TLDR; these had built in musical synthesizers. Same sorts of chips you’d find in electronic keyboards. You don’t have to record the sound, just the instruction for the chip to play the sound you want.

The late 80s saw the first introduction of the DAW and MIDI’s abundance in the studio. before we reached the normalization curve of the technology, the slop it would lead to, and the shift towards to the era of graduate hip hop producers flooding the industry, the creatives had mastered both as a way to simplify to expand on their sound and production style.

Video games were constrained by the limitations of processing power and costs prohibiting access to 3D and Vector math. As the RISC derivatives like MIPS and PowerPC took over and fab costs dropped, so did the restrictions of basic linear math graphics. PCM audio was one of the first spaces to be given full hardware access as the costs for DSPs dropped and unified pipelines appeared in operating systems and hardware.

I think people may be missing a big factor in their replies. The graphics and audio on video games is digital, but music and video used in the rest of the world had been maturing for quite some time as analog.

Think about a record, you are capturing the vibrations of the noise directly into physical media. Digital requires translating that somehow into a pattern of 1s and 0s, and at the beginning, we just weren’t that good at it and memory chips were just painfully small at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio

The format has also been influential in the progression of video game music, used in mixed mode CD-ROMs, providing CD-quality audio popularized during the 1990s on hardware such as PlayStation, Sega Saturn and personal computers with 16-bit sound cards like the Sound Blaster 16.

In other words, the quality was similar to CDs because the technology was the same.

Ok, so this is a loaded question. The Super Nintendo released in 1990 and used cartridge, but the N64 didn’t release until 1996. This means from Nintendos side, your question is just flat out wrong. The music would still be midi files.

Over on the Sony side, Playstation used a CD format. This means all sound could be CD quality. The visuals were 32 bit, and the whole era was just starting out figuring out how 3D polygons worked. So a lot of games were still 2D, and pixelated. But some 3D games used blocky polygons, which just looked like pixelated 3D objects.

Finally, over at Sega…Sega was a dumpster fire of confusing shit going on. Basically Sega of Japan and Sega of America were in direct conflict with each other. The Sega Saturn released…maybe…depending on where you were. Due to infighting between divisions you had a situation that looked like this…Genesis was releasing new games on cartridge, which were 16 bit, using technology from 1991. The Genesis also had a SegaCD add-on to the Genesis. Which provided games that still ran on 16 bit hardware, but could now store the media on CD. This allowed games to have CD audio and video but still ran hardware through the pixelated genesis hardware. BUT!!! Then there’s the whole Sega Saturn drama. SoA and SoJ were fighting for control of the Sega brand, and who’s in charge. Japan told America that Saturn, while sitting in warehouses and ready to ship, would NOT ship until SoJ was ALSO ready to launch in 1996. SoA didn’t listen, and just started shipping consoles to stores one night. Places like Funkoland and Babbages (think Gamestop like stores but waaaaaaay cooler) employees just show up for work one day, and find in many cases their front door just has unmarked boxes in front of them. Inside with no warning it was coming, the Sega Saturn launch. Trucks showed up in the middle of the night, dropped big cardboard boxes off in front of the door at 2am, while the store is closed, dark, and locked. Employees coming in at their normal time, with no prior knowledge, just find these boxes. That was the Saturn launch…in some places.

Oh…and I forgot about the Virtual Boy, which both launched AND died in 1995. It wasn’t pixelated, but it’s research and development was HEAVILY rushed. As a result, full color displays were scrapped, and it was ONLY red. I can confirm it hurt your eyes after like 30 minutes, but the Wario game was pretty cool. I also liked Tennis.

I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by that. Music predates computers by a long shot, you can hear Beethoven symphonies which were composed at a time where computers didn’t even exist in science fiction. Even if you’re talking about recorded music you can get Jazz records that also predate computers. So I’m not sure what exactly is there to compare here.

