UNLIMITED REPLAYS

THE OXFORD MUSIC / MEDIA SERIES

Daniel Goldmark, Series Editor

Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music

 Ron Rodman
Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop
 Louis Niebur
Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film
Scores
 Peter Franklin
An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal
 John Richardson
Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance
 Kiri Miller
Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music
 Holly Rogers
Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film
 Kevin Bartig
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to
Hollywood Cinema
 Katherine Spring
We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
 Kate McQuiston
Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film
K.J. Donnelly
Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
 William Cheng
Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz
 Jennifer Fleeger
Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine
 Jennifer Fleeger
Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music and Sound from M*A*S*H to A
Prairie Home Companion Gayle Sherwood Magee
Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the
Seventies and Eighties
Michael D. Dwyer
The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich
 Joan Titus
Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood
 Nathan Platte
Hearing Haneke: The Sound Tracks of a Radical AuteurElsie Walker
Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music
William Gibbons
Unlimited Replays
VIDEO GAMES AND CLASSICAL MUSIC

William Gibbons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibbons, William (William James), 1981– author.
Title: Unlimited replays: video games and classical music / William Gibbons.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Series: Oxford music/media series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043127 | ISBN 9780190265250 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190265267 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190265304 (oxford scholarship online) | ISBN
9780190265281 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Video game music—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML3540.7 .G53 2018 | DDC 781.5/4—dc23
LC record available at [Link]
This volume is published with the generous support of the Lloyd Hibberd Endowment of the
American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Push Start to Replay

1. Terms and Conditions
2. Playing with Music History
3. A Requiem for Schrödinger’s Cat
4. Allusions of Grandeur
5. A Clockwork Homage
6. Remixed Metaphors
7. Love in Thousand Monstrous Forms
8. Violent Offenders and Violin Defenders
9. Playing Chopin
10. Gamifying Classical Music
11. Classifying Game Music
Conclusion: The End Is Nigh

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Figures

I.1 The final screen of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987)
I.2 Zeus’s temple in The Battle of Olympus (1988)
2.1 The Theatre Royal, as featured in Assassin’s Creed III (2012)
2.2 The title screen from the Nintendo NES version of Tetris (1989)
2.3 The interior of the Hotel Mordavia, Quest for Glory IV (1994)
3.1 Columbia’s barbershop quartet performs “God Only Knows” in
BioShock Infinite (2013)
3.2 The penalty for interracial relationships in Columbia, accompanied
by Wagner’s “Wedding Chorus”
3.3 Stained-glass window depicting Elizabeth as “The Lamb”
4.1 Mickey Mouse in Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983)
4.2 Advertisement for Fantasia (1991)
5.1 The arrival at the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
5.2 The space station docking sequence in Elite (1985 Commodore 64
version)
5.3 Opening shot of Alex from A Clockwork Orange (1971)
5.4 Screenshot from the opening cutscene of Conker’s Bad Fur Day
(2001)
5.5 Alex exacts revenge on his droogs in A Clockwork Orange
6.1 Gameplay screenshot of Gyruss (NES version, 1988)
6.2 Gameplay screenshot of FEZ (2012)
6.3 Gameplay screenshot of Boom Boom Rocket (2007)
7.1 To Vincent’s dismay, Catherine (left) meets Katherine (right) in
Catherine (2011)
7.2 Vincent climbing in Catherine
7.3 “The Child,” the culminating boss of the Fourth Night in Catherine
7.4 “Doom’s Bride,” the boss of level 5 in Catherine
8.1 Agatha and her violin in Fallout 3 (2008)
8.2 Cohen and his “masterpiece” in BioShock (2007)
8.3 George Washington (right) in Assassin’s Creed III (2012)
9.1 Screenshot of a cutscene in Eternal Sonata (2007, metafictional
Chopin at right)
9.2 Gameplay screenshot from Frederic: Resurrection of Music (2011)
9.3 Chopin “updated” in Frederic: Resurrection of Music
10.1 The home screen of the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra app
(2013)
10.2 The “Variation Game” in the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
app
10.3 Screenshot of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (2015)
Tables

2.1 Preexisting French baroque music in Versailles 1685 (1997)

3.1 Anachronistic popular music in BioShock Infinite (2013)
3.2 Mozart’s Requiem in BioShock Infinite
4.1 Selected classical compilation scores in games, 1983–2011
4.2 Disney’s Fantasia in video games, 1983–present
6.1 Remixed classical music in Boom Boom Rocket (2007)
6.2 Remixed classical music in Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth
(1988)
7.1 Classical music in Catherine (2011)
7.2 Bosses in Catherine and possible interpretations of their meaning
9.1 Chapters of Eternal Sonata (2007) with musical selections
9.2 Classical remixes in Frederic: Resurrection of Music
11.1 Video game soundtracks in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, 2013–2016
11.2 Final Symphony program and titles
Acknowledgments

WRITING A BOOK is not a single-player game. Every stage of this process has
benefited from the guidance and support of family, friends, and colleagues.
A number of scholars generously took the time to offer comments on earlier
versions of this research. Naming all of them would be impossible, but I am
particularly indebted to William Ayers, William Cheng, Karen Cook, James
Deaville, Michiel Kamp, Neil Lerner, Dana Plank, Sarah Pozderac
Chenevey, Steven Beverburg Reale, Douglas Shadle, Tim Summers, and
Mark Sweeney. The staff at Oxford University Press and their affiliates
have been a pleasure to work with. Series Editor Daniel Goldmark and OUP
Senior Editor Norm Hirschy offered kind words and expert guidance
throughout this process, copyeditor Susan Ecklund whipped my manuscript
into shape, and the editors at Newgen ably shepherded me through the
production phase. Lastly, the Lloyd Hibberd Endowment of the American
Musicological Society provided much-appreciated financial support.
I’m especially grateful to the community at Texas Christian University,
my academic home for the last seven years. Dean Anne Helmreich and
School of Music Director Richard Gipson have both been incredibly
supportive, as have many of my faculty and staff colleagues. Music
librarian Cari Alexander has put up with my frequent and occasionally
unusual requests for materials. And over the years, my undergraduate and
graduate students have gamely let me work out these ideas in several
courses on musical multimedia and music history. Special thanks are due to
Kristen Queen and Martin Blessinger. As friends, musical collaborators,
and traveling companions, they’ve been listening to me talk about this book
across many years and several countries—even if I’m not sure they’ve ever
actually let me finish a sentence.
Portions of Unlimited Replays have been presented or published in earlier
forms. Faculty and students at universities including Denison University,
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at
Austin, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Southampton, Vanderbilt
University, and Wesleyan University graciously invited me to their
campuses and classrooms to present my research, and their thoughtful
questions and comments have proved invaluable. Likewise, I am grateful to
the organizers of the 2018 North American Conference on Video Game
Music and the 2017 GAMuT conference at the University of North Texas
for allowing me to present topics from this book as keynote addresses. Parts
of chapters 6 and 7 appeared in the edited collection Ludomusicology:
Approaches to Video Game Music (Equinox, 2016), and suggestions from
editors Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney have enriched
that material in its final form.
 Introduction
PUSH START TO REPLAY

SIGNALING BOTH ENDINGS and beginnings, the idea of “replay” is at the core
of the video game experience. A few years ago, I took the time to go back
to an unfinished game from my childhood: Nintendo’s Zelda II: The
Adventure of Link (1987). Once I finally completed the game’s quest, I was
rewarded after the ending credits with what I thought was a somewhat
anticlimactic message: “Thanks a million. Push start to replay” (Figure I.1).
At the time, I chuckled at the quirks of 1980s games and went on about my
business. Now, however, I view that option a little differently. If players
follow the game’s instructions, the adventure begins again—but this time
they start with all the items, health, and powers they had accrued the first
time through. The result is an experience at once familiar and new. Players
relive the game, but with their frame of reference and mode of
understanding it irrevocably altered—and hopefully enriched—by what
they had already accomplished. The meaning of “replay” has evolved
somewhat since the 1980s, yet the sense of simultaneously being old and
new remains the same. Today, the quality of a game is often measured by its
“replay value”—that is, by how many times players will enjoy playing
through it. The Internet abounds with lists of the “Most Replayable Games”
dedicated to identifying and praising titles that reward players for repeated
playthroughs. Zelda II’s “replay” feature still exists in some games as a
“New Game Plus” option, but more commonly “replaying” a game implies
taking a favorite game off the shelf and experiencing it anew in search of
unseen endings, missed opportunities, or simply a sense of nostalgia.
FIGURE I.1 The final screen of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987).

Replaying is equally important to music. A musician might “re-play” the

same musical passage over and over during practice in an attempt to
understand or master it, and our media players have “replay” buttons that
allow us to set a song, album, or artist on permanent repeat. In both cases,
as in Zelda II, our experience changes each time we play or hear the music
—we carry with us everything we gained in the previous times. To extend
the analogy, over significant periods of time, and through a variety of
methods, music accumulates multiple layers of meaning. These complex
and sometimes conflicting meanings have a profound impact on our
individual interpretations of musical works—imagine, for example, a happy
song that you can’t bear to listen to anymore because it reminds you of a
bad breakup. But through sets of shared sociocultural values, new meanings
can be indelibly inscribed not just on individual works but on entire styles
or genres. These meanings are present in all types of music, but they are
particularly apparent in what we call “classical music,” which has in many
cases developed nuanced webs of intersecting references over the course of
centuries of being replayed.
In this book I am interested in exploring the intersections of values and
meanings in these two types of replay: where video games meet classical
music, in other words, and vice versa. In a sense, my research on this
project began when I was about nine years old. Like many children who
grew up in the 1980s, I spent countless hours playing (and watching my
parents play) games on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Although I had the opportunity to experience most of the classic games of
the era—Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, and so on—
one of the memories that most vividly stands out in my mind comes from
the relatively obscure action-adventure game The Battle of Olympus (1988).
Although not particularly innovative from a gameplay perspective—its
side-scrolling blend of item collection and combat was derived from Zelda
II and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)—The Battle of Olympus
intrigues me for several reasons even today. Chief among these is the fact
that the game’s protagonist is the ancient Greek hero-musician Orpheus,
whose irresistible songs could charm even the gods. But what intrigued my
nine-year-old self was not the game’s hero, or even its plot, but rather its
music—and, in fact, one particular musical moment.
To succeed in his quest, Orpheus must curry favor with the Olympian
gods by offering appropriate tributes in their temples (Figure I.2). The
moment I arrived at the first temple, I noticed something odd about the
music: I already knew it. Instead of the game’s original soundtrack
(composed by Kazuo Sawa), I was greeted by the opening theme of the
well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565), purportedly
written by J. S. Bach. I distinctly remember my confusion at hearing this
piece of music, which led me to set the controller down for a few minutes,
both to listen and to think. I knew this piece from Disney’s Fantasia (1940),
and I had even played it myself in piano lessons (in a much simplified
version). What on earth was this music doing in a video game? What did
Bach, this particular piece, or classical music in general, have to do with
Greek gods and heroes? I was sure this music meant something—maybe
even something profound—but I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly
what it was. Even after I left the temple behind and continued on with the
game, I couldn’t shake that feeling; the bell couldn’t be un-rung. Classical
music seemed to pop up in other games with surprising frequency, and I
started to relish the puzzle of uncovering it and figuring out exactly what
piece it was (some things apparently never change). In the intervening
decades I have not lost my sense that it means something when classical
music intersects with games, and this book is first and foremost my attempt
to explore what some of those meanings might be.

