OK, I get it: Your development team just spent 18 months working 80-hour weeks to make the Next Big Game. You’re all underslept and exhausted; two of your team members went through painful divorces during the dev cycle, and three of you became first-time parents. The whole thing came in just under budget, but only at the loss of one of your best UI designers (he took the pay cut badly and defected to a rival company), and you just barely squeaked the whole thing in under schedule. Maintaining the buzz around the game became nearly impossible in the face of the next-gen console hubbub, but you’re all wide-eyed and hopeful. I accept all this with admiration and respect. I just have one request:

For fuck’s sake, include a volume slider for your in-game music.

I don’t mean to crap on your sound guy. I mean, shit, if I ever accidentally fell into a job at a video game development company, that’s one of a very few positions I’d be qualified enough to hold. Sound-guys the world over have been making good games better (see: Metroid; Katamari Damacy; Mega Man 2) and mediocre games alright (Zombies Ate My Neighbors; Solstice; Wanderers From Ys 3) for longer than I’ve been alive. The issue here is that a lot of you companies don’t have composers anymore; you have a guy who is licensing music. This is a terrible idea.

If you pay one person, or one team, even, to compose music for your game, then you have ultimate control over how the music in a game will aid and abet the game’s suspension of disbelief. To go into how this really works would be to attempt to dig deep into the mystery of how some games have lay at the base of my spine since I played them in 1984 (see: Temple of Apshai; Ninja; Bruce Lee) , and I don’t have the MacArthur grant necessary to pay my rent while I unpack all of that — but I can say, simply, that the score of a game is just as important as the score of a film, if not moreso, since most games play music continuously throughout your entire playtime. This is why every Final Fantasy soundtrack spans four CDs, and any score Ennio Morricone ever penned fits on a single LP; there’s simply more groundwork involved.

I snagged the tracklist for the new Madden game from Siliconera today to really prove my point. Here is a complete list of the songs which will appear in Madden ‘07:

• 30 Seconds To Mars - Battle Of One
• AFI - Summer Shudder
• Al Fatz - Came Down
• Anti-Flag - This Is The End (For You My Friend)
• Atreyu -Ex’s And Oh’s
• Audioslave – Revelations (premiere)
• Bishop LaMont feat. Chevy Jones - The Best (premiere)
• Cartel - Say Anything (Else)
• Cord - Go Either Way (premiere)
• Damone - Out Here All Night
• Dashboard Confessional - Reason To Believe
• Dynamite MC – Bounce (premiere)
• Feezy 350 - Playa What
• Glasses Malone – Right Now (premiere)
• Hit The Lights - Until We Get Caught
• Keane - Is It Any Wonder?
• Less Than Jake - Still Life Franchise
• Lupe Fiasco feat. Jonah Matranga - The Instrumental
• Matchbook Romance - Monsters
• Omnisoul - Not Giving Up (premiere)
• Rise Against - Drones
• Riverboat Gamblers - On Again Off Again
• Saves The Day - Head For The Hills
• Shorty Da Kid - Get Loose (premiere)
• Spank Rock - Backyard Betty
• Sparta - Future Needs (premiere)
• Taking Back Sunday - Spin
• The Panic Channel - Teahouse Of The Spirits (premiere)
• The Pink Spiders - Easy Way Out
• The Rapture – WAYUH (premiere)
• The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus - In Fates Hands
• The Sleeping - Don’t Hold Back
• Trae - Real Talk
• Underoath - Ever So Inviting

It’s worth noting here that the average gamer age is 33. I’m nearly a decade younger than that, and I feel a decade too old to enjoy 75% of this soundtrack — not in the “I don’t like all this new jangle-music the kids are into these days” sense, but more like: “Maybe if I was 13 and lived 45 minutes away from the nearest Sam Goody’s and only got one ‘modern rock’ radio station, I would be alright with this soundtrack.” I know precisely what 2/3ds of the bands on here sound like, and I can guess at half of the rest (thanks, age-old trend of incredibly telling band names!), and let me tell you: If you are not into either bullshit MySpace whine-rock or corporate-sheen post-post-grunge, you are in for a bad time. You might like the Spank Rock song if you like doofy hip-hop rave-ups about famous metal producers backed by a Microkorg being slapped with a floppy dick, and maybe the Rapture song if you have a soft spot in your heart for the nine months that dance-punk was interesting (I do). The rest of it will be an interminable march through the tear-drenched pleas of man-children, an odd thing to juxtapose against a football game.

