The significance of video game music does not end when we turn off the console, shut down the PC or leave the arcade. It has an extended life far beyond the boundaries of the game itself. Perhaps the most obvious way that video game music is encountered outside the game is through recordings and performances of game music.
Albums of video game music have been produced since the mid-1980s.Footnote 1 Once video games began to include substantial musical material, it was not long before albums started to capture that music. Video Game Music (Yen Records, 1984) featured music from Namco games, arranged by Haruomi Hosono, an influential musician and founder member of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Some of the tracks on the album were simply captures of the sonic output of a game round, while others were more elaborate reworkings with additional instruments. Similar records quickly followed. The same year, Hosono also produced a twelve-inch record in the same vein, with music from Super Xevious, Gaplus and The Tower of Druaga, written by Yuriko Keino and Junko Ozawa, while a full-length album, The Return of Video Game Music, arrived in 1985. It would not be long until albums for particular games companies and even specific games began to appear. G.M.O. records specialized in the former, rapidly producing numerous company-specific compilations from 1986 to 1988. A notable example of a game-specific album was the Dragon Quest LP (1986, Apollon), one of the first game music albums recorded with orchestral musicians. The album featured three versions of the game’s music: an orchestral recording, a version as it sounds in the NES game and a version performed on a higher-quality synthesizer. The tradition of arranging and rearranging video game music into multiple versions was thus embedded into game music recordings from the earliest days of the practice.
Now, soundtrack albums of video game music are commonplace. Furthermore, that tradition of arranging and adapting music into multiple formats has continued: the same game’s music might be adapted into any number of different recorded and performed versions. Game music arrangements span orchestral music, jazz, electronic dance music, piano solos, folk traditions and so on. Almost any musical style imaginable has featured some kind of game music adaptation. More so than film music, game music is open to multiple radically different interpretations; rarely does one performed or recorded version of a piece stand as definitive. This is likely because the process of taking game music out of its interactive context necessitates at least some kind of adaptation, even if that is just deciding how many repetitions to include of a looped cue, or whether or not to replicate the timbres of the original game sounds.
Recordings of game music have facilitated radio programmes about game music (BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Gaming, Classic FM’s High Score, MPR’s Top Score), not to mention circulation on YouTube and streaming services, where official releases sit alongside amateur and fan projects. Many of these recordings go hand in hand with live performances. Concerts of game music have been consistently produced since Dragon Quest’s music was performed at a special concert in Tokyo on 20 August 1987. Game music concert culture has a complex relationship with classical music culture,Footnote 2 and can often be a force for creating a particular problematic canon of ‘great’ game music. Of course, live performances of game music are by no means the preserve of the classical-style concert. There is a thriving culture of game music cover bands,Footnote 3 not to mention the innumerable ensembles and soloists who play game music as part of their repertoire. Often, these performances, whether as part of public concerts or just personal performances, are then documented and uploaded to YouTube where they become part of the broader online culture.
The vast online game music fandom motivates the continual production and reproduction of game music. Nostalgia is an important factor for engaging with game music; players are reminded of the past experiences of playing the games that they share with each other.Footnote 4 Yet, it would be erroneous to characterize game music fandom as exclusively an exercise in nostalgia. The participatory culture(s) of game music include remixes, adaptations, mashups and all kinds of musical creativity. These extend into hardware and software experimentations, or the reworking of the game’s materials in any number of ways. As in the chiptune scene, discussed earlier in this book (see Chapter 2), players recontextualize and adapt the materials of games to create new meanings and cultural objects themselves.Footnote 5
A neat example is Mario Paint Composer, discussed in detail by Dana Plank.Footnote 6 This adaptation of Mario Paint (1992) is a highly restrictive music sequencer. An online culture has developed in which innovative ways are found to circumvent the limitations of Mario Paint Composer to enable it to play pre-existing songs or new compositions. A lively community consists of gamer-musicians sharing techniques, organizing collaborations, critiquing each other’s work and providing each other with support and mentorship. As Plank argues, this is not a culture based on nostalgia for the original Mario Paint; instead the appeal comes from the social practice and participatory culture founded on the game. While Mario Paint Composer is an extreme example, similar dynamics of participatory cultures built on game-musical materials can be seen across game modding and remix cultures.Footnote 7 As Karen Collins puts it, game sound is ‘an interaction between player and game, between players, and between player and society’.Footnote 8
Aside from fan activities, commercial music endeavours have borrowed audio from games. From ‘Pac-Man Fever’ (Buckner & Garcia, 1981) to ‘Tetris’ (Doctor Spin, aka Andrew Lloyd Webber and Nigel Wright, 1992) and ‘Super Mario Land’ (Ambassadors of Funk, 1992), there is no shortage of novelty records based on games. More subtle integrations of game music into popular music include Charli XCX’s adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. coin sound in ‘Boys’, Drake using music from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) on ‘KMT’, Kanye West’s sampling of Street Fighter II on ‘Facts’, Wiz Khalifa’s Chrono Trigger samples on ‘Never Been’ and Burial’s use of Metal Gear Solid 2 on ‘Archangel’. Some musicians do not sample game music directly, but their work is nonetheless influenced by game music, such as jazz pianist Dominic J. Marshall’s ‘Deku Tree’ on his album The Triolithic. These examples indicate the extent to which game music has permeated modern musical consciousness. Games have also provided many opportunities for the presentation and promotion of pop music and artists. These include tie-in games like Journey Escape (1982) and The Thompson Twins Adventure (1984), app albums like Björk’s Biophilia (2011),Footnote 9 or even the playlists for yearly editions of sports games.Footnote 10
Classical music, too, has been integrated into games in a substantial way, both in the service of fun, and as part of an educational agenda. Eternal Sonata (2007) features Frédéric Chopin as the main playable character, and the plot of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (1995) focuses on the lives of Richard Wagner and his patron Ludwig II.Footnote 11 We have already mentioned the integration of classical music into games elsewhere in this volume, but it is worth reiterating that this is another way in which games and broader culture (musical and otherwise) intersect.
In more formal educational settings, games have been integrated into classroom teaching,Footnote 12 and video games have been used as a pedagogical model for teaching music.Footnote 13 Video game music is now mentioned on syllabi for national music qualifications in the UK, and game music is included in some Japanese schoolbooks, which use them to teach musical skills through performance. Once again, these examples testify that game music is not a sealed subgenre of music, but bound up with other areas of musical activity.
This mobility of game music is also clearly evident when game music moves across media, being used in advertisements, TV shows or films. Films based on games may replicate and adapt music from games. For instance, the Silent Hill (2006) film soundtrack is closely modelled on the game’s score.Footnote 14 Media that draws on geek culture more generally may also feature game music (as in the use of music from Zelda games in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) or the Super Mario Bros. theme in an episode of The Big Bang Theory).Footnote 15 Games are part of multimedia franchises, and draw on, and contribute to, these networks. In the case of the game Star Trek: Klingon (1996), not only did the game share a musical style (and composer) with the series, but a song introduced into the fictional world in the game was later reprised in the television series. These examples all emphasize that music is part of the fabric that binds together media networks.