FIGURE I.2 Zeus’s temple in The Battle of Olympus (1988).

But why dedicate an entire book to this particular subject? Classical

music in televisual media is nothing new, since film and television have
adapted preexisting music for more than a century. And why classical
music, anyway? Popular music appears much more frequently in games and
has already received significantly more attention from game music scholars.
But although these are valid points—and I will frequently engage with all
these parallel uses of preexisting music throughout Unlimited Replays—I
think exploring the combination of video games and classical music offers
unique rewards. The cultural positioning of these two prominent media at
the opposite ends of the spectrum of “high” and “low” arts creates
remarkable opportunities and challenges for game designers, players, and
classical music supporters. Returning to The Battle of Olympus, I’ve come
to believe that Bach’s Toccata and Fugue seemed so inscrutable to my
younger self in that game because my frame of reference told me the music
was in the wrong place. I grew up in a household that encouraged both
playing video games and listening to classical music, but even at nine years
old I had internalized the idea that there was a fundamental value difference
between those two activities. Listening to classical music, even if enjoyable,
was a serious exercise. In contrast, even the most serious video game was a
form of entertainment. Although I now feel quite differently about both, I
was certainly not alone in those assumptions; similar views of the value of
both classical music and video games are still widely held. Because we tend
to place these media in completely separate cultural categories, combining
classical music with video games involves a kind of transgression, a
crossing of boundaries that begs for explanation and interpretation.
In an attempt to offer some of both, I have divided Unlimited Replays
into eleven chapters, which explore the relationship between classical music
and video games from distinctive, though interlacing, perspectives. Chapter
1, “Terms and Conditions,” provides an overview of the core concepts of
the book, delving into the sociocultural meanings we invoke when we use
the terms “classical music” and “video games,” and then considering the
possible ramifications of combining the two. From that point, the chapters
are divided loosely into pairs. Chapter 2, “Playing with Music History,”
investigates how games have employed classical music to signify a
particular time or place—how Tchaikovsky’s music in the NES version of
Tetris (1989) highlights the game’s “Russianness,” or how the changing
musical selections of the strategy game Civilization IV (2005) reinforce the
player’s sense of chronological progress. Often the most interesting cases
are those in which the music is the “wrong” time or place for the situation
yet still provides the player with the necessary information; chapter 3, “A
Requiem for Schrödinger’s Cat,” offers a close reading of BioShock Infinite
(2013) to demonstrate just how complex these signifiers of time and space
can become. In that case, the clever use of music paradoxically works both
to orient players in particular times and places and simultaneously to
destabilize their understanding of where and when they are.
The following pair of chapters deals with the often fraught relationship
between video games and film. Chapter 4, “Allusions of Grandeur,”
considers the difference in cultural capital between games and film—the
latter being more clearly established as an “art form”—and examines
instances wherein game designers use classical music to draw comparisons
with cinematic models. There are a number of both direct and oblique
references to silent films in games, for example, particularly early on in the
medium’s history. More specifically, a number of video games have
embraced classical music as a way to recapture the feeling of specific films,
as I explore in relation to games based on the Disney classic Fantasia
(1940), and those that refer to the influential art film Koyaanisqatsi (1983).
Chapter 5, “A Clockwork Homage,” specifically investigates several video
games from the 1980s to the 2010s that use music to refer—whether
parodically or earnestly (or both)—to the films of the auteur director
Stanley Kubrick, particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A
Clockwork Orange (1971).
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with remixed classical music in games—situations
in which the nature of the music as “classical” at all is called directly into
question. Chapter 6, “Remixed Metaphors,” engages with a range of these
games from the 1980s to the present, including the arcade classic Gyruss
(1983), the indie game FEZ (2012), and the unusual Japanese shooter
Parodius (1988). In some cases, remixes seem to be a way of connecting
games to the artistic value inherent in “classical” works, while in others the
music creates a carnivalesque atmosphere in which traditional values of
“high” and “low” art are, if not entirely subverted, at least challenged in
meaningful ways. The following chapter, “Love in Thousand Monstrous
Forms,” draws on the “grotesque” in art as the irreconcilable combination
of opposites, illustrating how combining “classical” and “popular” musical
styles—as well as the careful selection of classical works—functions as a
critical part of the game design and a form of commentary in the
philosophical puzzle game Catherine (2011).
Chapter 8, “Violent Offenders and Violin Defenders,” transitions to an
entirely different method of representing classical music in games: on
screen, embodied in “live” musicians. Ranging from the saintly violinist
Agatha in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout 3 (2008) to the
murderously unstable composer Sander Cohen in BioShock (2007), these
depictions of musicians offer a revealing perspective on the roles of
classical music and its practitioners in contemporary society. Chapter 9,
“Playing Chopin,” focuses on two specific games—the role-playing game
Eternal Sonata (2007) and the mobile music game Frederic: Resurrection
of Music (2011)—both of which feature the nineteenth-century composer
Frédéric Chopin as the protagonist. Both games carefully (if not always
successfully) balance the need to adapt Chopin’s historical persona to fit the
practical and aesthetic needs of a video game, while still presenting the
composer and his music in a positive and “authentic” light.
Up to this point in the book, the chapters have investigated instances in
which classical music is incorporated in video games. The final two
chapters, however, turn this formula on its head, focusing instead on how
video games have been incorporated into classical music. Chapter 10,
“Gamifying Classical Music,” examines how classical music organizations
have paired with game developers to create new educational and
entertaining ways of presenting classical music to a broad audience. In
particular, I consider the mobile apps Young Person’s Guide to the
Orchestra (2013)—an interactive introduction to Benjamin Britten’s
classical work of the same title (1945)—and Steve Reich’s Clapping Music
(2015), a gamified presentation of the titular 1972 work. In one case, the
app recreates traditional notions of music appreciation for a digital-native
audience; in the other, the lines between playing a game and playing a
musical work are blurred to the point of invisibility. The final chapter,
“Classifying Game Music,” raises the question of whether game music can
itself become classical. I first explore fan-centered campaigns to broaden
the definition of “classical music” to encompass orchestral game music—
including the push to include game music in the British radio station Classic
FM’s annual Hall of Fame—before considering the increasingly pervasive
phenomenon of video game music performances in concert hall settings.
I make no claims that Unlimited Replays is a comprehensive examination
of the relationship between classical music and video games. There are
many intriguing examples that simply didn’t fit into my overarching
narrative, and I’m quite confident that there are many, many examples of
classical music in games of which I remain completely unaware—not to
mention the steady stream of new games, apps, and game-related concerts
being developed constantly. Rather than creating an exhaustive catalog, I
hope to sketch out some ways in which we might fruitfully approach this
topic. My ultimate goal is to open these questions up for a larger debate,
and one that extends far beyond classical music in games, contributing to an
assessment of what roles of art and entertainment play in twenty-first-
century culture.
1 Terms and Conditions

EARLY IN THE first episode of Netflix’s political drama House of Cards

(2013–), US representative Frank Underwood attends a lavish symphony
gala. As the concert begins—with Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto
“Summer,” from The Four Seasons (ca. 1723)—the camera fixates on
Frank’s reaction to the music. He appears mesmerized, focusing intently on
the off-screen musicians—until the camera pans out, and we realize we’ve
been duped by some clever cinematography. Although he’s still wearing his
tuxedo from the evening’s entertainment, Frank has abandoned the
luxurious surroundings and elite company of the symphony. Instead, he’s
sitting on a couch in his home, riveted not by Vivaldi’s music but by the
first-person shooter Call of Duty. The cut is jarring. As the action shifts
from the bright, see-and-be-seen environment of the concert hall to a dark,
solitary basement, the subtext is clear: classical music is socially and
culturally celebrated, while video games are shameful, a guilty pleasure to
be hidden away from prying eyes. Instantly, our perception of Underwood
shifts drastically. How could a US congressman, a patron of the fine arts,
close out his evening by trash-talking teenagers on an Xbox headset?
This scene’s effectiveness depends on audiences perceiving that worlds
of classical music and of video games are, if not exactly incompatible, at
least starkly contrasted. The show goes to a lot of trouble, in other words, to
help its viewers understand Frank as a complex and contradictory character.
But why do we understand these pursuits—classical music and video games
—as contradictory in the first place? This chapter is aimed at exploring that
question, which informs the entirety of Unlimited Replays. How we
perceive the relationship between classical music and video games is
shaped by the expectations we have of each of those elements; unpacking
that cultural baggage is a necessary first step to understanding what happens
when they’re combined. But it’s not an easy first step. The utility of terms
like “video games” and “classical music” depends on a shared cultural
definition, yet in practice how we interpret these concepts is often deeply
individualistic. Classical music in particular will reveal itself throughout
this book to be a profoundly problematic, or even misleading, concept. The
uncertainty hovering around these ideas in fact calls attention to my central
point: although both classical music and video games are produced by
artists, typically for entertainment purposes, for the most part the two media
occupy radically divergent and hotly contested cultural spaces. To set the
stage for the discussions to come, this chapter is devoted to exploring what
it means to call a piece of music classical, or an interactive media object a
video game. Before I can address the ramifications of combining classical
music with games, I have to consider the value judgments and cultural
baggage those terms carry.

Classical Music
The term “classical music” is virtually inescapable. It shapes how we study,
consume, and value music—from iTunes and Spotify to university degree
programs in, say, classical versus jazz piano. But what is it, really? For
many music historians and classically trained performers, “classical music”
refers to the music of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Vienna, a
repertoire centered around the composers Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. But of course this very
narrow definition is by no means the standard use of the term in mainstream
culture. If we trust iTunes, for example, just about all music composed from
the Middle Ages to about 1900 in Western nations is classical—except, of
course, for the music that gets placed in the equally broad categories of folk
music or world music. Classical also includes a fair amount of music
composed after 1900, except what we’d consider popular music or jazz. In
that view, classical music is essentially defined negatively: it’s classical
because it’s not something else. But that approach ignores the most
important, if often unspoken, criterion that many people believe makes
music classical: art.
In fact, this identity as art—whatever that means—is so fundamental to
classical music as a concept that we can substitute the term “art music” in
nearly any situation. This understanding of classical or art music emerged
near the beginning of the nineteenth century, mostly as a way to grant
certain musical repertoires, especially European instrumental music from
the mid-eighteenth century onward—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.—a
preferred cultural status. Gradually the works protected under this
“classical” aegis expanded significantly, on the one hand reaching back
further and further into history to incorporate repertoires like Gregorian
chant and Renaissance choral music, and on the other hand looking forward
into the twentieth century to accommodate new musical developments. Yet
even as the definition expanded to accommodate an ever-larger body of
works, the core concept remained the same: it was “good music” (itself a
label that persisted well into the twentieth century), a civilizing influence
that uplifted the spirit and ennobled the listener.1 As musicologists Denise
Von Glahn and Michael Broyles explain in their entry “Art Music” in the
Grove Dictionary of American Music, throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, art music was understood to be “composed by specially
trained musicians,” “universal because of its transcendence,” and
“unparalleled in its complexity, expressivity, originality, and thus
meaning.”2
In academic circles, these attitudes have largely—though by no means
universally—given way to a more inclusive understanding of music.
Resisting the idea that classical music is somehow superior to other musical
traditions, this broader perspective holds that all musical traditions offer
value, and that art (if that concept still means anything) is not restricted to
certain musical styles. Furthermore, this position acknowledges that
drawing stark distinctions between “classical” and “not classical” music
runs the risk of reinforcing classist, racist, sexist, and otherwise undesirable
narratives. Even among music scholars, however, more traditional views on
the subject have not entirely dissipated. In his book Who Needs Classical
Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (2002), the musicologist and
composer Julian Johnson succinctly, if polemically, describes “classical
music” as “music that functions as art, as opposed to entertainment or some
other ancillary or background function.”3
In fairness, Johnson does allow that classical music can, in fact, be
entertaining—but entertainment cannot be its sole (or primary) function.
“Art,” he says,

is frequently contrasted with entertainment, an opposition that

immediately invokes a series of binary divisions (e.g., high and low,
 serious and light, intellectual and sensual) that seem like so many
aesthetic versions of opposing class positions. . . . Art and
entertainment are perhaps better understood as social functions than as
categories that divide cultural products as if they were sheep and goats.
Classical music, I have argued, is made as art but frequently serves as
entertainment. Even when it serves as art, it doesn’t necessarily stop
serving as entertainment. But it also exhibits qualities that are neither
acknowledged nor accounted for by the category of entertainment,
qualities that can be understood only from the expectations of a
different function—that of art.4