But, to be fair, I am sort of an asshole about music; I agree that there are legions of people who don’t share my bulleted lists of disdain. In that case, then, why would people who enjoy The Movielife or Panic! At The Disco not just listen to those records while they play video games? Anyone who’s followed the Tony Hawk series, even by accident¹, has had at least one experience of the “Oh fuck, not this song again” variety. I played hours and hours of Burnout 3, and a few songs on there were happy surprises, but there are at least a dozen bands I would now gladly kill on sight². Playing games with licensed soundtracks is like being forced to listen to a stranger’s iTunes playlist for six hours³ on a bus; it’s like housesitting with a thirteen year-old; it’s like having your stereo break and your iPod break and your CDs get stolen and all your MP3s deleted, and there you are, your only source of music local bands’ Myspace profiles.

There’s another angle to all of this, as well: Having licensed music in your video game costs real money⁴. By “real money,” I mean to imply a large amount of money, much in the way that Mannie Fresh describes his truck as “real big,” by which he means that it contains a two-lane bowling alley and an elevator. According to the ASCAP website, the only choices game developers have for in-game song licensing are to either pay a fee per game sold, or to pay a one-time “buyout” fee. It is likely not in any hopeful game studio’s best interests to accept a per game royalty deal: Madden, the game series I am using as my example, routinely sells about nine fuckloads of copies per year; 2005’s iteration, with a 21-song soundtrack, sold over six million copies. At 8 to 15 cents per song per game sold, this adds up to, at the very least, ten million dollars. On to option B, then!

Option B is to pay a buyout fee for each song, which ranges in price from $2,500 to “over $20,000,” whatever that means. Shall we do some simple math? If you are EA, and you are producing a game with 34 licensed songs (count them up above!), this means that, assuming you are including one hotly-fought-over track (we can assume either the Audioslave song, or a combination of two or three others), the bare minimum amount you will spend on buyouts will be $100,000.

One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for nearly anyone; it is an astronomical sum to be throwing at music. Musicians are not a breed of people who are used to money; ask anyone playing in any bar in my neighborhood how much they were paid after their Thursday night half-hour slot opening for Rye Coalition⁵ precisely how much they were paid for the honor. I have been playing live shows for years, and often, money doesn’t even enter into the equation; usually I get a discount at the bar and free bottled water. This works both ways, as well; thousands of masterpieces have been written and recorded for next to nothing, or for free, or in apartments. You probably enjoy many of them yourself without even knowing their cheap-as-free provenances.⁶ And a football video game doesn’t even need a soundtrack of masterpieces. Real televised football games are not themselves scored by masterpieces. In fact, a friend worked for a summer at a local television station, where he was paid to create a stock set of hard rock songs that could be used as incidental music during games, or to lead-ins to commercial breaks. I can assure you that he was not paid one hundred thousand dollars; why, then, in a simulation of these televised games, would it need to be spent?

OK, I’ll stop bear-baiting and get to the point: Stop spending a hundred thousand dollars on licensing songs. You don’t need to license songs. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball didn’t license player names from the MLBPA, and as a result you can pit Nixon against Tom Mix, like as if Riverworld had a baseball league. This is much, much better than if they had actually gotten the rights. Instead of licensing songs, you should pay someone⁷ to write some decent background music, something you can loop that’s not necessarily intrusive and which is thematically appropriate, and then sit back and relax, because if you provide this person with a $50,000 salary, you can hire them for two full years, and have them score half a dozen games, which in turn saves you $600,000, which means you can buy some speedboats and some mescaline and really let your hair down. Or, at the very least, like I said: Put a fucking volume slider in the options menu already. If I never hear Atreyu’s “Right Side Of The Bed” again, it’ll be too soon.

¹ For example: Have you lived in a college dorm at any time in the past eight years? If yes, then you qualify.

² Power Player’s Hint to up-and-coming bands: If you want your music to be loved by millions, a bad first step is to have those millions associate your song, deep in their muscle memory, with thousands of horrible car accidents.

³ And not someone who you’re trying gamely to sleep with; that sort of experience is a trial-by-fire that I trust my generation will eventually be able to bond over, as one. “So there I was, listening to ‘Because I Got High’ for the seventh consecutive time…”

⁴ …unless you bought the PC version of Grand Theft Auto, which allows you to create a subdirectory full of symbolic links to MP3s elsewhere on your hard drive, which are then played on a custom radio station in-game, which, to me, still stands as one of the most brilliant ideas of all time: Nothing says vehicular manslaughter quite like four consecutive hours of Lightning Bolt.

⁵ Or, according to a flyer I saw recently, featuring a black-metal dude mooning a schoolbusful of nuns, opening for a band called “Shitfuck.”

⁶ The best of these stories is likely the (possibly-apocryphal) tale of Kool Keith receiving $30,000 from DreamWorks to record Dr. Octagonecologyst, immediately spending the entire sum on pornography, then recording the album by himself, on his own equipment, for free. This rumor is only given further credence by the fact that DreamWorks once attempted to court Brainiac by buying them all Vespa scooters; they went on to release their next LP on Touch&Go.

⁷ E.g., me.