Wothan Escape

Insights from the gaming industry

Music Video Games

A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, is a video game where the gameplay is meaningfully and often almost entirely oriented around the player's interactions with a musical score or individual songs. Music video games may take a variety of forms and are often grouped with puzzle games due to their common use of "rhythmically generated puzzles".

Music video games are distinct from purely audio games (e.g. the 1997 Sega Saturn release Real Sound: Kaze no Regret) in that they feature a visual feedback, to lead the player through the game's soundtrack, although eidetic music games can fall under both categories.

Music memory games test a player's musical memory. Sight-reading music games take a variety of forms depending upon which aspect of the music serves as the focus of gameplay. Although the majority of such games primarily emphasize rhythm as the major gameplay-determinative musical element, other elements of musical notation and development such as pitch and volume also serve as points of emphasis in a number of games. In all of these game-forms the goal of the player is to provide a direct injective response to each prompt (linked to an element of the music) from the game.

Rhythm-based games range from dance games such as Dance Dance Revolution and other music-based games such as Donkey Konga These games challenge the player to press the right button at the right time. The popularity of these rhythm-based games has created a market for specialty input devices such as dance mats and electronic drums. Early games include Dance Aerobics (1987) and PaRappa the Rapper (1996).[