Ultimately, to consider game music only within the bounds of the game text is to only see part of the story. Similarly, to limit our understanding of games and music to compositions written for games is to underestimate the ways in which games can shape our musical engagements and understandings more generally. Instead, by recognizing the ways that games draw on, contribute to, enable and reconfigure musical activities and meanings, we can better appreciate the significance of video games as a musical medium.
Introduction
Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become a cliché to emphasize the economic power of the video games industry. The phrase ‘Video games are big business’, or some variation thereof, has been a staple of writing on the topic for decades, with early iterations lauding the commercial successes of arcades,Footnote 1 later iterations citing it as motivation for the academic study of gamesFootnote 2 and more recent versions citing the staggering billions in income they have generated, which has formed the basis of several transnational empires.Footnote 3
At the same time, over the past thirty years many have lamented the multiple shifts the music industry has undergone as a series of demises. The music industry has now ‘died’ many times over. Sinnreich metaphorically describes this as ‘a kind of industrial murder’, itself ‘constructed and promoted aggressively by the music industry itself’, which has fingered ‘nearly everyone for the blame, from digital music startups to major companies like Google and Apple to the hundreds of millions of people who use their products. P2P file sharing even plays the role of the butler, as the inevitable primary suspect.’Footnote 4 Within this particular narrative, in which the games industry thrives while the music industry is being killed, a favourite exaggeration of the media, and to a certain degree of the games industry itself, the two industries are compared, on the basis of an argument that the games industry has surpassed the music industry and the film industry combined.Footnote 5 This narrative is not new, and neither are the types of figures it quotes. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note, the early 1980s already saw the arcade game industry ‘grossing eight billion dollars’, when ‘pop music had international sales of four billion, and Hollywood brought in three billion’ and ‘revenue from the game Pac-Man alone probably exceeded the box-office success of Star Wars’.Footnote 6
The comparison is problematic on a number of levels, not only since secondary and tertiary markets for film and music are usually not accounted for in this particular calculation, but also, more importantly, as the comparison does not take into account the affinities between cultural industries, and it becomes particularly ineffectual when trying to understand the commercial machinations of a neoliberal world in which the transmedia empire rules supreme. As Kärjä noted over a decade ago, ‘there is no reason to forsake conglomeration, as the mutual cross-promotion of music and audio-visual media is a long-lived convention by now’.Footnote 7 Even when looking beyond the varieties of integration (vertical, horizontal, lateral) that are central to these empires, the connections between these industries are more important than ever before. In her seminal 2008 book Game Sound, Karen Collins argued that ‘there is a growing symbiotic relationship between the music industry and the games industry’, adding that ‘commonly, games are being used to promote and sell music, and recording artists are being used to sell games’.Footnote 8 This symbiotic relationship has grown and evolved since 2008, but while there are potentially endless variations on this basic relationship, there are few instances in which pop music, video games and economics meet that do not fall within this basic description. What is important to note is that even when they exist as separate entities (which is itself increasingly rare), cultural industries do not operate separately, as this chapter will continue to demonstrate by looking at the complex relationships between popular music and video games.
Popular Music in Video Games
Popular music permeates the history of digital games in many forms, from the stylistic allusions and even covers of songs found in video game scores from earlier days, to the direct use of popular music recordings made possible by the evolution of gaming technologies. As Collins notes, because of the nature of music in games at the time (it existed primarily as code rather than samples), there was ‘little understanding of copyright law’, resulting in ‘significant borrowing of music without copyright clearance’.Footnote 9 This would soon change, and the use of recorded popular music in video games would intensify significantly in the twenty-first century. Although there are significant precursors here, and numerous other developers which are important in their own way, the three developers that have defined this relationship as we know it are EA Sports, Harmonix and Rockstar.
Sports games played an instrumental role in demonstrating the aesthetic and commercial role that popular music can play in digital games. One of the earliest sports games to which popular music was integral was Psygnosis’s futuristic racing game Wipeout (1995), which featured both an original soundtrack by Tim Wright and a number of tracks from popular electronica artists of the time including Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital. Music was a significant part of the marketing of the game, and a Wipeout: The Music LP was released on CD and vinyl. Cross-promotion also entailed distributing the soundtrack to Wipeout XL to dance clubs in London and New York.Footnote 10 It is also important to note that Wipeout was also a release title for the PlayStation in the UK, which emphasizes not only how pre-recorded music was part of the demonstrative aspect of the technology in play, but also the link between game music and UK club culture in the 1990s.Footnote 11
EA Sports have taken this to a higher level in the twenty-first century, with now Worldwide Executive and President of EA Music Group Steve Schnur in the role of the evangelist. Tessler draws on a talk from Schnur when examining the now-almost-quaint premise that video games are ‘the new MTV’; she argues that ‘video games are new cultural and industrial intermediaries, forging new customer-motivated and consumer-driven business partnerships’, and that, like the music video, video games have had a considerable impact on ‘the vertical integration of the music industry’.Footnote 12 As Summers contends, these games both take advantage of pre-existing musical associations and forge new ones, even to the point of influencing musical performances at real-life sports competitions.Footnote 13 While the MTV comparison may today seem somewhat outdated, and Schnur’s claims are at times exaggerated, it remains clear that the impact of video games, and particularly EA Sports, on the music industry is not to be underestimated; it functions in particular as a gatekeeper and marketing machine, whereby players get exposed to new, carefully curated playlists every year, over and over throughout tens of hours of gameplay, which leads directly to purchases, and even to the launch of now-well-known indie artists.Footnote 14
Music games – particularly rhythm-action games – were naturally also significant in terms of the development of commercial relationships between video game developers and the music industry. Harmonix are perhaps the most successful developer of pop-based rhythm-action games, most notably with franchises like Guitar Hero (2005–2015), Rock Band (2007–2017) and Dance Central (2010–2019). Guitar Hero was originally designed by Harmonix in partnership with RedOctane, who developed accessories such as dance pads and special joysticks for games, but when Harmonix was acquired by MTV Games and RedOctane by Activision (which would become Activision Blizzard following a significant merger in 2008), Guitar Hero became an Activision product and was developed by Neversoft. Meanwhile, Harmonix started developing a direct competitor, Rock Band (which would later be published by Microsoft Studios and then by Oculus, themselves owned by Facebook). Competing publishers also led to competition in terms of the acquisition of rights for the different music available in the subsequent games. Successful rights acquisitions were celebrated and special editions were released, while additional songs were purchased in droves, urging comparisons to the much older industry of mass-produced sheet music.Footnote 15 For the most part this was a mutually beneficial relationship, although it did, at times, create conflicts and dissatisfaction. An interesting moment was the Death Magnetic controversy, whereby the aforementioned Metallica album was mastered differently (and in the view of many, significantly better) on the Guitar Hero 3 version than the album version released on the same day. The album was considered to be a victim of the music industry ‘loudness wars’ and was affected by serious dynamic range compression, an issue which was simply avoided in the video game version, which did not suffer the same clipping issues.Footnote 16
