter, with photorealistic graphics and elegant gameplay.

But you’d be hard-pressed to deduce any of this from watching the TV spot.

The ad opens with a post-apocalyptic scene of wreckage, as a lone armor-clad space marine type runs through desolate streets, pumping rounds into foreboding alien-infested shadows. So far, so good.

But as the “camera”—all footage was captured in-game, as Microsoft gleefully points out—pans down on the first shot, the plaintive piano melody of Gary Jules’ “Mad World” wafts into the scene.

Originally performed by synth-rock legends Tears for Fears, Jules’ version of the song is most famous for its use at the end of cult classic film “Donnie Darko.” Its unabashed sentimentality and total abstention from narration is a breath of fresh air for a format usually characterized by overdriven guitar pyrotechnics and blaring hyper-sell voiceovers.

But what does it all mean? And what’s it doing here?

The ad has sparked a lengthy online debate between gamers. Some posters denounce it for being overly “emo,” or for not conveying any information about the title’s gameplay, or even the plot.

A more interesting, and often hilarious, reaction has come from a cadre of amateur remixers, whose alternate visions of the ad can be found on YouTube. They feature the original footage set to wildly different musical backgrounds, from the absurd (“Stayin’ Alive” and the “Ghostbusters” theme) to the oddly appropriate (Billy Joel’s “Pressure”).

Still others praise the evocative pairing, and its departure from gaming conventions. The blog DailyTech hails the ad as a “work of art,” and sees the juxtaposition between brutality and tenderness as a provocative advancement of gaming culture.

But with a $10 million game-production budget to earn back, it’s clear that whatever aesthetic value the “Gears” ad has, its creation was hardly an avant-garde gesture of “l’art pour l’art.”

In this case, the game is already so well-hyped—preorder sales alone were rumored to reach $100 million—that Microsoft can afford to go out on a limb with the ad.

“Gears” has been designed from the ground up as a “cinematic” game.

Designer Cliff Bleszinski refers to the game’s central aesthetic as “destroyed beauty,” and claims in an online interview with Dean Takahashi that he came up with this theme after thinking about the last scene of the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes,” in which Charlton Heston discovers the fallen remains of the Statue of Liberty.

Parodoxically, not all games need to become “cinematic” in order for their approach to music to approximate that of big-screen undertakings. In the film world, soundtracks run in both directions, from hit-packed rosters of foreground music—think “Bad Boys II”—to the painstaking counterpoint of Yo La Tengo’s score for recent indie showpiece “Old Joy.”

Video games are much the same, and what many are ignoring is that they have been for years.

In contrast to the blaring heavy-metal, pop punk, and rap lineups of such popular series as “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” “Grand Theft Auto,” and “NBA Jam,” more sophisticated games have long relied on soundtrack music for subtle mood manipulations.

While “Super Mario Brothers” and its ilk had their share of minor-key tunes to cue the player that a particular level was eerier than usual, it wasn’t until after the end of the 8-bit era that computers and consoles were developed with the technical capabilities to handle more nuanced audio.

LucasArts’ classic 1990 graphic adventure “Loom” featured gameplay structured around the use of musical “spells” in sequence, and pioneered the use of existing music in games: much of its soundtrack was comprised of excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”

While innovations like this were initially confined to low-profile experiments, before long prominent studios got in on the action. Trent Reznor, mastermind of industrial group Nine Inch Nails, composed the entire soundtrack for id Software’s legendary 1996 shoot-em-up “Quake,” for instance.

More recently, Harry Gregson-Williams, Hollywood music composer, scored the 2001 game “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty,” in the same year that he scored such big-budget films as “Shrek” and “Spy Kids.”

Given connections like this, and the frequency with which the language of the cinema is applied to games by popular critics, it should come as no surprise that there are profound parallels in the development of both media.

A format initially explored for purely technical exercises develops into a popular source of entertainment, and is soon dominated by simple, instant-gratification exercises like titillating nickelodeon peep shows, or their direct descendents, coin-operated video game arcade machines.

Before long, certain producers—whether silent film’s D. W. Griffith or Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto—always come to lend their personal stamp to high-profile projects, and the level of specialization and differentiation in the market grows quickly. In the ensuing fragmentation, everything from ambient drone to hip-hop anthems enter into play.

While “Gears of War” itself is hardly a masterpiece of subtlety—most of the game still revolves around shooting huge guns at bad guys—the mere fact that a company with Microsoft’s clout is acknowledging the emotional and aural impact of games with its marketing approach is significant.

Yet again, money has followed innovation, and a maturing medium has devised a way to position itself as a solution to needs that gamers weren’t expected to have.

A revolution? Maybe, but one that’s been unfolding since far before Mr. Jules became involved.

—Columnist Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.