This serpentine argument is difficult to straighten out, but the gist seems to
be that classical music is by definition always art, but sometimes also
entertainment. The distinction is that it can never just be entertainment;
there must always be some profundity of artistic expression that surpasses,
say, popular music. Ironically, this problematic view seems prevalent—and
often unquestioned—in the very popular culture that it seems to denigrate.
According to film scholar Dean Duncan, for example, the “popularly
accepted sense” of classical music is “art music which has, either in its time
of composition or by some evolutionary process, come to be accepted as
‘serious.’ ”5 This definition is a masterpiece of circular reasoning. The
music is art because it is classical, classical because it is art, and serious
because it is—both, maybe? Moreover, the music has “come to be
accepted” as serious—but accepted by whom? Despite the illogical nature
of this definition, however, Duncan isn’t wrong. That is, quite often, the
popularly accepted sense of classical music, which is frequently portrayed
in media and in the press as somehow more serious or important than other
types of music.6 That viewpoint is the focus of my interest here not because
I agree—I emphatically do not—but because it continues to be so
widespread and enduring.
As I write this, for example, the first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry on
“classical music” identifies it as “art music in the traditions of Western
music.”7 Following the hyperlink to “art music” yields a well-balanced (if
fairly brief) article on the topic, but one predicated on the circular definition
of art music as “music descending from the tradition of Western classical
music.” Significantly, the article opens with the informative note the “art
music” is “also known as formal music, serious music, erudite music, or
legitimate music,” terms that reinscribe an elitist system of value
judgments.8 Who would admit to preferring “illegitimate” or “frivolous”
music? Other sources of popular knowledge embrace similarly troubling
definitions. [Link], for example, tells us that “classical music” is
“a loose expression for European and American music of the more serious
kind, as opposed to popular or folk music.”9 Again, this explanation offers
no clear sense of what “serious” means—even should we choose to believe,
all evidence to the contrary, that classical music is always serious.
Ultimately, finding a working universal definition of “classical music”
that doesn’t depend on its artistic superiority to other musical forms is
simply impossible. So what do we do? Can “classical music” exist without a
definition? An explanatory 2013 article from the Minnesota Public Radio
website seems to suggest that it can:

Musicologists can stay up all night talking about the shape and
trajectory of classical music, debating questions like the importance of
the score, the role of improvisation, and the nature of musical form.
Where you come down on these questions determines who precisely
you think falls into the broadly defined genre of “classical music.”
Renaissance troubadours? Frank Zappa? Duke Ellington? Yes, no,
maybe?
Everyday enjoyment of classical music doesn’t require you to strain
your brain with such fine distinctions, but it definitely helps to
understand that classical music is a living tradition that’s being defined
and redefined every day.10

Although the article seems to exhort us to simply sit back, relax, and stop
worrying so much, this conception is actually fairly complex. We can, it
seems to suggest, acknowledge that classical music as an idea is rife with
contradictions—if not entirely intellectually bankrupt—yet still understand
what the term means in daily usage.
As heretical as it may seem, I am inclined to agree. Musicologists,
performers, and critics alike have spilled considerable ink in a quest to
define exactly what, if anything, classical music is—all to little avail. I am
not interested in following them into this linguistic and conceptual
quagmire, and neither am I willing to strictly define the boundaries of
classical music for this book. I am, however, deeply interested in how the
concept of classical music tends to be viewed within the context of popular
culture. The terminological and conceptual fluidity that sometimes results
throughout Unlimited Replays illustrates the contradictions inherent in
classical music as a concept—complexities that factor into how this music
works in relation to video games. Classical music, then—like art itself—is
what culture perceives as art, and what it therefore imbues with particular
cultural capital.
Despite—or, more likely, because of—its aura of cultural prestige,
classical music is often also viewed as antithetical to youth culture. To put it
bluntly, classical music is decidedly uncool. Consider, for example, the
numerous instances in which businesses and cities have (usually
successfully) attempted to prevent unwanted loitering by playing classical
music in spaces where teenagers tend to gather. In her intriguing book
Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, the musicologist
Lily E. Hirsch notes that since the 1980s (the very period of video games’
ascendency)

classical music has been used as a crime deterrent all over the English-
speaking world: in Canadian parks, Australian railway stations,
London Underground stops, and different cities all over the United
States. . . . In these locales, various authorities employ classical music
to reduce hooliganism and ward off undesirables.11

Some advocates for this use of classical music would argue for its quasi-
Orphic powers to ennoble the souls of these troubled youths—no doubt
attributing their departure to a collective decision to find gainful
employment and/or volunteer at soup kitchens. But the practical underlying
assumption at work here is that many members of youth culture detest
classical music to the point where they would rather pack up and leave an
area than willingly subject themselves to hearing it. The author of a 2005
article in the Los Angeles Times notes a “bizarre irony” in the process:
“After decades of the classical music establishment’s fighting to attract
crowds—especially young people and what it calls ‘nontraditional
audiences’—city councils and government ministers are taking exactly the
opposite approach: using high culture as a kind of disinfectant.”12 Thus, we
find a wide perception of classical music as being fundamentally opposed to
the same youth culture that dominates discussions of video games.
Video Games
For the most part, the term “video games” (or “videogames,” as some
prefer) is interchangeable with “computer games” or “electronic games,”
indicating a distinction from other types of games, such as sports or tabletop
board games.13 We might reasonably quibble about distinctions between
these kinds of labels, and in some circles the connotative differences are
significant: the philosopher Grant Tavinor, for example, notes that
“computer game is sometimes taken to refer to games on a personal
computer, but it is also used as the generic term; electronic game might also
refer to toys as well as video games; while videogame, as well as being the
generic term, is sometimes used to refer exclusively to console games.”14
Though I acknowledge these distinctions, throughout this book I use “video
games” in the broadest and most inclusive sense possible. Although for
some readers the term might conjure images of neon-laden 1980s arcades,
or teenagers gripping their PlayStation controllers, video games and their
players are a rather diverse lot. Aside from the many millions of players
across all demographic lines who regularly enjoy video games on their
computers or consoles, the ubiquity of smartphones and social media allows
casual games to reach astoundingly massive audiences.15 As we saw with
classical music, however, settling on a term doesn’t necessarily give us a
good sense of what video games actually are.
A number of academic game scholars, not surprisingly, have given the
topic serious attention. Jesper Juul, for example, spends most of his
influential book Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional
Worlds in search of a clear definition, as a necessary step toward building a
unifying theory. Video games, Juul contends, have broken out of the
classical game model that describes thousands of years of games, from
ancient Egyptian senet to poker. Games are “a combination of rules and
fiction,” and so any definition or theory must describe “the intersection
between games as rules and games as fiction, and the relation between the
game, the play, and the world.”16 Yet Juul’s definition, while useful, doesn’t
take into account the function of video games—it might tell us what they
are, but it doesn’t tell us what they’re for.
Other theorists, however, have embraced function as a central aspect of
games, and such a definition is essential to understanding how games
interact with classical music (which, as we have seen, can be defined by its
function as “art”). For the purpose of contrasting games and classical music,
I borrow Tavinor’s frequently quoted definition:

X is a videogame if it is an artifact in a visual digital medium, is

intended as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such
entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following
modes of engagement: rule and objective gameplay or interactive
fiction.17

Particularly noteworthy here is the idea that a game must be “intended as an

object of entertainment.” While I would join a number of scholars and
philosophers in arguing that the intention of the game’s creators is less
significant than how the audience understands and receives the game, the
point is nonetheless intriguing.18
The idea that entertainment is video games’ core function seems, in fact,
to be an unquestioned truth. Take, for example, Gonzalo Frasca’s assertion
that video games encompass “any forms of computer-based entertainment
software, either textual or image-based, using any electronic platform such
as personal computers or consoles and involving one or multiple players in
a physical or networked environment.”.19 James Newman adopts this
definition in his influential book Videogames (2004), noting that he
“follow[s] Frasca in using the term videogame in its broadest possible
sense.”20 In other words, even the widest conceivable definition of games
depends on that entertainment factor; without that, it’s just not a video
game. Although Tavinor ultimately argues halfheartedly that some (but by
no means all) video games qualify as art, he takes note of the intense
cultural resistance that idea faces:

Art involves something more than mere entertainment or amusement,

and some might think that it is that extra something that videogames
lack. It may also be argued that videogames are immature, derivative,
mass produced, distasteful, and do not afford the sorts of perceptual
and cognitive pleasure that proper artworks do.21

Thus while classical music may belong to the realm of high art, video
games are often understood to occupy an altogether less exalted sphere.
Created, in most instances, for entertainment value and commercial success,
video games form part of the vague but artistically suspect realm of popular
culture.
As Tavinor predicted, the very idea that some games might be art, in fact,
has proved controversial. A major flashpoint in this debate was the film
critic Roger Ebert’s insistence that games were not, and probably never
would be, an art form. Ebert’s article “Video Games Can Never Be Art”
(2010) offers his most detailed explanation of this point of view,
systematically debunking the claims to art of some of the most artistic video
games, such as the independent games Braid (2008) and Flower (2009).22
Braid, he says, “exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie,”
while nothing in Flower “seemed above the level of a greeting card.” As the
critic Harold Goldberg points out in his book All Your Base Are Belong to
Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture, games were
perceived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries “the way
rock ’n’ roll was in the fifties: they were dirty, sex-stinking, over-the-top
with no redeeming social value, despicably lowbrow.”23
On the other hand, a number of other critics have recently made
compelling arguments for understanding (some) games as art. Goldberg
makes such a claim for BioShock (2007), and Ebert’s 2010 missive was
prompted by a TED Talk by the game designer Kellee Santiago, who
strongly advocated that games have crossed the boundary into artistic
status.24 Art museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and New York’s Museum of Modern
Art, have staged exhibitions of games, suggesting that games have attained
at least a certain level of artistic distinction. Game scholars, not
surprisingly, have also jumped into the fray, falling generally on the side of
games as art.25 In the book Works of Game, for example, John Sharp has
explored in some detail the development of artgames—video games
intended (that dangerous term again!) to have artistic aspirations beyond
entertainment—as well as game art, in which artists manipulate or alter
games to create new works.26 Despite these efforts, however, it seems clear
that video games do not yet claim the same amount of artistic cultural
capital that classical music does. They remain, in Juul’s words, “notoriously
considered lowbrow catalogues of geek and adolescent male culture.”27
As was the case with the specific boundaries of classical music, when it
is taken by itself, I don’t find the question of whether games are art
particularly meaningful.28 What does interest me, however, is how games
navigate these uncharted artistic waters by steering toward less contested art
forms. Classical music frequently offers a convenient point of reference for
scholars and critics seeking to legitimize games at artworks, for example.
Tavinor suggests as much when he ponders “whether videogames are art in
something like the way that the exemplars of a more traditional conception
of art—Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Van Eyck’s The
Arnolfini Marriage, Joyce’s Ulysses—are art.”29 He wonders, in other
words, whether games can compare to what he labels “uncontested
artworks.”30 Other critics have drawn similar connections between classical
music and games: in an article on games as art, for example, James Paul
Gee associates the video game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
with an actual classical symphony:

Moving through this game is like moving through a symphony where

every “tone” (image) and combination of “tones” (images) creates
moods, feelings, and ambiance, not primarily information (as in
movies and books). The experience of playing the game is closer to
living inside a symphony than to living inside a book. And the
symphony is not just visual, but it is composed as well of sounds,
music, actions, decisions, and bodily feelings that flow along as the
player and virtual character . . . act together in the game world.31

The musical language Gee intriguingly employs as a metaphor for the

gameplay experience—tones creating ambience, and so on—shouldn’t be
inherently limited to classical music. He could, in other words, just as easily
have suggested that the game was akin to “living inside” the Beatles’ song
“Hey Jude” or the Broadway musical West Side Story. True, the choice of a
symphonic metaphor here ties in neatly with the game’s title. But his
specific choice of a symphony goes beyond mere rhetorical expediency.
The symphony remains (in the popular mindset, at least) a pinnacle of
musical artistry—classical music at its purest and most artistic. Connecting
a video game to this tradition reinforces its claim to artistic merit by
association. Like Tavinor’s Mahler symphony, here we see the
“uncontested” value of classical music linked to the comparably contested,
artistically ambiguous space games occupy.
The Art of Classical Music in Video Games
At this point, you can no doubt spot the problem. If we accept the
proposition that games must inherently be first and foremost entertainment
products, and we accept Johnson’s assessment that classical music must
function “as art, as opposed to entertainment or some other ancillary or
background function,” the paradox becomes clear. Mixing classical music
and video games thus always transgresses boundaries—in one way or
another, it issues an existential challenge. Let me return briefly to Johnson’s
conception of classical music—“music that functions as art, as opposed to
entertainment or some other ancillary or background function.” What this
definition seems to suggest is that the music must be the fundamental focus:
it must be listened to and embraced as art to fully function. The
musicologist Lawrence Kramer has espoused a similar focus on intent
listening as the primary focus of classical music, which, he writes,
“developed with a single aim: to be listened to. Listened to, that is, rather
than heard as part of some other activity, usually a social or religious
ritual.”32 Playing video games would certainly count as another activity,
and one in which listening is most often relegated to a secondary role. From
the perspective of games, on the other hand, recall Tavinor’s requirement
that games be “intended primarily as an object of entertainment.” Though
he in no way precludes the possibility that games could be art, they
nonetheless must primarily be vehicles for entertainment. Most commonly
they are commercial products aimed at the broadest possible audience—
anathema, many would argue, to artistic expression.
These definitions are unmistakably mutually exclusive. Classical music
shouldn’t exist in video games, for instance—and yet it does. This seeming
impossibility raises a number of complex philosophical questions. What
happens to classical music when it becomes part of a commercial product,
and as background music, no less? Does it—in function if not in content—
cease to be classical at all when appearing in an entertainment-based
medium? And can music be classical at all if it’s working in the background
rather than at the forefront of conscious attention? Some would say no—the
musicologist James Parakilas suggested as much in an 1984 article in which
he declared that “classical music is no longer itself when it is used as
background music.”33 If we’re not regarding it as art, in other words, it
ceases to function artistically. But if we do feel that classical music in
games is still art, then what about the games themselves? Do they cease to
be primarily entertainment vehicles when classical music enters the mix?
Are they, in other words, elevated to artistic status by the presence of art
within them, and if so, are they at that point even video games? In short:
What happens when the irresistible force of entertainment meets the
immovable object of art? The chapters that follow are dedicated to
addressing, if not necessarily answering, these and other questions that arise
from the seemingly unlikely combination of these two media.

1
On “good music” in early twentieth-century America, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How
Technology Has Changed Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), chap.
2.
2
Denise Von Glahn and Michael Broyles, “Art Music,” in The Grove Dictionary of American
Music, 2nd ed., available online at [Link].
3
Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 6. The musicologist Richard Taruskin took particular umbrage at
Johnson’s pat definition. Not one to mince words, Taruskin summarizes Johnson’s entire book as
“an elaboration of this categorical, invidious, didactically italicized, and altogether untenable
distinction.” Richard Taruskin, “The Musical Mystique,” New Republic (October 21, 2007),
available online at [Link]
4
Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?, 47.
5
Dean Duncan, Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2003), 8.
6
On the privileging of art in American culture (as one example), the classic resource is Lawrence
W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7
“Classical Music,” Wikipedia, available online at [Link]
(accessed July 17, 2014).
8
“Art Music,” Wikipedia, available online at [Link] (accessed July
17, 2014) (bold text in original).
9
“Classical music,” available online at [Link] (accessed August 7, 2014). This definition
is drawn from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2005)
10
Jay Gabler, “What Is Classical Music?,” Minnesota Public Radio (October 16, 2013), available
online at [Link]
accessed August 7, 2014).
11
Lily E. Hirsch, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012), 14. The entirety of Hirsch’s chapter 1 is dedicated to classical music’s
role in deterring crime.
12
Scott Timberg, “Halt, or I’ll Play Vivaldi!,” Los Angeles Times (February 13, 2005), available
online at [Link] (accessed August
7, 2014).
13
See, for example, the discussion of the terms in Veli-Matti Karhulahti, “Defining the
Videogame,” Game Studies 15, no. 2 (December 2015), available online at
[Link]
14
Grant Tavinor, The Art of Videogames (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 17 (emphasis in
original).
15
On the rise of casual games, see Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and
Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
16
Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2005), 197.
17
Tavinor, Art of Videogames, 26. For an earlier version of this definition (along with explanation),
see Grant Tavinor, “Definition of Videogames,” Contemporary Aesthetics 6 (2008), available
online at [Link]
articleID=492&searchstr=tavinor.
18
For a discussion of how games fit into this perspective, see John Sharp, Works of Game: On the
Aesthetics of Games and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), chap. 5.
19
Gonzalo Frasca, “Videogames of the Oppressed: Videogames as a Means for Critical Thinking
and Debate” (master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001), 4 (emphasis added).
20
James Newman, Videogames (London: Routledge, 2004), 27 (emphasis added).
21
Tavinor, Art of Videogames, 175.
22
Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art” (April 16, 2010), available online at
[Link]
23
Harold Goldberg, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered
Pop Culture (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011), 185.
24
See Goldberg, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, chap. 12, “BioShock: Art for Game’s Sake.” The
game, according to Goldberg, “made people who eschewed videogames see the art in an
entertainment that dealt with profound ideas and twisted emotions . . .. BioShock expressed its
ideas clearly and deftly, like the best movies, music, and books. It was art for game’s sake . . .
proof of the concept that art and commerce could successfully and happily coexist in the world of
videogames” (207). Kellee Santiago, “Stop the Debate! Video Games Are Art, So What’s Next?,”
TED Talk (March 23, 2009), available online at [Link]
feature=player_embedded&v=K9y6MYDSAww.
25
For example, see Aaron Smuts, “Are Video Games Art?,” Contemporary Aesthetics 3 (2005),
available online at [Link] and James Paul Gee, “Why
Game Studies Now? Video Games: A New Art Form,” Games and Culture 1 (2006): 58–61.
26
Sharp, Works of Game, especially chap. 3.
27
Juul, Half-Real, 20. Juul goes on to note that “while games are regularly considered lowbrow, this
is often due to some very naïve notions of what is highbrow or what is art. In a very simple view
of art, art is what is ambiguous, whereas most games tend to have clear rules and goals.”
28 For another perspective on the irrelevance of the question, see Ian Bogost, How to Do Things
with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), chap. 1.
29
Tavinor, Videogames as Art, 174.
30
Tavinor, Videogames as Art, 175.
31
Gee, “Why Game Studies Now?,” 59.
32
Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), 18.
33
James Parakilas, “Classical Music as Popular Music,” Journal of Musicology 3 (1984): 15.
2 Playing with Music History

TUTORIALS USUALLY AREN’T the most exciting parts of video games. These
introductory segments are responsible for giving players the necessary tools
to play the game, but from a design perspective, they can be tricky to
balance. Too much, or too little, direct guidance can result in players getting
confused, frustrated, or bored—not an ideal first impression of a game. To
overcome these hurdles, game developers use a variety of techniques to
impart large amounts of information quickly, and occasionally even
enjoyably. Many of these techniques rely on a shared set of experiences—
players get some basic instructions from the game and fill in the rest using
their existing frame of reference. If you’ve played one first-person shooter,
for instance, you probably have at least some idea of how the next one is
going to work. Music often works in a similar way in games and other
media: certain styles, genres, or even particular works convey meanings to
players based on their previous experiences. Players experiencing a horror
game might feel a wave of anxiety when they hear dissonant string music
because their prior musical knowledge tells them something scary is about
to happen. These powerful intertextual references work as another type of
tutorial in games, providing valuable information without resorting to
spelling it out directly.
To see how these types of musical choices convey information to players,
let’s consider the actual tutorial mission from Assassin’s Creed III (2012).
In a major departure from the European Renaissance setting of several
previous games in the series, the majority of Assassin’s Creed III takes
place in North America, around the time of the American Revolution. In
advertisements and previews, the game promised players a glimpse of
colonial life, complete with burgeoning cities, Native American villages,
and lush, pristine wilderness. Yet the tutorial for Assassin’s Creed III finds
players skulking around the backstage of the Theatre Royal in 1750s
London in search of an assassination target (Figure 2.1). As they go about
their task—all the while learning the basics of gameplay—players hear
snippets of music and dialogue, and occasionally even catch a glimpse of
the stage. The evening’s performance happens to be of The Beggar’s Opera
(1728), an English ballad opera by John Gay that featured music borrowed
from popular tunes and opera arias of the time. Thanks to its scandalous
plot and well-known melodies, The Beggar’s Opera was one of the most
enduringly popular works of eighteenth-century English theater—but its
presence in a video game is surprising, to say the least.

FIGURE 2.1 The Theatre Royal, as featured in Assassin’s Creed III (2012).