Beyond relatively small issues such as this, the success of these franchises created clear tensions between the games industry and the music industry. These were evident in the exchange between Edgar Bronfman, chief executive of Warner Music, and Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, whereby the former was dissatisfied with the amount of royalties paid to record companies,Footnote 17 while the latter argued that the commercial advantages of having your music featured in such games far outweighed the disadvantages.Footnote 18 Statistics did support Kotick’s assertion, particularly in terms of exposure to new music and short-term sales, with Universal Music Group COO Zach Horowitz claiming that sales for songs included in games had spiked by up to 1000 per cent.Footnote 19 Such convincing figures were quite commonly quoted at the time, with an Electric Artists white paper claiming that 40 per cent of hard-core gamers will buy music after hearing it in a game and that 73 per cent of gamers believe that game soundtracks help sell music.Footnote 20 This moment was telling, in terms of both the popularity of the genre and of the industrial tensions created by the rise of the video game industry more broadly. While the genre reached its peak around the mid- to late-2000s, some rhythm games continue to thrive, like the mobile hit Beat Fever (2017), NEXT Music (2018), which provides people with a link to Spotify to stream a song after it has been successfully played in the app, or the virtual reality (VR) game Beat Saber (2019), a launch title for the Oculus Quest system, available on multiple VR platforms, which was not only perhaps the most familiar rhythm game of the 2010s, but also one of the few commercially successful VR titles.Footnote 21
The third developer that has arguably defined the relationship between pop music and video games is British giant Rockstar. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note, ‘marketing synergies are at the centre of Rockstar’s business strategy’.Footnote 22 While many of Rockstar’s games include popular music, its flagship franchise Grand Theft Auto (or GTA: 1997–2013) is the most significant here. The first of the games to include a significant amount of popular music was the nostalgia-laden Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), closely followed by Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). These followed up on the critical and commercial success of Grand Theft Auto III (2001) and built their innovative sandbox worlds on an arguably satirical vision of the United States, reaching record sales which would only increase with subsequent instalments; the latest game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V (2013) broke seven Guinness World Records, reflecting its popularity and commercial success.Footnote 23 Miller emphasizes that the figures associated with the sales of these games are significant as they are ‘less casual purchases’ as a result of their cost; their high price is justified by the ‘buyer’s expectation of spending something like a hundred hours in the gameworld’.Footnote 24 The music of Vice City and San Andreas was featured prominently on radio stations in the games and became an integral part of the GTA experience. As Miller argues in her seminal ethnographic and ethnomusicological study of San Andreas, ‘the only direct product placement in the games is the music on the radio, a design choice that creates a powerful musical connection between the gameworlds and the real world’.Footnote 25 Importantly, some of these musical imports are advertised in the game’s instruction booklet, including a two-page spread for Capitol Records.Footnote 26 The ‘soundtracks’ to these games have also been released separately, to further commercial success. Miller discusses the attention devoted to the radio station system by the developers and argues that ‘their playlists have instructional force, teaching millions of players how to recognize and value certain artists, songs, and musical characteristics within a given genre’.Footnote 27 While both Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V built on these experiences and expanded their playlists significantly, it was Vice City and San Andreas that paved the way for nostalgic radio stations in numerous franchises to come, including BioShock (2007–2013) and Mafia, particularly Mafia III (2016).
Video Games and Popular Musicians
Collins describes musician-themed games as one of the three types of games in which music is ‘the primary driving motive’, alongside the already-discussed category of rhythm-action games and the more loosely defined category of ‘creative games’, which rarely involve popular music directly.Footnote 28 Here, Collins cites a number of arcade games which are musician-themed, including Journey’s Journey Escape (1982), Aerosmith’s Revolution X (1994), Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style (1999), and perhaps the best known example, Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (1990). More recent iterations of the genre include 50 Cent: Bulletproof (2005) and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (2009), as well as the metal parody Brütal Legend (2009), which features Jack Black as the protagonist Eddie Riggs,Footnote 29 as well as including a number of guest appearances from rock stars such as Ozzy Osbourne. Collins argues that ‘the music is a peripheral or secondary aspect of these types of games, with the attention instead on the marketing power of celebrities’.Footnote 30 While the musician-themed game was arguably never a popular genre (although individual games may have been), popular musicians have been involved in the creation of video games, their sound and their music in a number of ways.
On the one hand, popular musicians have been involved in the creation of video game music itself. According to Collins, this occurred more frequently ‘after the development of Red Book (CD) audio games machines in the mid 1990s’, but notes that Brian May’s work for Rise of the Robots (1994) is a notable early example of this.Footnote 31 Trent Reznor’s involvement in the sound of Quake (1996) and subsequent soundtracks for id Software games is also a significant example. Credited as Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, the well-known rock star created the sound of Quake, including the music and the sound effects, contributing to the unique atmosphere of the game, which built on its predecessors (most notably Doom, 1993) to kick-start the FPS (first-person-shooter) genre. Reznor was certainly neither the first nor the last popular musician to be involved in the production of video game sound, and was followed by many others, whose contributions ranged from full soundtrack development, to rerecording existing tracks in Simlish (the fictional language of the EA subsidiary Maxis franchise The Sims), to the performance of a single track for the game. Notable artists here include Paul McCartney, Metallica, Skrillex, Amon Tobin and Leona Lewis. Some even lent their likenesses to characters in the games; for instance, Phil Collins appears as himself (complete with concert) in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006), while David Bowie’s contribution to Omikron: The Last Nomad (1999) included both playing an important character and contributing significantly to the soundtrack of this somewhat eccentric sci-fi production. Musicians lend their image to the outside promotion of these games as well; for instance Jay Kay, lead singer of Jamiroquai, linked his 2005 tour to the Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) launch and the Need for Speed franchise more broadly, including special EA-sponsored competitions.Footnote 32
Video games have also provided numerous avenues for musicians to launch or further their careers. Kärjä examines the case of the band Poets of the Fall, and their 2005 rise to fame due to the game Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003). The Poets of the Fall track ‘Late Goodbye’ appears on the end credits of Max Payne 2, which led it to become a surprise hit; its success was all the more surprising considering the band did not have a record label behind them and had played very few gigs at the time. In other words, their success operated in parallel to traditional music industry systems and marketing strategies. Similarly, Jonathan Coulton, who wrote the famous ‘Still Alive’ song which appeared on the end credits of Portal (2007), releases his songs outside of traditional publishing contracts and under a creative commons licence, focusing on alternative revenue streams. Both Poets of the Fall and Jonathan Coulton are exceptions here, of course, and the majority of songs promoted through video games are part of larger industrial synergies. For instance, while EA Sports franchises are well known for ‘breaking’ new talent, only 25 per cent of the songs on the soundtrack of FIFA 2005 (2004), for instance, were from independent record labels;Footnote 33 this was enough to maintain an edge without posing a financial risk.
