IMO the YM2612 was neat but shortly after it appeared, we started getting multichannel PCM-based (or ADPCM) sound chips which were much more flexible and had more naturalistic sounds.
I originally wanted to reply to this comment saying _"The age of MIDI music in games wasn't that short, was it?"_. I thought I'd look it up first, and you're right. It looks like by around 1994 most computer games were using PCM music. It looks like the Sega Mega Drive with its FM chip was released in 1988. The first Sound Blaster card with an integral FM synth was released in 1989. General MIDI was only standardised in 1991. So I guess it didn't last as long as I thought.
Still, I grew up in the 90s, and this kind of MIDI music in games was ubiquitous, and instantly recognisable to anyone in my generation. Even though it didn't last long. It had a huge impact.
So, depends on how you count the “age of MIDI”. Majority of Nintendo 64 games used a MIDI pipeline… you’d take MIDI and a sound bank, convert it to some proprietary format, and drop it into your game. By “PCM” I just mean sampled instruments. That includes stuff like SoundBlaster and Roland SoundCanvas.
FM was only a short slice of MIDI music in games. A lot of that was Genesis / Mega Drive.
When the DX7 came out in 1983, people were wowed by the decent piano sound, for example, which was something analog synths never did well. There were lots of sounds like that - bells, xylophone etc.
Then sample based keyboards started to get more affordable, and RAM and ROM got cheaper.
Eventually in 1988 came the Korg M1. Megabytes of samples in ROM let it do a perfect piano sound, along with a horde of other great sounds, natural and unnatural.
The M1 became the best-selling synth in history and the world's fascination with FM finally faded.
I think by 1988 the world was well and truly suffering from "DX7 preset fatigue". To quote Philip Oakey from Human League:
"They get really bland after a while. And when we get into what I call the DX Sound Hunt, it drives me up the wall. Someone in the studio will say, ‘Okay! Let’s have a bell sound.’ Then we start going through the 128 sounds on our DX —we have the Sycologic MX1 expander board— and playing every one, including the whistle, the train, and the bombs. If we find something we like, it has probably turned up on 50 records that have been made over the past few years..." [0]
I was wondering whether the Korg M1 was really what turned the tide against the digital synth revolution that the DX7 kicked off, and whether it really was the first of its kind. I looked up Yamaha's synth chronology[1], and it really seems like Yamaha didn't produce anything between 1983-1990 that wasn't an FM synth. I'm actually very surprised. My internal chronology was off. I had thought Yamaha had started making PCM-based synths before that!
Korg M1 was definitely the most popular. The Roland D-50 appeared around the same time, but it wasn’t as popular as the D-50. By 1992 you had a wide selection of samplers and romplers available.
Presets on the M1, D-50, Wavestation, JV-1080, etc all got used to death. A lot of the PCM samples were recycled from popular samples on older synths, dating back to systems like the Fairlight or Synclavier. Everyone had samples of the Jupiter, Moog, Synclavier, Fairlight, DX7, TB-303 and TR-808/909.
That was one the cool mistery of those romplers to me (my first one was a JV-1010): they had the PCM tech that would allow them to sample real instruments like the brochures said, so strings, woodwinds a pianos were awesome, I could understand why. But what machines did they get to sample for the synth presets?
A guilty pleasure of mine is that genre of YouTube videos showing where famous songs used the Korg M1's presets. It was absolutely all over the music of the 90s! When I was younger I unfortunately didn't pay these early romplers their due out of sheer snobbery. These days I'd love to play around with them.
I watched the same videos, and ended up purchasing a small number of 1990s romplers in rackmount format, as well as a Yamaha FM module. It turned out to be a good investment—the patches often don’t sound realistic but they sound good, they’re very easy to use, and it’s easy to find a patch that I like. More modern synthesizers, softsynths, and DAWs seem like they have a ton of garbage, unusable patches with a million effects on them to show off how powerful their sound processing engine is.
The Yamaha FM module was actually my first hardware purchsae, and I thought I would love it a lot more—it’s pretty limited.
Still, I grew up in the 90s, and this kind of MIDI music in games was ubiquitous, and instantly recognisable to anyone in my generation. Even though it didn't last long. It had a huge impact.