The guitar has a long history; to understand how it evolved, start by looking at its shape. The guitar is roughly a resonating box, a neck and six strings — its basic construction. Tracing it back reaches ancient Greece, Egypt and the Middle Ages — enough for a rigorous historical study. Space here is limited, so we begin with the two most discussed ancestors of the modern guitar: the 16th-century Vihuela and the 17th-century Baroque guitar.
Vihuela
Hear a modern player pick up the vihuela and perform 16th-century scores:
A vihuela held in a Paris museum, its shape 87% like a modern guitar, also with six courses of strings. Its appearance is more ornate.
The vihuela was common in 16th-century Europe. It appeared first in Spain, then in Portugal, Italy, France and elsewhere, and was often used to write pieces; some surviving scores can still be found.
How does it sound? Hold that thought. Let us look at another forerunner of the guitar, which appeared 100 years later.
Baroque Guitar
Here is an old tune played anew on the baroque guitar (the clip uses the nine-string version):
A 17th-century baroque guitar held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The MET for short — the same museum that hosts the Met Gala each year.
Another forerunner: the baroque guitar. It was most often built with five courses, sometimes ten strings, sometimes nine, with variations in tuning and tone. Like the vihuela it was common in southern Europe, and it gradually took the vihuela's place.
Whether vihuela or baroque guitar, the style is close, though the latter is more complex in arrangement. Either way, anyone who plays games will hear it and think: this is tavern background music.
So the music in those games is researched, after all.
It is easy to imagine that people of the future will hear the pop music of our 20th and 21st centuries the way we hear the vihuela. Perhaps, aboard a distant spacecraft, they will handle the Beatles' “Yellow Submarine” like an antique and conclude that 20th-century musicians were all mad on LSD.