Video games also provide varieties of cultural capital to musicians beyond the games themselves. Video games have been the subject of numerous pop songs and, at times, entire albums, with artists both inspired by the new art form and capitalizing on its popularity. The novelty niche has been a significant part of the genre, with early examples such as Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever album (1982) including songs dedicated to the eponymous game, as well as to games like Frogger, Donkey Kong and Centipede. At the same time, video games have provided inspiration for innovative artists, ranging from electronic music pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, to the entire genre of chiptune.
Synergy and Transmedia Storytelling
Beyond these evident cross-fertilizations, whereby the two industries act symbiotically (as do arguably all cultural industries), there are areas of consumption which both lie outside of what is traditionally thought of as the fields of games and music, and yet are inextricably linked to both. Synergy becomes essential here. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note, synergy is ‘about the intensification of growth and expansion through integration across the many spheres of production, technology, taste culture, and promotion’.Footnote 34 Trailers and other promotional materials for games fall into this loosely defined category and act as synergistic nodes, often connecting different media.
Modern video game trailers operate in ways that are both similar to and distinct from film trailers, lying, as Švelch argues, ‘between the ludic and the cinematic’.Footnote 35 Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter argue that ‘because the television screen displays both video game play and advertisements about such play, the game and the image of the game fuse’.Footnote 36 While a certain genre of video game trailer shares formal qualities with film trailers, specifically those which present fully CGI-animated or live-action content, as well as promotional intent, focusing on the promotion of a full game (either upcoming or newly released), many others diverge from this model. Švelch developed two typologies of video game trailers, which centre on either their formal qualities, or the relationship between the games themselves and these paratextual materials; both are helpful in terms of understanding what differentiates video game trailers from trailers for other media, particularly film, and the roles that popular music plays in these aspects of game marketing. Specifically, as games tend to simply have more trailers than other media, because of their longer development cycles and the necessity to create and maintain interest, that game trailers can also differ from them in terms of content (focusing on gameplay footage, pre-rendered animation, or live-action footage); in the fact that they do not necessarily promote a full game (but may promote certain aspects of it); and in that the relationship of these paratexts to the games themselves may focus on either the performance of play, cross-promotion and/or transmedia storytelling,Footnote 37 or replicating the interactivity of the medium.Footnote 38 The role of popular music in video game trailers reflects these varying criteria.
Performance trailers will often use popular music that aims to promote a particular experience. In the case of games that use a significant amount of licensed music, their trailers will reflect this. For instance, trailers for sports video games will often feature popular music prominently, often cross-promoting relatively new or popular artists. Music games, specifically rhythm games, will often feature not only the popular music featured in the games, but often the popstars themselves, or even animated versions of them, as is the case of The Beatles: Rock Band (2009), which fully capitalizes on the rights obtained. Transmedia trailers, on the other hand, will use popular music, or often covers of popular music, to, as Švelch describes, expand ‘the fictional world of a video game beyond the boundaries of a video game as a medium’.Footnote 39 Some trailers interestingly bridge the two categories, focusing on identification and presenting a ‘projected identity’Footnote 40 whereby escapism is at the forefront and the player/character distinction is blurred. Thompson has noted this phenomenon in League of Legends promotional music videos,Footnote 41 but it is a widespread strategy prominent amongst a number of game genres. With sports games, for instance, it is common that a trailer will initially feature players in their homes enjoying a game, only for them to suddenly break the fourth wall and become the professional athletes portrayed.Footnote 42 Music is important throughout these types of trailers, as becomes particularly evident in a number of live-action trailers for the Call of Duty franchise, where a classic rock soundtrack is as integral to the power fantasy sold as celebrity cameos and slow-motion explosions.
The use of popular music in video game trailers becomes particularly synergetic not only when developers and music labels are part of a larger corporation (as is the case with many Sony franchises), and when third-party content creation focuses on both games and music (as is the case with MTV games), but also when music labels develop related games or, as happens more often, video game developers delve into music production. As Collins noted, ‘some games companies are becoming full multi-media conglomerates, and are aligning themselves with particular social groups and taste cultures, which are themselves often developed around genres of music’.Footnote 43 There are earlier examples of this, like Sega’s Twitch Records,Footnote 44 or Nintendo’s live performances as part of their Fusion Tour,Footnote 45 but more contemporary instances takes this further, as is the case with League of Legends (2009).
On 3 November 2018, millions of viewers tuned in to watch the Opening Ceremony of the League of Legends 2018 World Championship, the largest e-sports event of the year, and, according to some sources, the e-sports event with the largest viewership of all time. Like many sporting events of this scale, the ceremony started with a musical performance, and the artists who walked on stage were both brand new and very familiar to fans of this successful MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena). The band were K/DA, a virtual band composed of Ahri, Akali, Evelynn and Kai’sa, four League of Legends (LoL) champions. These characters, created by Riot Games, were voiced by Miyeon and Soyeon (of K-pop group (G)I-dle), Madison Beer and Jaira Burns, respectively. The accompanying video was released on the same day, and garnered a large number of views – 104 million over its first 30 days,Footnote 46 and at the time of writing it stands at over 270 million. Furthermore, the song debuted at no. 1 in the digital pop charts, and also ranked #1 on Google Play Top Songs and #1 on the iTunes K-pop charts. Overall, the song, its accompanying AR (augmented reality) performance at the World Championships, and its accompanying animated music video, have been Riot Games’s most successful foray into popular music, also earning the company a Shorty Award – ‘Honoring the Best of Social Media’ for ‘Best in Games’ in 2019, but music – and pop music in particular – plays a central role in the developer’s business strategy.
As Consalvo and North note, LoL, Riot Games’s only title for the first decade of its existence, is ‘possibly one of the most influential titles in normalizing the free-to-play game model for core gamers and the games media’.Footnote 47 Essential to the game’s commercial success is its permanent free status, and its monetization through micro-transactions, largely in the form of new champions (playable characters) and new skins for existing champions (aesthetic changes to champions). While Riot Games produce and release a significant amount of music, including music from the games themselves, and additional material by their bands, their music videos (or those videos explicitly marketed as music videos) fall into one of two categories: promotional videos for upcoming e-sports championships, or promotional videos for new champions and skins, both of which act as trailers for either events or new in-game content.
K/DA’s big moment in November 2018 thus encapsulates a myriad of relationships between video games and popular music and acted as a complex promotional machine. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter argue: ‘The synergistic marketing of interactive games involves the coordination of promotional messages to saturate diverse cultural niches, a heightened emphasis on the binding of game design and advertising, and the weaving of a branded network of cultural products, practices, and signs to create multiple entry points for consumer-players, hence multiple revenue streams for game corporations.’Footnote 48 Following K/DA’s ‘Pop/Stars’ music video and performance release, the K/DA Official Skins Trailer was also released, illustrating the aesthetic qualities of the K/DA ‘members’ in-game, including how elements of the choreography are incorporated. In December 2018, VR developer Oculus released a video on YouTube featuring Madison Beer (one of the performers of the song) playing the Beat Saber version of ‘Pop/Stars’ on Oculus Rift. As one of the most popular rhythm games of the past decade, this introduced a new level of monetization to the song, and a new connection to traditional music video games.
