Why use music to generate content: Monster Rancher

Why use music to generate game content? The simplest reason, ignoring the joy of seeing your favorite song turn into a playable game, is that there is so much out there. Let's look at Monster Rancher, Tecmos proto-pokemon title from 1997. The game is primarily a breeding game where you create monsters, breed them to create new monsters, pit them against each other and profit.

The game has nothing to do with music per se, except that new monsters can be created by analyzing a CD in the drive. Now let me be clear about what I mean by "analyzing a CD". There is NO music analysis at all, just looking at the raw data in the CD and interpreting it to fit the game. Think along the lines of, well 6 tracks means a water monster and 7 tracks means a fire monster, etc, although what they do is a little more intricate than that. The monsters then have nothing to do with the music, unless it's a CD that the designers specifically included a special monster for.

Even though there is no music analysis, this game highlights a reason to use music analysis in video games. Everyone has music to use. In 1997, when Monster Rancher first came out, it was CDs. I personally had a huge collection of CDs because I would save up my lunch money and get a new CD every week, so this game allowed me to use my CDs in a unique way. Now its MP3s. I can imagine a kid the same age I was when I played Monster Rancher feeding his favorite songs to see what would happen in a video game. Next post I'll look at a game that does this on the iPod Touch - Square Enix' Song Summoner.