I guess your question is in the lines of “why doesn’t Mario soundtrack sound like Radiohead” which is a very valid question, we clearly had the technology to record and play Radiohead music, so why not during games? The answer is simple, computers just weren’t capable of it (although in the 90s that changed but let’s start from the beginning). The computers at the time were 8 bits, this means that any value you store must be between 0 and 255, this leaves you very little sound capabilities, together with this games needed to be extremely small in order for the computers of the time to be able to run them. This severe limitations led to the aesthetic and sound of classic games, they were essentially the best graphics a computer could run at that time. You can find 8-bit versions of almost any music, which will show you an idea on how that music would have sounded like in one of those games (although that’s not exactly true because of the size limitations the music would be even worse quality).

In the 90s we made the jump to 16 bits, and that allowed a lot more sounds, voices sounded a bit garbled so they were rarely used but you can find some. But in this era you start to get music that’s closer to real music in games, take for example Sonic and compare the background music with the original Mario.

Still in the 90s we made the jump to 32bits, and then audio was no longer a problem. In this time you get games showing video and full audio, and there are games whose soundtrack were actual albums.

It’s bitrate and computation based. Playing back a waveform through speakers takes very little computation and doesn’t really have all that much data.

Computing billion of pixels per second by doing exotic math between thousands of entities with millions of individual physics calculations and then ray tracing all that and doing it 100 times per second… dude, that’s many many many orders of magnitude more complicated.

To put it in perspective- a heavily compressed song almost fits on a floppy disc. A heavily compressed movie almost fits on 600 floppy disks. A decent quality movie takes 4000 floppies. An hd movie- 10,0000. A 4K UHD etc etc film? Close to 50,000 floppy disks. That’s just video, there’s no physics, no ray tracing, no rendering, no bump mapping, no animation, no anything, just displaying data. Now imaging doing all that, but 5x more per second and add all the things I said.

Graphics cards of today are more powerful than an Empire State Building sized computer of the 90s, probably more powerful that most of the computers on earth put together in the early 90s.

Why did games look basic? Because we had basic level computational power. But why was sound so good? Because sound is like stacking wooden blocks when modern games are like colonizing mars. Different orders of magnitude in complexity and scale.

A single smartphone image is easily 3x bigger than a high quality song- and that image needs to be rendered hundreds of times a second for a modern game. It’s not even the same sport.

Video games in the 90s were limited by CPU and system/cartridge size (really the size of ICs), where recording studios were not, so things could be big.

But really, video games were new, the artform was barely there, and music has been around for centuries.

Edit: in the early 90s, translator size was 0.5um, or 500nm. Today, 5nm is not uncommon.
Also of note: That’s in 2 dimensions, so you can fit 10000 transistors in that same space.

With old games, it was a case of the quality of processing and speed of processing on consumer grade devices. Look at Toy Story, released in the 90s. It looks dated and less well animated than a current video game. Each frame took hours to process and a current video game does it on the fly.

Analogue sound can and has been recorded for many decades. The mp3 codec existed in the 90s as did other formats. Recording high quality video and sound was very doable. Mixing was less easy than now, but still possible. Images could also be stored lossless. Video was broadcast at low definition. Many of the recording were only made in that low definition format. That’s why old video looks dated. Some were recorded in better quality for the dvd or bluray market. They appear better.

There’s a couple factors, but to oversimplify, games are just very complicated. If you had a high-end recording studio, you might have a high-end computer (for the time) to digitize recorded audio. You just need to basically record a microphone and be able to play it back, so its not too complicated anyway. In the same vein, for animation and CGI, a studio would have super high-end computers, and even then it would often take days for the computer to process a single high-quality image or much longer for animation.

Compare that to games, where you need to generate an image in about one 30th of a second. At the same time, the game has to also play back sound, handle a bunch of extra input and logic for the game, and has to do it all on a computer that an average family can afford.

There was a huge jump in audio recording technology right around that time. They switched to digital and the primary device people listened on was a digital CD player. It was still expensive and needed boat loads of hard drives so only the major labels and production companies had it. Check out the differences in bands that had a lot of sound effects and samples like hip hop or EDM to really see the stark contrast.