I found this on burnkit’s blog. Pretty much sums it up for me…
“Video game music has been around for, well, almost as long as there have been video games. Those square waves have been permanently etched into our brains as a result of countless sessions of pixel blasting and button mashing. If you told me when i was a kid, that in the future iâ??d be listening to video game music on my car stereo, iâ??d say you were nuts. Video game music at that time, like the graphics, was thought of as imperfect facsimiles of what music was supposed to sound like. Just as you were supposed to imagine that the little green pixel moving around on the screen was you, a noble knight battling the forces of evil, so too were you supposed to imagine that the series of squeaks and buzzes emanating from your PCâ??s tiny piezo speaker were an orchestra of finely-crafted wooden wind instruments providing your noble knighthood with an acompanyment of victorious fanfare.
But something happened when some of us video-game damaged children grew up. We felt nostalgic for those old square waves.”