A bit of historical digging, however, offers up several possible

explanations for this perplexing choice of music. Because Italian opera
dominated the stages of eighteenth-century London, The Beggar’s Opera
was a fairly radical departure. One critic of the time, for example, described
it as “Gay’s new English Opera, written in a Manner wholly new, and very
entertaining, there being introduced, instead of Italian Airs, above 60 of the
most celebrated old English and Scotch tunes.”1 Audiences members
accustomed to Italian operas, in other words, were instead introduced to a
new, English variety. Given that background, players with sufficient
historical background might choose to understand The Beggar’s Opera as a
sly nod to the Assassin’s Creed games themselves. The previous three
Assassin’s Creed games featured Italian protagonist Ezio Auditore.2 Perhaps
the subtext here is that players used to an Italian Assassin’s Creed—and
skeptical of this new setting—might similarly embrace an English (or
colonial) setting. It’s also worth considering how the broad social
commentary of Gay’s work resonates with the main themes of Assassin’s
Creed: both narratives are steeped in class struggles and the justification (or
lack thereof) for violence. In fact, as a result of its rough, low-class
characters, some eighteenth-century listeners declared The Beggar’s Opera
a bad influence on England’s youth—an entertainment liable to corrupt
their character and lead them to violence.3 The parallels to the enduring
criticisms of violent video games like the Assassin’s Creed series are
obvious, and perhaps The Beggar’s Opera works as a kind of subtle cultural
counterattack. All of these are valid—if maybe a little far-fetched—
interpretations, yet this subtext would likely be completely lost on all but
the most historically informed players.
In that case, it might seem arbitrary to choose The Beggar’s Opera
instead of any other eighteenth-century opera popular in London at the
time.4 I would argue, however, that The Beggar’s Opera is particularly
effective in this scene because it helps players quickly situate the game—
and themselves—in a specific place and time. The Assassin’s Creed series,
which touches on both near-future science fiction and historical adventure,
is an unusual generic hybrid. Its central conceit—an advanced technology
that allows users to relive their ancestors’ lives—allows designers to set the
various games in widely divergent settings while still creating a
(semi-)coherent overarching narrative.5 This variety offers players an
essentially unlimited set of exciting new places and times to explore, but it
also runs the risk of disorienting them while they adjust to their new
environments. This disorientation feels particularly evident in the tutorial
for Assassin’s Creed III. Players familiar with the game’s premise, whether
from advertising or simply from reading the back of the game box, would
likely expect an American Revolutionary setting. Finding themselves in
1750s England instead might cause some initial confusion while players are
already struggling to familiarize themselves with the game.
So, how does The Beggar’s Opera help us understand this scene better?
Most obviously, it reinforces the game’s shift from the future (where it
begins) into the past. Before the opera begins, the player—acting as
Haytham Kenway, a major character—hears the overture to The Beggar’s
Opera while directing Haytham to his seat. The music has all the trappings
of English baroque theater music: a small orchestra with harpsichord,
baroque dance rhythms, and so on. Historically savvy players might be able
to use this aural evidence to date the action, but—much more important—
even players unfamiliar with music history would almost certainly be able
to identify the music as classical. And even if the “when” is not entirely
obvious based on the music, the “where” is fairly straightforward. The
spoken and sung text is in English, an impression supported by the actors’
British accents. By immersing players in this “civilized” European
environment and then quickly transitioning to a colonial Boston setting, the
game highlights the comparatively uncivilized (or unpretentious) New
World.
This short scene from Assassin’s Creed III illustrates how music in media
provides listeners with a wealth of information—often much more than is
immediately apparent. Like a good tutorial mission, the music teaches us
without being overtly didactic; it shows rather than tells. Because it already
has a “life” outside the film, show, or game, preexisting music is
particularly effective at conveying a great deal of information efficiently.
Listeners have a set of ready-made perceptions and associations already tied
to the music—either particular pieces or more general styles—that help
them instantly make connections that might take much longer with newly
composed music.
Games aren’t alone in using these codes, of course. Film, followed later
by television and other media, has made use of our prior musical knowledge
for more than a century. For that reason, I frequently draw on examples
from those media to illustrate how games use players’ perceptions of
classical music to provide them with essential information.6 As Peter
Larsen notes in his overview Film Music, “All music conveys culturally
established connotations. By virtue of style, musical idiom, instrumentation,
etc. music refers to music of the same type and thereby to particular
historical periods, particular countries, particular cultural environments.”7
The same, I believe, is true of music in games, but despite these similarities,
games’ uniqueness as a medium creates some important differences in how
music works, even at a basic level. For the remainder of this chapter, I will
focus on one seemingly straightforward use of classical music in games:
establishing geographical and chronological setting. Music’s potential for
indicating these basic elements is, at least at first glance, almost too obvious
to be noteworthy. In practice, however, things get substantially more
complicated, and what interests me in particular is how games play with our
understanding of music history. Much like the Assassin’s Creed games treat
history—sticking just close enough to historical fact to fit in with our prior
knowledge, yet changing details to create more engaging stories—games
often rely simultaneously on our knowledge and our ignorance of music
history.

Exploring the World Map

Using classical music to suggest particular countries, regions, or cultures is
a time-honored practice in media. In the case of early film, for instance,
often the entire soundtrack was compiled from well-known classical works,
alongside folk tunes and popular songs.8 In that setting, musicians might
use their own musical knowledge to choose pieces that conveyed the
appropriate information to audience members, or they might rely on books
of musical examples to help them find appropriate music. The Hungarian-
American film musician Ernö Rapée included a number of classical
examples in his widely circulated Encyclopedia of Music for Motion
Pictures (1925), as did other cinema musicians of the era. Lacey Baker’s
Picture Music: A Collection of Classic and Modern Compositions for the
Organ Adapted for Moving Pictures (1919), for example, noted that the
“Arabian Dance” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was “admirable for an
Oriental picture,” and so on. In that way, the easily identifiable—and often
entirely made-up—ethnic flavor of these classical works served as useful
shorthand for particular cultures or locations.9 Particularly in the first
decade or so of their history, video games drew heavily on the visual and
musical language of early film, including a reliance on this kind of musical
cue.
The Nintendo Entertainment System boxing game Punch-Out!! (1987,
originally titled Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!) offers a clear example of how
these kinds of codes can work. Each of the opponents the player faces
during the game originates from a different country, which is represented in
the game in several ways. The boxers embody often uncomfortable
stereotypes of their homeland both visually—through the boxer’s name and
appearance—and aurally, by way of a short introductory musical cue played
before each match. These themes can relate to the character’s nationality in
a few different ways, but one straightforward technique is to use a familiar
musical work from that country.10 The German boxer Von Kaiser, for
instance, is introduced via a brief quotation from the “Ride of the
Valkyries” portion of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1870). This cue
works identically to early film compilation books—by relying on players’
prior knowledge to fill in missing background information. For this choice
to make sense, in other words, players have to already associate the tune
with Germany. They might make that association by recognizing it from its
original source or from its previous appearances in media to represent the
idea of “Germany.” For example, Wagner’s music appeared frequently
World War II era cartoons as a means of identifying Germans through
musical stereotyping, just as Von Kaiser himself is a stereotype of early
twentieth-century Germans.11 Rather than anything immanent in the music
itself, it is Wagner’s reputation as the archetypical German composer,
combined with the work’s reception history, that allows the “Ride of the
Valkyries” to work so effectively in Punch-Out!!.12
Using a composer’s music to signify their country of origin is one of the
most common ways of using classical music to indicate setting in games.
We find a similar use of classical music in the NES version of the popular
puzzle game Tetris.13 In this particular version, players begin by choosing
one of three options for background music. The first choice—though never
identified in the game as anything other than “Type A”—is the “Dance of
the Sugar Plum Fairy,” from the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s
ballet The Nutcracker (1892). As with Wagner’s music in Punch-Out!!,
Tchaikovsky’s music brings to mind what players already know about the
composer. Without that aspect, in fact, the “Dance of the Sugar Plum
Fairies” is an odd choice for background music. For one thing, at least in
the United States, The Nutcracker is typically associated with the holiday
season. Moreover, there is nothing particularly “Russian” about its music, at
least to my ear—there are certainly works by Tchaikovsky and others
composed in a much more overtly national style. But what the “Dance of
the Sugar Plum Fairies” lacks in “Russianness” it more than makes up for in
familiarity; even players unfamiliar with sounds of the Russian classical
repertoire would likely be able to name its source, and perhaps its
composer.14 Tchaikovsky’s music gains particular salience here as a result
of Tetris’s marketing in the United States as an explicitly Soviet product
(Figure 2.2). The Nintendo box art, for example, proclaims “From Russia
with Fun!,” and if players earn a high enough score, they are treated to an
image of the Kremlin—complete, ominously, with some kind of missile
being launched. Nearly every aspect of the NES release, in short, was
calculated to remind players of the game’s Soviet origins, and
Tchaikovsky’s music went a long way toward creating a sense of national
identity in a game entirely devoid of plot.15

FIGURE 2.2 The title screen from the Nintendo NES version of Tetris (1989).

Other games have made use of similar techniques. For example, several
games in the Civilization series of strategy games use classical works to
indicate the nationality of world leaders. In Civilization V (2010), for
instance, the music for Catherine the Great’s Russia is an arrangement of a
movement from the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and
Juliet (1935), and the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
(1824) represents Otto von Bismarck’s Germany. Understanding these
musical choices rests on the player’s awareness of the composer’s
nationality—quite an assumption, given the relative obscurity of some of
the selections. In some cases, games ask even more of players, depending
on a familiarity with the musical work itself. Punch-Out!! offers another
clear example: the Spaniard Don Flamenco enters the ring accompanied by
the opening strains of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875). Here the
player infers “Spanishness” not by knowing the nationality of the composer
—Bizet was French—but by knowing that Carmen takes place in Spain.
This kind of reference asks a bit more of players: they must be familiar
either with the story of an opera or with its use in other media to signify
Spain.
On the whole, the use of classical music to signify nationality or
geography seems to have declined in games since the 1990s. There are a
number of possible reasons for that change, but I suspect that just as films
moved beyond the musical codes of compilation scores, game composers
may have become more adept at using original music to give players a
sense of place. Their task was undoubtedly made easier by the
technological innovations in game audio that emerged in the 1990s, such as
CD audio. The use of prerecorded acoustic instruments, for instance,
allowed composers to use indigenous instruments to suggest geographical
locations. A bit of flamenco guitar might suggest “Spain” just as quickly as,
and likely more effectively than, a reference to a nineteenth-century
operatic plot, which is precisely what happens in the update/sequel/reboot
of Punch-Out!! released for the Nintendo Wii in 2009. In this newer
version, Don Flamenco’s intro music is still from Carmen, but now it
features guitar—an instrument nowhere to be found in Bizet’s original
music—to reinforce his nationality.

