First Music: The Mystery of the First Video Game Soundtrack

Ever wonder what the first video game with music is? Well, wonder no more: It’s Gun Fight by Midway with an adaptation of Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2! Or is it?

There is something strange about what should be an exceedingly straightforward fact which is the variety as to whether you get a yes or no answer depending on the source. The quickest way to get a sense of this is the simplest: Two Youtube videos, one of a surviving arcade cabinet and one of the MAME emulated version. In the former (above), you will hear the distinctive heady chunks when a player shoots or is shot but find no Fredric Chopin accompanying it.

In the MAME version, you will hear the sounds and the music, but keen listeners will note that these sounds have a dead reverberation to them. Comparing the arcade cabinet’s sounds, it does sound similar, but each sound feels almost truncated and feels almost like they were recorded separately by a handheld recorder rather than being generated by the machine. One can compare a pure emulation as in Space Invaders for a comparison of clarity.

There are several possibilities behind this discrepancy. One, that the music is a togglable feature and that MAME has it on by default. Many early arcade cabinets had settings which could be adjusted via the use of ‘dip switches’ on the board to change the pricing, the difficulty, and even certain features such a levels appearing in that version of the game. However, in looking at both service manuals for Gun Fight one will find that although the sound is noted any music functionality is not either for testing or special hardware.

So could it come from a consecutive game and was added to MAME improperly? Gun Fight did have a sequel, Boot Hill. In MAME, it plays the tune as well as a myriad of others. Two videos exist of the real arcade cabinet. One appears to showcase one consistent song which is not Chopin and the other (below) exhibits the behavior seen in the MAME version with alternating songs.

So what’s going on here? Was the sound functionality from Boot Hill transplanted into Gun Fight by accident? Only one song out of the two? At least one thing can be solved as an old coin-op.org post states that the sounds from the game are sampled from Gun Fight, though by all appearances they need not have been as the sounds themselves were digital. Tom McHugh spoke of this in an interview with me but he did seem a little perplexed about the topic of music, not seeming to remember if he had done it. He also stated that he did not program Boot Hill and was therefore unfamiliar with any changes that were made.

The current version of MAME as of this post has sound disabled for Gun Fight, possibly because of these issues and misinformation. This is not the only piece of inaccuracy when it comes to this game’s documentation either. Many sources claim that the board uses an early graphical chip from Fujitsu, but according to Ed Fries (currently in the process of repairing a Gun Fight machine) that chip is nowhere to be found on this game nor Space Invaders (it’s first reference appears in regards to Space Invaders Part II). As these games become scarcer, it will be necessary to re-evaluate these hardware parts for the purposes of emulation and preservation.

So what was the first video game music track then? Taking that definition rather strictly, the answer may be Sega’s Man T.T. (AKA Moto-Cross, AKA Fonz). This game came equipped with an analog eight-track player – also used in Allied Leisure’s electro-mechanical Wild Cycle – to provide some tunes for the player to listen to whilst playing the game. It is also possible that an unpreserved TTL game had the first soundtrack and we aren’t aware of it, or even that there’s something wrong with the current Gun Fight unit we are able to listen to.

While Gun Fight was a game of many firsts, despite being an adaptation, it likely has to give up the moniker of ‘first music track’ unless otherwise proven. The mysteries hardly diminish the fun in searching for first though, and in setting the record straight.