Overall, the song, its videos and its uses both typify and complicate the traditional relationships between pop music and video games on a number of levels. Riot Games has released music which has been distributed through the largest channels for distributing music currently available – YouTube, the biggest platform for streaming music in the world, but also Spotify, Apple Music and so on – as part of large marketing campaigns promoting new content for its free-to-play game, music also made available as part of new iterations of traditional rhythm games like Beat Saber, where it is also used to illustrate and promote new VR technologies. These commercial endeavours are only made more complex by their ephemerality, in that Riot Games rarely use one of their manufactured bands as part of long-term marketing,Footnote 49 but also by the fact that Riot themselves are owned by Chinese giant Tencent – the most profitable video game (and arguably media) conglomerate in the world. The commercial and political implications of this and other transnational conglomerates for the industries under question are yet to be fully explored.
Conclusions
The cultural field of video games extends far beyond games themselves, into a wider network of paratextual and intertextual machinations: some directly related to the marketing and sale of video games and acting as an integral part of the industry, some operating at the margins; both inextricably linked to the industry, depending on it and existing outside of it.
While this chapter has primarily focused on triple-A games (although some of the developers included can be considered independent, particularly in terms of their relationships with outside publishers), the relationship between popular music and video games changes somewhat beyond these limited borders. At the same time, alternative revenue streams, including video game music covers, remixes and mashups, make their way into the mainstream through popular platforms like YouTube, while samples and tracks of video game music, as well as video game hardware, are commonly used in music production. While not many of these avenues are commercially relevant, particularly when compared to the commercial impact of other video game YouTubers, Twitch streamers and e-sports stars, they demonstrate how these relationships pervade cultures. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note, ‘The basic logic in synergies is that, just like a high-quality interactive gaming experience, one path always spawns ten more.’Footnote 50 More research into the commercial and economic impact of these platforms in relation to music would benefit our understanding of these synergies or their potential subversion.
Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter argue that video games are ‘a paradigmatic media of Empire – planetary, militarized hypercapitalism, and of some of the forces presently challenging it’.Footnote 51 The economics and marketing of popular music and video games operate as integral parts of transnational capitalist machines, hypercapitalism at its best and worst. At the same time, as Miller warns, ‘while it would be a mistake to ignore the role of commercial forces in structuring the practices described ..., it would be equally myopic to dismiss ordinary players’ practices as nothing but compliant consumption’.Footnote 52 Indeed, Svec focuses explicitly on how the musical properties of games – the ‘grim realities of cultural production under capitalism’ re-enacted in Guitar Hero, and the ‘simulation of machinic virtuosity’ in Rez – can offer ‘“lines of flight”, however humble’.Footnote 53 In other words, the seeds of the disruption of hypercapitalist machines exist both within them and at their margins, but whether their impact on the culture industries will sufficiently challenge existing matrices remains to be seen.
The influence of games, and their music, extends well beyond the boundaries of the game texts. Outside of Jesper Juul’s ‘magic circle’, the imagined space in which the rules of the game apply and play occurs, are worlds of meaning, consumption and community that reflect and serve to transmit our own lived experience with the medium.Footnote 1 This chapter investigates game music removed from the context of the video games that contain it, instead focusing on the role of game music in the context of wider culture. As part of that exploration, this chapter marks how the availability of communication and audio production tools from the year 2000 to the present affords fan communities surrounding game audio an ever-increasing potential for discussing, transmitting, remixing and otherwise exploring the music of the games we play. I say ‘we’ in the inclusive sense intentionally, as an insider of a number of fan groups engaging with game audio. Though this essay attempts to remain relatively detached throughout, I follow scholar Henry Jenkins in describing myself as a fan, and in pointing out that even when writing on subjects that ‘are not explicitly personal, [I] deal with forms of culture that have captured my imagination and sparked my passion’.Footnote 2
That disclaimer aside, this chapter is especially concerned with one game music fan group: OverClocked ReMix – and their primary output hosted at ocremix.org, which today is one of the largest centres of organized fan activity surrounding game audio. OC ReMix (to use the site’s own preferred abbreviation) provides a window into how fan efforts have been facilitated over time as new technologies have become available. This is in large part due to the longevity of the website, but also the size of the community, and the scope and scale of the efforts that community has been able to produce. In the process, such labour demonstrates how technology is entwined with creative potential on the part of fans and amateurs. This essay serves as an introduction to OC ReMix, the twenty-year history of which is briefly covered below. I then make specific claims about how the organization’s long history provides an opportunity to study how fan activity and output has changed in the wake of more accessible production and publication technologies. Ultimately, fandom provides a lens through which we can observe part of a larger cultural conversation about game audio’s significance to players long after they put down controllers and step away from the games.
History of OverClocked ReMix
OC ReMix was founded in 1999 by David Lloyd as a spin-off of Overclocked.org, a site hosting various resources including a webcomic about emulation (in this context, the process of running video game console code and materials on one’s home computer). Lloyd had ‘a real interest in just the art of arranging and composing music more than playing any given instrument’, and a passion for video game music – as a result, the site was created as ‘a way to get better at … and explore making music’.Footnote 3 While some other sites concerning fan-created video game music predate OC ReMix, they were constrained by the technological limitations of the pre-broadband mid-1990s.Footnote 4 One of the contributions OC ReMix makes to fan-driven game audio culture is that it was amongst the first sites in game audio fandom to host music using the MP3 file format (rather than low-quality, low-file-size MIDI files) tailored for wide distribution.Footnote 5
OC ReMix began as a one-man operation, with Lloyd (using the moniker ‘djpretzel’) uploading musical arrangements (hereafter ‘remixes’, following the site’s parlance) either composed by him or (after the first few dozen mixes were posted) sent his way by fellow game audio fans. By 2002 the volume of submissions had grown beyond the capacity of Lloyd’s own spare time, and a panel of judges was established to help keep up with the ever-increasing volume of submissions. Today, the site receives multiple thousands of submissions per year.