Time Management
Even if classical music has been outpaced as a technique for game
designers to indicate geographical location, however, it remains an
extremely useful and effective way of providing players with a sense of the
historical era The Assassin’s Creed example at the beginning of this chapter
illustrated how a piece of music can evoke a particular historical moment, a
technique that appears in most of the games in the series. Once again, there
are ample parallels to how classical music works in film and television. The
music of Henry Purcell (1659–1695) helps situate the film Restoration
(1995) in seventeenth-century England, just as that of George Frederic
Handel (1685–1759) does for the next century in The Madness of King
George (1994). In contrast to films, however, relatively few games are set
in a realistic (or even quasi-realistic) historical past, with a particular dearth
of games taking place before the twentieth century. Consequently, instances
of game designers using preexisting music in precisely this way are
relatively uncommon.16 Classical music requires, for the most part, some
pretense of historical reality; it might be jarring to hear “real-world” works
in the context of a pseudo-medieval fantasy world, for example. On the
other hand, classical works can play a vital role in games that do aspire to a
certain degree of historical authenticity.
Consider, for example, the point-and-click adventure game Versailles
1685 (1996) and its sequel, Versailles II: Testament of the King (2001). As
their titles suggest, both games take place in the monumental palace of
Louis XIV, where the player solves mysteries to unravel far-reaching
conspiracies against the throne. These games came about through a
somewhat unlikely collaboration between the Réunion des Musées
Nationaux in France (Association of National Museums) and Cyan
Entertainment—the developer behind the 1990s game phenomenon Myst
(1993). The goal was to wed the enjoyable puzzle-solving mechanics of
adventure games with educational background on French history and
culture, meaning that historical accuracy was of paramount importance.
Indeed, the art historian Béatrix Saule—a leading expert on Versailles and
the reign of Louis XIV—oversaw nearly every aspect of both games’
development. Music is front and center in this quest for authenticity; the
games exclusively contain music drawn from the French baroque period,
coinciding with the period in which they take place (Table 2.1). Versailles
1685 included excerpts of three religious choral works by Jean-Baptiste
Lully (1632–1687) and François Couperin (1668–1733)—two of the most
notable composers of the period—along with a single instrumental work by
the lesser-known Étienne Lemoyne (d. 1715).
TABLE 2.1 Preexisting French baroque music in Versailles 1685 (1997)

Composer Work Date of

composition
Jean-Baptiste Miserere, LWV 25 (excerpts) 1664
Lully (1632–
1687)
Lully Plaude Laetare Gallia, LWV 37 1668
(excerpts)
Lully Te Deum, LWV 55 (excerpts) 1677
Lully Dies Irae, LWV 64 (excerpts) 1684
François Ignitum eloquim tuum, from Quatre 1703
Couperin versets d’un motet composé de l’ordre
(1668–1733) du roy
Couperin Tabescere me fecit, from Quatre versets 1703
d’un motet composé de l’ordre du roy
Couperin Etenim Dominus, from Sept versets du 1704
motet composé de l’ordre du roy
Étienne Courante, from Pièces de théorbe en sol Date
Lemoyne (d. majeur uncertain
1715)

These choices, already carefully selected for their period, were chosen
with equal consideration of location. Not only were all three composers
French, but each of them also had close ties to the palace of Versailles:
Lully and Couperin were court composers and musicians under the employ
of Louis XIV (though at different times), while Lemoyne was one of the
king’s chamber musicians. In fact, the recordings themselves were
connected with Versailles as well, emerging from projects undertaken under
the auspices of the Centre de Musique Baroque (Baroque Music Center) at
Versailles in the early 1990s.17 Although the works by Couperin do stretch
the date slightly (having been published almost two decades after the events
of Versailles 1685), the game’s emphasis on authenticity is nonetheless
remarkable and underscores the importance of sound to establishing a sense
of historical immersion.
Versailles II takes the same approach but considerably broadens its range.
In addition to more of Lully’s and Couperin’s works, its soundtrack also
includes music by a laundry list of influential but less celebrated French
baroque composers, each related in some way to Versailles and the royalty
who lived there.18 In contrast with predominant religious choral works of
the first game, here the selections lean toward instrumental music, running
the gamut from solo harpsichord pieces to opera overtures. More
significantly, the emphasis on music as an important way of understanding
cultural history is even more apparent. Rather than using existing albums,
as the first game had done, Versailles II featured a large number of new
recordings to create the perfect historical compilation. As the back of the
English-language game box proudly explains, the soundtrack consists of
“an orchestra of 25 musicians directed by the harpsichordist Skip Sempé,
who has specially recorded more than an hour of music for the game.”
Music was a clear priority in both Versailles games, a crucial part of
creating an authentic, educational, and immersive gaming experience. It is,
to say the least, an impressive effort. Between the two games, players are
exposed to a wide and representative variety of French music of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—far more, in fact, than a typical
music student might encounter in the course of an obtaining an
undergraduate degree. Because most players will be unfamiliar with French
baroque music, the process of musical signification works a bit differently
than in the preceding examples. Instead of depending on players’ prior
knowledge, the music and gameplay work together to create a kind of
feedback loop: the games teach players to associate the sound of the music
with the era of the game, while the overtly historical (that is, “old”) sound
of the music encourages a sense of immersion.
The Versailles games were reasonably successful critically and
financially, particularly in France, where they were often used in
educational settings. Yet these kinds of historical games remain scarce, and
the ways in which they can fruitfully include classical music are often less
effective in other games. The role of music in Versailles has more in
common with traditional cinematic uses of classical music than it does with
other games. The use of historically accurate music in the French period
films Tous les matins du monde (1991) and Le roi danse (2000), for instance
—the latter of which also centers on Louis XIV—provides obvious
parallels. The music works in those films, as in Versailles, because it
grounds the viewer in a unique historical moment. At most, these kinds of
games and films typically address only relatively short spans of time—a
lifetime, perhaps. Television tends to work similarly; even the shows with
the longest timelines usually focus on a few decades, as, for example, in
Downton Abbey (2010–2015).
A number of games, on the other hand, contain narratives that stretch
over much longer spans of time—centuries, or even millennia—and in
which time itself becomes a central main gameplay element. For the most
part these are games in the strategy genre, popular mostly on computers
from the 1990s to the present. These games are defined primarily by the
player’s need to effectively manage time and resources. In historically
based strategy games (however loosely defined), players often guide the
development of a real-world civilization, fighting wars, advancing
technology, and so on. A sense of immersion in historical periods—whether
a particular era or the gradual march of progress—is a highly enjoyable part
of the game for many players. To that end, a number of strategy games
employ classical music from one or more periods to establish a sense of
chronological setting.
Civilization IV (2005), for example, uses classical music from multiple
periods to help guide the player through centuries of in-game time. Players
assume one of multiple world cultures and guide that culture from its
infancy to modern times by making military and diplomatic choices. Each
playthrough is different in terms of how exactly the culture develops, but
the same emphasis on forward motion—cultural progress—underlies each
attempt. As the player develops his or her chosen culture, the time advances
through several eras (“Medieval,” “Industrial,” “Modern,” etc.), each
featuring corresponding musical choices, ranging from antiquity to the
contemporary composer John Adams (b. 1947).19 The gradual evolution of
the music conveys a sense of forward momentum, culminating in the
minimal musical styles often associated with advanced technology and
modern life.20 As Karen Cook has pointed out in a study of the game, the
musical selections reinforce and reflect “the sense of chronological motion
and technological progress on which Civ IV is based.”21 In other words, the
classical music of Civ IV creates a narrative of music history that runs
parallel to the historical narrative created in each playthrough.
 This music-historical narrative conveys the progression of time in a way
that the user interface, graphics, and even gameplay might not. Someone
might reasonably argue that because each era is clearly identified as it
arrives, Civ IV encourages us to correlate the music and the era, much like
the Versailles games. But here, I think, the process works in a different way.
I would hazard a guess that most players have at least a general sense of the
progression of music history, whether they know it or not. Chant might
make us think of medieval monks, harpsichords of nobility in powdered
wigs, minimalism of busy modern cities, and so on. In Civ IV, the player’s
sense of musical progress affects how they perceive the rest of the game.
My in-game version of America suddenly feels much more advanced
because the music has progressed, even though in gameplay terms it hasn’t
changed significantly from two minutes ago. Players understand that
Adams is more advanced than Bach in the same way they understand that
nuclear power is more advanced than steam. That perception of progress
isn’t without problems, however. For one thing, it (perhaps unintentionally)
asserts that older styles of music are inherently less advanced or—less
charitably—perhaps even primitive. Furthermore, as Cook suggests, it
encourages a fundamentally Western understanding of all of world history,
even though many cultures have an equally rich (and often much longer)
tradition of music making.
Yet as much as Civ IV’s musical narrative building relies on players
having a basic knowledge of Western classical music history, it also counts
on them misreading that same history. Listeners with too much awareness
of music history will undoubtedly notice jarring anachronisms and
significant liberties taken by the game designers. Beethoven (1770–1827)—
whose music and life bridged the gap between the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries—shows up in the Renaissance. The actual Renaissance composer
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594), however, is part of the the
medieval era of the game. And so on. This creative historical reimagining
might seem just a quirk of Civ IV’s already loose take on historical
progress, but it actually highlights a recurring use of classical music in
games. Rather than conforming to historical fact (as in the Versailles
games), designers often will appeal to what players think they know about
music history. In other words, they find a sweet spot between, on the one
hand, conforming slavishly to historical fact and, on the other, alienating
players by stretching reality too far—an intriguing interplay to which I turn
in the next section.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

The previous sections explored several ways in which carefully selected
classical music helps establish a game’s geographical and chronological
setting—or both, as in the Versailles games. For the most part, this process
works by drawing music directly from the place or time that the game is
attempting to evoke. That approach seems obvious: German music equals
Germany, sixteenth-century music indicates the Renaissance, and so on. But
can music suggest the “right” setting by using the “wrong” music? In other
words, can games tap into players’ musical experiences and expectations to
indicate one setting by using music from somewhere or sometime different?
The short answer is yes, and it happens more often than many players may
realize. Take, for example, the case of the point-and-click adventure game
Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness (1993; also known as Quest for
Glory IV). Each of the games in this computer game series takes place in a
fantasy realm based loosely on a culture or location in the real world. The
first game, Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero (1989), takes place
in and around the vaguely Bavarian town of Spielburg, while subsequent
games adapt other cultures—Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990) takes
place in the quasi-Persian Shapeir, and Quest for Glory III: Wages of War
(1992) in the Central African–inspired savannas of Fricana. In each case,
the music composed for the game draws on musical signifiers of these
respective cultures to help ground players in each new location.
Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness brings the player to Mordavia, a
pastiche of Slavic cultures featuring characters and monsters drawn from
Eastern European folklore. The only instance of borrowed classical music
in the game appears as the background music in the Hotel Mordavia, a cozy
lodge that players visit on several occasions (Figure 2.3). The music is an
arrangement of “Anitra’s Dance,” from the incidental music to the play
Peer Gynt (music composed in 1875) by Edvard Grieg (1847–1907)—
music that features in a number of games throughout this book.22 When I
played Quest for Glory for the first time in 1994, I didn’t recognize this
music. Its inviting but somewhat melancholy quality seemed to fit the hotel
(and Mordavia itself) perfectly, and I assumed it was composed for the
game, like the rest of the score. Knowing what I know now about music
history, however, this musical selection feels fascinatingly “wrong.” In
contrast with the musical choices mentioned in the previous sections of this
chapter—those for Assassin’s Creed, Versailles 1685, or Tetris, for example
—the game seems to deliberately avoid obvious ways of suggesting its
setting. For example, there are plenty of Eastern European composers
whose music might have served the same purpose, but Grieg was
Norwegian—and an ardent nationalist at that. By the same token, the play
Peer Gynt, written by Grieg’s compatriot Henrik Ibsen, has nothing to do
with the Slavic legends found in Quest for Glory IV. While the play does
contain some supernatural elements, they emerge from Scandinavian
folklore, not Slavic. For that matter, the section of the play in which
“Anitra’s Dance” appears takes place in North Africa. In other words, it’s
difficult to imagine a piece of classical music that has less to do with
Eastern Europe. Yet its effectiveness in the game is hard to dispute.

