Question:

Why was the length and the quality of the Commodore 64's music so grand in the context of it being the video game system in the transition period between the decline of Atari and the rise of Nintendo? All these years after the computer and its games have come and gone, it just strikes me as beautifully strange that rather than just porting a video game with its music as is, C64 composers would often make the effort of composing opening screen/loading music that would often dwarf the pre-existing music on the original game (Yie Ar Kung Fu, anyone?). Yet for all of the splendor of the epic music composed for the C64, for the most part, many of its successor's (NES) games had many very forgettable and short scraps of music that were an afterthought at best. Was this because the Commodore 64 didn't have a Japanese presence, which is where the lion's share of NES developers came from? Where they unaware that the bar had been raised to such heights or did they just not care?

Your thoughts, memories, and what-have-yous.

Optional (i.e. read if you feel so compelled) rose-tinted essay:

To this day the music of the Commodore 64 astounds me.

As far as its technical ability goes, the majesty that was the SID soundchip gave composers an unique and amazing instrument, which could emulate everything from ethereal hums from other realms to screeching, whammy bar accented guitar solos. For those of us who lived through the transition of the Atari 2600's beeps and brainks to the C64, seemingly countless multiverses were bounded in the world of music. If it is hyperbolic, it is not very to say that the leap was like going from enduring a panhandler serenading you with a rubber band to listening to a philharmonic orchestra.

The music of the games were the work of musicians. The Commodore's finest composers created soaring anthems rather than 15 or so seconds of forgettable looped filler. I recall from my childhood's memories listening in rapture to title screen music, almost completely oblivious to the actual game that was waiting to be played. It was as if it was the music, not the game, that was the payoff for the long loading times. Here is Rob Hubbard's piece for Arcade Classics:



Good heavens. Listen to that crunching rock anthem and then skip to 5:44 when the music transitions to the soothing bridge that melts away all the tension it built up. Was all of that necessary for the title screen of an arcade classics collection? This so beautifully illustrates what makes the Commodore's music so special: it is unexpectedly and even undeservedly sublime for its time and place.