The website’s use of the term ‘judges’ panel’ correctly suggests that the site’s music constitutes a curated collection: only 10–15 per cent of music submissions are posted to the website. Via the judges’ panel, site staff make evaluations of the quality of its submissions, maintaining a dual emphasis on both the originality of arrangement and the quality of sound production (enabled by the focus on MP3 submissions rather than MIDI files).Footnote 6 OC ReMix actively acknowledges that this is a subjective process, one in which remixers must situate their arrangement submissions between two seemingly opposing ideas: they ‘must be different enough from the source material to clearly illustrate the contributions, modifications, and enhancements you have made’ while simultaneously they ‘must not modify the source material beyond recognition’.Footnote 7 William Cheng, addressing the topic of speedrunning, writes about navigating the boundaries between what is possible and what is expected:
To be sure, it is possible for an act to be so radical that it comes off as more alienating than impressive … Distinguished players are not ordinarily those who zip completely … out of bounds. Rather, they are the ones dancing precariously along the edges … testing its boundaries while abiding as verifiable participants within.Footnote 8
A subjective decision process might well involve opinions on the game in question being remixed. OC ReMix actively works against any notions of canon formation within the game audio community. Judge and long-time contributor Andrew ‘zircon’ Aversa notes that ‘we DEFINITELY don’t want to only promote the popular titles. That’s why we’ve repeatedly rejected the idea of a rating system or anything involving mix popularity. The results would immediately skew towards those really popular games.’Footnote 9 It’s likely that at least part of why the site staff feels so strongly about this can be attributed to Lloyd’s nostalgia for older games (both in game audio and emulation), rooted in his love of the Sega Master System, rather than the much better known Nintendo Entertainment System.Footnote 10
Lloyd also contributes a great deal of written material to the website – he creates a short write-up of each new posted ReMix (the capitalization here follows the website’s own nomenclature) as a means of introduction to the new piece. Originally, these were one- or two-sentence constructions, but as the website has grown, so has the scope of these introductions, which today feature citations from the artist’s submission, quotes from the vote of the judges’ panel and intertextual references noted by Lloyd as he listens to every piece.Footnote 11 When read in full alongside the decisions of the judges’ panel (also available on the website) for each mix, it’s clear that these write-ups do more than provide an introduction for someone unfamiliar with the source material – they situate every arrangement in the history of OC ReMix itself and in the body of music created for video games writ large.
Starting with remix number 1000, Lloyd has turned every 500th site post (that is, remix number 1500, 2000, etc.) into a reflection on the state of the website and the trajectory of the fandom surrounding video game audio. For the thousandth posted remix, one of his own covering Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Lloyd writes:
OC ReMix is not about numbers, in the end, nor should it be. However … taking a retrospective look back from OCR01000 to OCR00001 – however arbitrary those numbers are – reflects on what I think are amazing accomplishments on the parts of the site’s many contributors. The listeners, reviewers, judges, forum members, #ocremix regulars, mirrorers and file sharers, and of course the ReMixers themselves, have all put together something that, even were it all to end abruptly tomorrow, is to me a singular and wonderful contribution to both music and games.Footnote 12
The post for remix number 1500 is more forward-looking than a celebration of what came before, with announcements about Chipamp, a plugin installer for Winamp that automatically adds functionality for a variety of chiptune formats, keeping neatly in line with Lloyd’s ongoing passion for emulation and history as core reasons why OC ReMix exists. Lloyd’s write-up for the 2000th posted remix is a celebration of a ‘celebrity’ contribution – a collaboration between David Wise, Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland covering Wise’s own score to Donkey Kong Country 2 that foreshadows the Donkey Kong Country-inspired score of Yooka-Laylee (though, of course, nobody could have known that at the time).
Alongside the release of individual mixes, OC ReMix has also released ‘albums’: these are more focused collections of music with either a single game or concept in mind. Lloyd reflects about the history of album releases on the site:
Kong in Concert … while it wasn’t the very first OC ReMix album, it took the concept originally established by Relics [the first album, a solo project by user Protricity] one step further and made many intelligent decisions regarding the playlist, website, and overall package/presentation that I think have been fairly influential. Relics was the conceptual innovator and set the overall precedent, but KiC ran with that and has served as a blueprint and barometer for many albums since.Footnote 13
The title above, Kong in Concert, positions the release both as aspiring towards and standing against more traditional concert releases.Footnote 14 The album is clearly not ‘in concert’, as many tracks contain no live instruments. Calling attention to this distinction serves to reinforce the difference in status between fan activity and official activity, such as official arranged editions of game soundtracks or concert events such as Video Games Live.Footnote 15
Occasionally, albums mark significant events in the life of OC ReMix. The remix album of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Blood on the Asphalt, released in 2006, caused Capcom (the creators of Street Fighter), then in the process of creating a remastered edition of the same game, to contact OC ReMix (first the album’s director Shael Riley, who pointed them to Lloyd). Lloyd had ‘recently enacted an End User License Agreement at OverClocked ReMix that could … grant Capcom license to use the arrangements from Blood on the Asphalt’.’Footnote 16 The group of musicians on the album, coordinated by Lloyd, ‘tried hard to ensure that working with a large fan community was as close as possible for Capcom to working with a single composer. We didn’t want to squander the opportunity [to participate in an official release] by risking drama or miscommunication.’Footnote 17
The partnership was a success, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, released in 2008, featured the first score of a commercially released game to be created entirely by fans. Lloyd remarks:
Capcom were cautious but ultimately pretty flexible with the contract we signed, which … allows us to distribute the music from HD Remix ourselves, independent of Capcom, as long as we don’t charge a profit … Ultimately, everyone wins: we retain the ability to treat the music as fan works and make it freely available online, and Capcom gets what we think is a pretty badass soundtrack for free.Footnote 18
The partnership between Capcom and OC ReMix continues to serve as a model for corporations engaging fan communities; in the years following the release of HD Remix, Capcom again reached out to the site for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mega Man’s release, and commissioned a commercial album celebrating all of the different Mega Man franchises across two discs. OC ReMix has also collaborated with other fan groups; for APEX 2013, a premiere video game tournament, the organizers commissioned OC ReMix to produce an album that celebrated each of the games featured at the tournament. This was the first time an OC ReMix album had been created in association with a specific event, and a number of albums have been created for subsequent APEX years.
Another milestone release for OC ReMix was Voices of the Lifestream, which established a new scale for what the community could do with their album format. Voices features a complete re-envisioning of every cue from Final Fantasy VII; in total, the album contains forty-five tracks from more than forty artists across four discs.
Five years later, OC ReMix (in an effort led by Andrew Aversa) attempted to build on the success of Voices: ‘Back in 2007, I directed an album project based on Final Fantasy VII. Now, I’m working together with McVaffe on an even grander tribute for Final Fantasy VI, in celebration of the series’ 25th birthday.’Footnote 19 In order to make the release as good as possible – as Final Fantasy VI (FFVI ) holds a special place in the game audio community for a number of reasons outside the present scope – the site attempted to raise funds on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.Footnote 20 This original effort was met with a cease-and-desist notice from Square Enix, which caused the Kickstarter to be taken down before the original campaign ended.
Though the specifics remain unclear (the site staff involved, including both Lloyd and Aversa, are bound by a non-disclosure agreement), OC ReMix and Square Enix reached an agreement and a month later, the Kickstarter campaign was relaunched, with a pointed disclaimer added ensuring that backers knew the project was unofficial. The campaign ultimately raised over $150,000 from backers, though the website ended up losing some money on the release, due to the cost of royalties to Square Enix, the physical production of the albums themselves and other associated costs.Footnote 21 Despite these challenges, the album release marks the first time a video game fan organization has successfully negotiated with a company to allow for release of a fan work that had been taken down via a cease-and-desist order, speaking to the centrality of OC ReMix in the larger space of game audio fandom.
