2 The Expansion of the Audiovisual Repertoire in Games with Music and Spatial Representations

Unlike Pong, the sounds of which were based on circuits of transistors and resistors especially developed for single tones, an arcade game such as Space Invaders (Midway 1978) already had sound chips that made it possible to synthesize sounds. This expanded the sound spectrum, and the audio quality of the sounds moved from a clearly perceptible electronic form to a more realistic reproduction of sound effects. At the same time, the increasing improvement of electronic sound synthesis made music become a more important element in computer games. The 8-bit sound chip of the Commodore Amiga, which entered the market in 1985, enabled the reproduction of short samples and thus marked the advent of an increasing use of recorded sounds in computer games.

Another central transformation, especially in relation to generating spatial impressions, took place for the audio with the introduction of stereo sound in the mid-1980s (Amiga 1000)—here the game Discs of Tron (Atari 1983) should be particularly mentioned—and for the video with the transition from sprite-based 2D to vector-based 3D display. This was accompanied by a development from graphically abstract and reduced images toward the currently prevalent forms of representation derived from photo and film realism. The space game Elite (Acornsoft 1984) is considered the first representative of fully computed three-dimensional representation.