FIGURE 2.3 The interior of the Hotel Mordavia, Quest for Glory IV (1994).

To be sure, the way Grieg’s composition was adapted from its original
version to fit the game does help players make a connection between sound
and in-game location. The pitches were altered to include a repeating
bassline reminiscent of folk music, and the added emphasis on the bass
(particularly beginning about halfway through the loop) gives the piece a
ponderous feel suitable for its rustic setting. But these alterations alone are
not enough to justify the music’s success here, or its presence at all. A more
likely possibility is that, despite all the geographical distance between
Norway (or North Africa) and Eastern Europe, Grieg’s music fits with what
many listeners expect from Slavic music. As a number of film-music
scholars have pointed out, the kinds of shorthand codes that composers use
to indicate nationality or ethnicity need not necessarily conform to actual
musical practices—they just have to be close enough to meet audience
expectations. K.J. Donnelly, for instance, notes the extent to which the
music often used to indicate “Indians” in Hollywood Westerns became a
“fake sonic . . . film prop that could easily be unrecognizable to Native
Americans.”23 This same “wrongness” is frequently found on television,
where strict time constraints often make musical shorthand even more
crucial than in film. Ron Rodman, for example, points to the rampant ethnic
cues in the “Shore Leave” episode of Star Trek from 1966, which contains
Irish and Japanese characters drawn from the imaginations of the Enterprise
crew. Rather than being “authentic,” the episode’s composer (Gerald Fried)
relied on “the intersubjective semantic field” of the audiences—in other
words, their frame of reference. “This is the musical verisimilitude of film
and television, where meaning relies on the negotiated meanings of
previous texts more than on the authentic texts that may or may not be
known to the viewer.”24
The same concepts apply in terms of representing chronological setting.
Civilization IV already illustrated this kind of musical anachronism, yet
because history doesn’t necessarily progress realistically in that game, the
player isn’t precisely “misled” into believing the music is from another
place or time.25 In some cases, however, music can be deceiving, signifying
a particular time through music of an entirely different era. That is certainly
the case in Pirates! (1987), a much-loved simulation game in which players
guide their avatars through a Caribbean career in swashbuckling. Originally
released on the Commodore 64, Pirates! was popular enough to warrant
versions on a number of other computers and consoles in the late 1980s, as
well as remakes in the 1990s (Pirates! Gold), again in 2004, and most
recently in mobile form in the early 2010s. For the sake of convenience, I
will discuss the 1991 release on the Nintendo Entertainment System,
although the same general points apply to most of the other versions, as
well. Immediately after starting a new game of Pirates!, players choose a
time for their adventures, with options ranging from 1560 to 1680. After
another few questions, they’re then treated to a brief introduction, featuring
an excerpt from a minuet by Handel, from his Water Music suite No. 1,
HWV 348 (1717). After a few moments of gameplay, players see another
screen of text, this time underscored by a portion of the bourée (another
type of dance) from the same suite.
Players’ choice of period has a significant impact on several aspects of
gameplay, yet no matter what, the music is always the same. This choice is
both a pun and a historical allusion: the title Water Music suggests the
game’s focus on ships and the sea, and Handel’s suite was composed for
performance on a barge, during a trip down the Thames. But Water Music
isn’t the only baroque music to appear in Pirates!: a visit to any of the
governors’ mansions is accompanied by J. S. Bach’s Two-Part Invention in
G Major, BWV 781 (ca. 1720), a keyboard work. From a historical
perspective, these pieces are intriguing. Bach’s invention and Handel’s
Water Music were composed in almost the same period, which suggests that
the designers intended to create a uniform musical environment—somewhat
akin to that in the Versailles games. Yet while those titles took great pains to
ensure historical accuracy, here players are faced with “impossible” music,
composed well after even the latest time players can choose. Even given
that the NES might not have had enough memory—or the developers might
not have had the patience—to include music from each of the possible
periods, they could have at least chosen music from one of the possibilities.
Instead, something else is at play. Although the works by Bach and Handel
don’t correspond to any of the eras available in Pirates!, they nonetheless
evoke them all. Untethered from a single period, the music instead creates a
broad sense of a historical past. Historical accuracy is less important, in
other words, than conforming to players’ expectations of what old music
sounds like.
The soundtrack to Pirates! assumes that players either don’t know or
don’t care that the music is, from a purely historical perspective, “wrong.”
At the same time, however, players still have to possess enough of an
understanding of music history to recognize that the music sounds
sufficiently old. These choices of classical pieces play with music history,
building on general expectations while exploiting the hazier details in the
name of creating an enjoyable gaming experience. In the next chapter, I
continue to explore this fascinating contradiction, turning to a specific
example of just how complicated these types of associations can become.

1
Daily Journal (February 1, 1728), quoted in Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 99.
2
The so-called Ezio Triology of Assassin’s Creed II (2009), Assassin’s Creed: Brotherbood (2010),
and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (2011) takes place primarily in Italy, although Revelations
abandons that setting for Constantinople.
3
Winton notes, for example, that well into the nineteenth century critics continued to weigh in on
the The Beggar’s Opera’s “tendency to deprave.” Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre,
107.
4
Interestingly—though almost certainly coincidentally—Polly (1729), Gay’s less popular sequel to
The Beggar’s Opera, sees the characters escape from London to become pirates in the West
Indies, which is essentially the plot of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
5
On this historicity of the Assassin’s Creed games, see Douglas N. Dow, “Historical Veneers:
Anachronism, Simulation and History in Assassin’s Creed II,” in Playing with the Past: Digital
Games and the Simulation of History, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 215–232.
6
For an overview of the relationship between game music and its cinematic models, see Tim
Summers, Understanding Game Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chap. 6.
7
Peter Larsen, Film Music (London: Reaktion, 2005), 68.
8
See, for example, the discussion of compilation scores in Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
9
Games have occasionally made use of folk musics for the same purposes, as in the 1996 version
of the popular edutainment game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, which licensed a
large number of global folk musics from the Smithsonian Institution’s Folkways music collection.
10
Dana Plank briefly examines Punch-Out! in her article “‘From Russia with Fun!’: Tetris,
‘Korobeiniki,’ and the Ludic Soviet,” Soundtrack 8 (2015): 7–24.
11
On the use of Wagner’s music in cartoons to represent Germanic opera and culture, see Daniel
Goldmark, Tunes for Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), chap. 5; and Neil Lerner, “Reading Wagner in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips
(1944),” in Wagner and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010), 210–224. On Wagner’s music in video games, see Tim Summers, “From
Parsifal to the PlayStation: Wagner and Video Game Music,” in Music in Video Games: Studying
Play, ed. K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2014), 199–
216.
12
Roger Hillman has suggested a similar role for late nineteenth-century Italian opera in historical
films from that country, noting that “the gap between the composition of a piece of music that
pre-exists the film and its use on that film’s soundtrack at a distance corresponding to the work’s
 reception history can in turn suggest—or even provide—historical interpretation.” Roger
Hillman, “Sounding the Depths of History: Opera and National Identity in Italian Film,” in A
Companion to the Historical Film, ed. Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu
(Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 328.
13
In fact, two versions of Tetris were released on the NES, one produced by Nintendo (which is the
one I discuss) and a rival version produced by Tengen.
14
We might find a cinematic parallel here in the extensive use of Sergei Prokofiev’s music in
Woody Allen’s film Love and Death (1975), a parody of Russian literature.
15
For a fuller look at classical music in the NES Tetris, see my article “Blip, Bloop, Bach? Some
Uses of Classical Music on the Nintendo Entertainment System,” Music and the Moving Image 2,
no. 1 (2009): 40–52. Plank’s “From Russia with Fun!” also explores in some detail the uses of the
folk song “Korobeiniki,” in various versions of Tetris, and her insightful work has informed my
discussion of Tetris here.
16
On historical games, see many of the essays in Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R.
Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013).
17
All examples are from the same Musique à Versailles series of recordings. The Lully works are
taken from the 1994 recording Lully: Grand Motets Vol. 1, by Le Concert Spirituel, directed by
Hervé Niquet (originally released by FNAC Music, later later released under the Naxos label);
the Couperin motets are taken from a 1993 recording by Les Talens Lyriques, directed by
Christophe Rousset, later released on the Virgin Veritas label; and the Lemoyne work began as an
interlude on the 1994 recording Sébastien Le Camus: Airs de Cours, also available on Virgin
Veritas.
18
Aside from Lully and Couperin, Versailles II contains music by Jean-Henri D’Anglebert (1629–
1691), Michel Lambert (1610–1696), Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (1601–1672),
Gaspard Le Roux (ca. 1660–1707), Louis Couperin (1626–1661), André Campra (1660–1744),
and Marin Marais (1656–1728).
19
Karen M. Cook, “Music, History, and Progress in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV,” in Music in Video
Games: Studying Play, ed. K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (New York:
Routledge, 2014), 166–182.
20
Robert Fink, for example, has argued compellingly for an interpretation of American minimalist
music as in part “a sonorous constituent of a characteristic repetitive existence of self in mass-
media consumer society.” Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as
Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4.
21
Cook, “Music, History, and Progress in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV,” 168.
22
Grieg’s well-known “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” also from Peer Gynt, is particularly
prevalent in early games, appearing, for example, in Mountain King (1983), Maniac Miner
(1983), and Jet Set Willy 2 (1985).
23
K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI, 2005), 56.
24
Ron Rodman, Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 124.
25
On the historical simulation of Civilization and similar games, see, for example, Rolfe Daus
Peterson, Andrew Justin Miller, and Sean Joseph Fedorko, “The Same River Twice: Exploring
Historical Representation and the Value of Simulation in the Total War, Civilization, and
Patrician Franchises,” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed.
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 33–48; and
Tom Apperly, “Modding the Historians’ Code: Historical Verisimilitude and the Counterfactual
Imagination,” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed.
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 185–198.
3 A Requiem for Schrödinger’s Cat

EARLY ON IN BioShock Infinite (2013), protagonist Booker DeWitt arrives in

the city of Columbia—which, despite the game’s setting in 1912, happens
to be floating in the sky. Still adjusting to his impossible surroundings,
Booker tries to blend in at a carnival, surrounded by excited residents
milling through impeccably tidy streets. As players explore, they might
notice an airship pull up alongside the city, a stage prominently featured on
its deck. Improbably, the deck of this ship hosts a dapper barbershop
quartet, complete with red-and-white-striped coats, bow ties, and top hats
(Figure 3.1). The first time I played the game, the barbershop quartet
seemed like a nice historical touch—a clever but not particularly innovative
way of keeping players grounded (so to speak) in the Gilded Age. I almost
continued on my way, but at the last minute, I decided to stop and listen. As
I did, it dawned on me that I knew the song the quartet was singing, but I
couldn’t quite place it. A few moments later, however, I realized both why I
knew the song and why I didn’t: the music was an arrangement of “God
Only Knows,” from the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds (1966). For first-
time players who know the original version of the song, this moment might
be BioShock Infinite’s earliest instance of foreshadowing—a warning to
players that not all is as it seems in this idyllic city in the clouds. Indeed,
before long, everything goes horribly awry, and Columbia’s utopian veneer
is violently and irrevocably stripped away.
FIGURE 3.1 Columbia’s barbershop quartet performs “God Only Knows” in BioShock Infinite
(2013).