It bears mentioning that part of the reason the organization was able to succeed in negotiating with Square Enix is that no one – neither David Lloyd nor anyone else involved with staffing OC ReMix – has ever received monetary compensation for work related to the website. Any money that comes in (via YouTube ad revenue, donations and sales of the Mega Man album described above) is re-invested into the hosting costs associated with keeping the site up and running. However, being a central hub for game audio fandom over twenty years certainly lends a certain amount of corporate authority amongst the community outside of economic terms. An accumulation of prestige and ‘the exchange of curatorial expertise’ are part of ‘an informal economy, which coexists and complexly interacts with the commercial economy’.Footnote 22
In its twenty-year history, OC ReMix has had a number of musicians start as fans and ReMixers (that is, those folks creating music published to the site) before going onwards to professional careers in music. Andrew Aversa (SoulCalibur V, Tangledeep), Wilbert Roget II (Call of Duty: WWII, Mortal Kombat 11), Jake Kaufman (Shovel Knight, Shantae), Danny Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac), Jimmy Hinson (Mass Effect 2, Threes!), Pete Lepley (Wargroove) and Nabeel Ansari (Sole) have all composed game soundtracks after posting music to OC ReMix. Many others, including Doug Perry, Jillian Aversa, John Stacy, Mattias Häggström Gerdt and Ben Briggs all have full-time careers in music as performers, software developers (of music-production software), audio engineers, or DJs and in related fields.Footnote 23 Similarly, a number of established industry composers have contributed remixes to the site in support of its mission: these include George Sanger (The 7th Guest), Joe McDermott (Zombies Ate My Neighbors), David Wise (Donkey Kong Country), Grant Kirkhope (Banjo-Kazooie), Norihiko Hibino (Zone of the Enders, Metal Gear Solid) and Rich Vreeland (Fez, Hyper Light Drifter).
Over the span of twenty years, the group has further spurred a number of other fan communities to take root, operating outside the parameters of the OC ReMix submission guidelines. One important such community is Dwelling of Duels, which places more of an emphasis on live performance – no such restriction exists in the OC ReMix submission guidelines. Another site, now defunct, was VGMix, created by composer and fan remixer Jake Kaufman (then using the moniker ‘virt’), who was prompted to do so by two factors. First, that OC ReMix had too high a bar to clear regarding its submission standards, causing many good fan creations to fall outside the guidelines (medleys, mixes using material across multiple games and franchises, lo-fi chiptunes, etc.) without a prominent venue for publication. Second – and perhaps more importantly, to Kaufman – that a distrust had grown concerning the authority invested in OC ReMix and Lloyd specifically, which (at the time) Kaufman perceived not merely as a locus for participatory culture, but as a corporate entity seeking ‘to court and capture the participatory energies of desired markets and to harness them toward their own ends’.Footnote 24
Specifically, the ‘About’ section of the VGMix.com website reads, in places, as a pointed rebuke of OC ReMix’s practices:
No month-long waits to have your music approved … We’re not about brand loyalty or buzzwords, we’re about giving you a place to speak your mind … some of us prefer not to put our music at Overclocked because of the fundamental way it’s run … [.]Footnote 25
This was not just a private debate between people in a back room; rather, throughout game audio fandom online, these two opinions caused division within the larger community. In OC ReMix’s own posting history, there is a gap of almost ten years (between late 2001 and early 2010) during which Kaufman did not submit to the website, preferring other fan outlets (including VGMix). Upon the ReMix heralding Kaufman’s return to the website (and as a result, the OC ReMix community), Lloyd notes (in an extra-long write-up):
In the many years since the infamous ocremix-vgmix split, a lot of things have happened that make this writeup possible, I think. We all got older, for one, and while age doesn’t guarantee wisdom, it can certainly facilitate it … I debated even saying anything, and instead just posting this mix like it was any other album track, but even if the past didn’t warrant some commentary, the truth is that Jake’s reputation and growth as a game composer would have demanded some special words, regardless … Hopefully the few folks that are operating under the misimpression that I feel otherwise … can finally come around, as I believe we have.Footnote 26
That such a reconciliation warranted public comment on the OC ReMix website speaks to the centrality of the organization to the larger sphere of game audio fandom. Today, the group is rapidly approaching remix number 4,000, and is thinking about what might happen when the original founders retire. In 2016, the organization moved ‘under the umbrella and sponsorship of Game Music Initiative, Inc, a 501c3 non-profit charitable organization’ in order to ensure the preservation and continuation of the OC ReMix mission in the event something happens to one of the core staff members.Footnote 27
Game Music (Remixes) as Art
The mission statement of OC ReMix reads as follows: ‘Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is a community dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form.’Footnote 28 That the notion of game music as artistic endeavour needs to be promoted suggests that it, and by extension, video games themselves, might not be considered art. Similarly, Video Games Live, a touring concert series created and produced by composer Tommy Tallarico, defines itself as ‘a concert event put on by the video game industry to help encourage and support the culture and art that video games have become’, as if games of the past (which past? Is there an arbitrary line somewhere?) were somehow neither culture nor art.Footnote 29 Both groups – one amateur, one professional – are formed out of a belief that game audio deserves a place amongst the cultured; that is, it deserves to be recognized as ‘art’.
In describing the relationship between video games and classical music (in the broad sense), William Gibbons notes:
the fundamental principle on which classical music as a concept is based: some music is art and some music isn’t. Despite what their opponents might claim, it isn’t that these fans want to eradicate musical hierarchies – it’s that they want to ensure that their preferred music makes the cut. The barbarians at the gates aren’t tearing down the walls; they just want to come in for tea.Footnote 30
Given a world where an audience perceives the orchestra (classical music) as art, and chiptunes (video games) as entertainment, it makes sense that a number of people might want to recreate music written for the latter medium in styles that might mask its ludic origins. This sort of hierarchical thinking (with classical music at the top) is pervasive enough not only to warrant Gibbons dedicating an entire book to the subject, but also to shape the public reception of OC ReMix. The site staff has occasionally both recognized that this sort of argument about what is and is not art exists, and has challenged it, promoting diversity amongst musical genres. In particular, electronic dance music and techno are often derided as ‘less than’ in critiques of the site, as a note on the OC ReMix Facebook pages acknowledges even as it defends electronic music:
From YouTube today: ‘I love OC ReMix, I really do, but I’m getting sick of hearing techno ALL THE TIME.’ If YOU see someone say this, don’t take that BS lying down. They don’t listen to all of our music (or know what techno is). Most of our music is not techno. Even IF our music was all techno and electronica, we’d be PROUD of it.Footnote 31
Similarly, another note from a few years later reads:
Recently on Tumblr: ‘Has OC ReMix ever hosted a music file that wasn’t just some sound mixing techno/trance rendition? There are multiple genres of music in life.’ As always, if you ever see anyone say something like this about OC ReMix, they don’t really know what music we post … In 2014 so far, we’ve posted 153 ReMixes. 127 aren’t ‘techno/trance’, i.e. 83%. Skeptical? Here’s the 127 [linked below the post individually] to check out! Enjoy, and don’t be afraid to embrace electronica too. ‘Teknoz’ is also great, and we welcome whatever genres are sent to us!Footnote 32
Getting into the weeds of specific arguments about what is and isn’t art is well outside the scope of the present chapter. I will note that this type of reception speaks to a point made by Melanie Fritsch: ‘in order to understand fan-made creations … fans need to become literate in the respective fandom as well as in the practices, discourses and aesthetics of the surrounding fan culture.’Footnote 33 In other words, the priorities of OC ReMix as an organization might be in conflict with a broader fan base of remixed video game music. Music made for the site is, of course, made for the site, and therefore crafted with the site’s mission in mind. Acknowledging that disagreement about mission across a broader audience of listeners (beyond OC ReMix) not only exists but that there are groups of people emotionally invested in it provides a lens through which we can understand why fans choose to remix video game music in the first place.
Jenkins and Fandom Through Time
Fandom scholar Henry Jenkins writes about a number of trends in fandom – one of the most repeated themes in his own work is that technology continues to shift our understanding of what fandom means. Today, an engaged, active audience is simply ‘taken for granted by everyone involved in and around the media industry’.Footnote 34 This is especially true in comparison to the state of affairs described by Jenkins in Textual Poachers, published in 1992, when ‘fans were marginal to the operation of our culture, ridiculed in the media, shrouded with social stigma’, a time when communication effectively worked in one direction only, from platform holders to end consumers.Footnote 35
Jenkins, writing in 2006, articulates a number of points about a then-emerging participatory culture, noting that ‘new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content’.Footnote 36 Perhaps the biggest technological change was the general global shift from less stable, slower dial-up Internet to the modern always-connected broadband Internet over the years 2000–2010, with more people globally using a broadband connection from 2004 on.Footnote 37
In the context of OC ReMix specifically, the affordability and availability of audio production software has grown drastically in the period from when the site was founded to the present day. In 1998 (a year before OC ReMix was founded), the core version of Pro Tools – a premiere, industry-standard audio production suite – carried a list price of $7,995, well beyond what even a committed hobbyist can afford to spend.Footnote 38 By 2003 the list price for Pro Tools LE (a somewhat pared-down version, targeted for individuals and beginners) was $495 (including the two-channel MBox interface), and today, Pro Tools is available at a subscription rate of $29.99 per month, or $299 per year. In addition, other digital audio workstations (DAWs) entered the market, creating competition and accessibility for new users; many DAWs (including Pro Tools) now have free trials or extremely limited free editions. Other notable audio software releases in this timespan include Audacity (free, open source audio editor) in 2000, GarageBand by Apple in 2004 (free in the Mac OSX ecosystem) and Reaper (a $60, fully featured DAW) in 2006.
A difference in quality over time is especially noticeable when reading reviews of early remixes written by users years after their release. Andrew Luers, under the moniker ‘OA’, closes his (mostly negative) remarks on one early remix by writing ‘Regardless, this mix is ancient, so I can understand the difference between then and now.’Footnote 39 Similar suggestions about production quality (quality of sample libraries, bitrate, mixing techniques employed, etc.) abound in reviews of early remixes. This is likely because both creativity and quality of musical arrangement (that is, orchestration, instrumentation, etc.) is both more difficult to subjectively evaluate and less constrained by the limitations of 1999 technology, compared to production quality.
OC ReMix specifically addresses this in its submission guidelines, which once stated that revisions were not permitted unless fixing an error with a recently posted mix, ‘in keeping [with] the idea that OCR represents a history of video and computer game remixes, not just a collection of them, and that rewriting or replacing pieces of that history would have negative repercussions’.Footnote 40 It is clear that Lloyd and the judges’ panel think of OC ReMix as a locus for a larger community, one with a history worthy of preservation.Footnote 41
Without dwelling on a history of technology specifically, a few other developments not geared specifically towards audio that are nonetheless important to the present conversation are the launch of YouTube in 2005, Twitch.tv in 2011 and Discord in 2015. Each are part of ‘an era of communication’ demonstrating ‘some decisive steps … expanding access to the means of cultural production (through ease-of-access-and-use tools) and to cultural circulation within and across diverse communities’.Footnote 42 Today, OC ReMix now cross-publishes all of its musical output on YouTube, with a short reel explaining the website running over the top of the audio of each remix. Discord has served to replace IRC (Internet Relay Chat, an older chat system) chatrooms for many communities, including OC ReMix, which maintains an active Discord server – similarly, the ‘bulletin board’ style of forum, while still used, is seeing less and less traffic as site members gravitate towards Discord as a preferred platform for communication.
Closing Remarks
The growth of OC ReMix and other fan groups was made possible via the continuing trend towards availability of both broadband Internet and music-production technologies. Without that infrastructure in place, fandom might still have organized around shared interests, but the centrality of ‘digitally empowered consumers’ in ‘shaping the production, distribution, and reception of media content’ – what Jenkins describes as grassroots convergence – would not have been achieved on the same scale.Footnote 43 OC ReMix, and the wider community of game audio fandom it helps foster, illustrates ‘the many ways that expanding access to the tools of media production and circulation is transforming the media landscape, allowing … for greater support for independent media producers’.Footnote 44
As newly disruptive technologies such as Twitch.tv enable amateur and fan activity in live broadcast spaces, we can look forward to observing how these relationships between fans and rights holders continue to develop. Despite continuously changing technologies, I suspect it will be some time before a new organization is formed that traces the effects of technological change as readily as OC ReMix has done during the transformations throughout all of our society in the wake of broadband Internet, web hosting, social media and participatory culture.
What started as a project by a single person is today a larger enterprise, with 4,000 posted ReMixers, thousands more forum members and millions of listeners. As listeners continue to respond emotionally to games and the music contained within them, OC ReMix serves as a locus for the larger community of players (and viewers, in the age of Twitch.tv etc.) who are moved by the musical material of video games. I believe that remixing these works is a means to inject them with our own personality, putting something of ourselves into a conversation about meaning. David Lloyd writes:
As much as it is a site dedicated to games, and to music, OCR is a site dedicated to the infinite possibilities of musical arrangement, specifically, and commercial markets *tend* to resist individual artists moving too far & too often along the spectrum of stylistic diversity & influence … To be clear, I’m not throwing shade on the emergent commercial mixing scene, which I view as both fantastic AND inevitable, but I do think meaningfully distinct & vital work remains possible outside of that space.Footnote 45
The ‘work’ he references is about this ongoing, continually unfolding conversation. What do games mean for us – as individuals, and as a larger audience? Fan-made responses to this music not only help elucidate meanings of the video games themselves, but also enrich an ever-growing community of players, composers, listeners and fans that have something to say about video game music.