The previous chapter explored how classical music in games builds on

players’ prior musical knowledge and experiences to create setting. In this
chapter I’m interested in how BioShock Infinite uses the same tools for the
opposite purpose: rather than anchoring the game in a particular time and
place, the music keeps players temporally and geographically unmoored.
Because Infinite builds its complex web of references by using several
different musical styles, I broaden the scope of this chapter beyond music
we might typically think of as classical. The game’s diverse soundtrack
includes American popular music of multiple eras, jazz standards, blues,
Protestant hymnody, and classical music—all in addition to the newly
created score by series composer Garry Schyman. The mélange comes as
no surprise to those familiar with the previous BioShock games. Since the
series began in 2007, it has garnered attention from players, critics, and
scholars alike for its intellectual depth and attention to detail, including in
its music selection.1 In fact, much of the music in BioShock Infinite works
in the same ways as the music in the previous two games, reinforcing the
historical position while also offering commentary (often ironic) on the
actions of the game.
 Yet Infinite also differs in significant ways from its predecessors and, on
a grander scale, from how preexisting music usually works in media.2 It
does so, I argue, in service of a specific goal. These musical selections and
arrangements echo the game’s philosophical reflections on certain aspects
of quantum mechanics and, in particular, on the simultaneous coexistence
of mutually exclusive realities. By dwelling on that topic, BioShock Infinite
invokes the specter of Schrödinger’s cat, the 1935 thought experiment from
which I draw this chapter’s title. Though of course the field of quantum
mechanics is complex and at times esoteric, this experiment illustrates one
of its better-known principles. In the words of astrophysicist John Gribbin:

It is possible to set up an experiment in such a way that there is a

precise fifty-fifty chance that one of the atoms in a lump of radioactive
material will decay in a certain time and that a detector will register the
decay if it does happen. Schrödinger . . . tried to show the absurdity of
those implications by imagining such an experiment set up in a closed
room, or box, which also contains a live cat and a phial of poison, so
arranged that if the radioactive decay does occur then the poison
container is broken and the cat dies. In the everyday world, there is a
fifty-fifty chance that the cat will be killed, and without looking inside
the box we can say, quite happily, that the cat inside is either dead or
alive. But now we encounter the strangeness of the quantum world.
According to the theory, neither of the two possibilities open to the
radioactive material, and therefore to the cat, has any reality unless it is
observed. The atomic decay has neither happened nor not happened,
the cat has neither been killed nor not killed, until we look inside the
box to see what has happened. Theorists who accept the pure version
of quantum mechanics say that the cat exists in some indeterminate
state, neither dead nor alive, until an observer looks into the box to see
how things are getting on. Nothing is real unless it is observed.3

One solution to this apparent paradox was the many-worlds theory of

quantum mechanics, which suggests that a virtually infinite series of
parallel universes exists alongside our own, differing from one another in
large or small ways based on the choices of their inhabitants and the
random effects of probability. Originally developed in the late 1950s, this
idea gained more attention in the following two decades, thanks in part to
the work of physicist Bryce DeWitt—the inspiration for Infinite protagonist
Booker DeWitt’s name.
Succinctly summarizing the plot of BioShock Infinite is challenging (I
say, having just attempted to succinctly summarize a branch of theoretical
physics), but the many-worlds idea is central to its narrative. In the game’s
universe, scientists have discovered how to create “Tears” in the fabric of
space and time—ruptures that allow travel between alternate realities.
Elizabeth, one of the game’s main characters, can open these Tears at will,
allowing her and Booker to travel into alternate universes or to bring
objects and people from one universe into another—typically with
unforeseen, and occasionally disastrous, consequences. Elizabeth gained
this power by virtue of a mistake: while she was being transported from one
universe to another as an infant, the tip of her finger was caught in a Tear,
severing it and leaving it behind in her original universe of origin. Because
each new universe is created because of a difference in choice or chance,
each one is mutually exclusive. Like Schrödinger’s cat, then, Elizabeth thus
inhabits two contradictory realities simultaneously. Infinite subtextually (if
not directly) delves deeply into this conflict, repeatedly calling attention to
the impossible coexistence of things that both are and are not. This central
dichotomy features into the game’s musical choices in ways that are both
obvious and subtle.

Space, Time, Music

As I’ve already discussed, it’s virtually impossible to detach music we
already know from our prior experiences with it. Sound design in games
often depends on those associations, which allow the music to work as a
kind of shorthand—a code designed to trigger certain associations in the
viewer or player. Popular music (broadly speaking) can be especially
helpful in this regard. While many players might not be able to distinguish
between, say, music of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, they
probably have a decade-by-decade understanding of historical trends in
popular music styles. Take the Grand Theft Auto games, for example, which
rely on in-game radio stations to help create the setting. Grand Theft Auto:
Vice City (2002) sonically immerses the player in a fictionalized version of
1980s Miami, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) does the same for
1990s Southern California, and so on.4 I have argued elsewhere that mid-
twentieth-century popular music plays this role in multiple ways in the
original BioShock: the style of the music itself reminds players of the
game’s chronological setting despite the futuristic technology surrounding
them, while the song lyrics frequently comment on the action at hand.5
That multilevel functionality persists in BioShock Infinite, although there
the choices of period music are a bit looser in their chronological
grounding. Because it was difficult to find “music from that era that sounds
great to a modern ear,” as BioShock series designer Ken Levine explained in
an interview, the popular music in Infinite encompasses a longer time frame
(in some cases a decade or more after 1912) and a wider variety of musical
styles than its predecessors.6 Yet the function of these songs remains the
same. The 1907 gospel hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” for example
—heard multiple times throughout the game—contributes to the
chronological setting and reinforces Columbia’s Protestant cultural
foundation. More significantly, the song also gradually transforms into a
commentary on the game’s central metaphysical concern: breaking the
cycle of historical repetition in alternate universes.
But if songs like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” work in much the same
way that popular music did in the first two BioShock games, the
anachronistic music is something new to Infinite—and vitally important to
its soundscape.7 Let’s consider an example. Booker travels to Columbia
with a singular goal: liberating Elizabeth from the prison where she has
been kept for most of her life. Accomplishing that feat occupies the first
several hours of the game, but after a harrowing escape, the duo find
themselves on a picturesque beach, where they (and the player) get some
much-needed respite. As Booker contemplates their next move, Elizabeth
meanders along the beach, enjoying her newfound freedom and taking in
the sights. Eventually the pair head toward an arcade, following a
lighthearted tune from a calliope (a steam-powered organ popular at fairs
and carnival settings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
The calliope’s unique old-timey sound suggests its historical period, as
does the distinctive oom-pah-pah of the arrangement. Upon close listening,
however, players may recognize “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” a song
originally written in 1979 but popularized by Cyndi Lauper four years later
and covered by a number of artists in the years since. Although the calliope
arrangement is strictly instrumental, players who know the song will no
doubt consider the text—or at least the title, which seems to comment on
Elizabeth’s childlike exuberance. Delving deeper into the lyrics suggests
other connections. “Some boys take a beautiful girl,” the song tells us, “And
hide her away from the rest of the world / I want to be the one to walk in the
sun / Oh girls they want to have fun.” Clearly, these lines reflect the
situation at hand: Elizabeth was hidden away from the world, yet now she is
literally both walking in the sun and having fun. These anachronistic
arrangements (Table 3.1 for a complete list) still perform the historicizing
and commentary functions players have come to expect from BioShock
games, but their unusual chronological position complicates things, adding
another layer onto an already multilayered allusion.

TABLE 3.1 Anachronistic popular music in BioShock Infinite (2013)

Title Artist Date

“Everybody Wants to Rule the Tears for Fears 1985
World”
“Fortunate Son” Creedence Clearwater 1969
Revival
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” Cyndi Lauper 1983
“God Only Knows” Beach Boys 1966
“Shiny Happy People” R.E.M. 1991
“Tainted Love” Gloria Jones; Soft Cell 1964;
1981

Anachronistic popular music in media (particularly games) is relatively

uncommon, but there are nonetheless numerous antecedents going back to
early cinema. The influential Western Stagecoach (1939), for instance,
included several songs that would be written only decades after its story
takes place.8 More recently, the director Quentin Tarantino uses this
technique in many of his films; the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction (1994), for
example, includes popular music from multiple decades, obscuring when
precisely the film takes place. In other films, directors use anachronistic
music in historical settings to help audiences find an equivalent
contemporary experience. Both Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006)
and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) feature music of the
“wrong” period—1980s pop and 2010s hip-hop, respectively. In both cases,
the music is intended to capture a feeling of opulence and excess that
historically accurate music might not convey to listeners who were less
familiar with those styles. These films come into closer dialogue with the
present by encouraging audience members to draw connections between the
unfamiliar and the familiar (the 1780s and the 1980s, for example).
Games offer an analogue in the post-apocalyptic Fallout series of role-
playing games. Although these games take place in the distant future, they
extensively feature midcentury American popular music. The dystopian
environments in which players find themselves are rendered even more
jarring by the optimism of the chronologically misplaced midcentury
music.9 In other words, preexisting music in games typically either (1)
evokes a particular period and/or geographical setting, as in the first two
BioShock games; or (2) actively works against those settings (whether to
disorient players or to create meaningful transhistorical connections for
them). By definition, these functions are mutually exclusive—each is
useful, but game designers must make a choice.
What makes BioShock Infinite particularly innovative in this regard is
that the game designers opt for both: songs like “God Only Knows” and
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” are simultaneously historically/contextually
appropriate and noticeably anachronistic. The resulting cognitive
dissonance has the unusual effect of both reinforcing and destabilizing the
player’s sense of time and place. Players (distinct from the characters in the
game) thus know two things about the chronological setting of BioShock
Infinite: it’s 1912, and it cannot possibly be 1912. The songs we hear are
both new and old—and, moreover, “new” again in their “old”
arrangements.10
The game eventually offers players a logical explanation (relatively
speaking) for the temporal confusion these songs incite. Unbeknownst to
his devoted Columbia audience, the songwriter Albert Fink has been
opening Tears to alternate dimensions and plagiarizing the melodies of
songs that shouldn’t exist in 1912. As in the case of “God Only Knows” and
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” the historical juxtapositions can initially
confuse players, becoming understandable only during replays. (Indeed,
many design aspects of BioShock Infinite seem calculated to encourage
players to experience the game multiple times—resonating with the game’s
cyclical theme, and perhaps offering a kind of metacommentary on video
games as a medium.) Even more important, however, these songs reinforce
Infinite’s focus on the cognitive dissonance of mutually exclusive realities.
In the following section, I examine this aspect more fully by exploring
Infinite’s use of classical music.

Tears and Mourning

Back at the carnival, just after the encounter with the barbershop quartet,
Booker receives a raffle ticket (a baseball)—a chance at the grand prize at
the carnival’s main event. Upon joining a large crowd to witness this
spectacle, Booker has the unexpected (and undesired) good luck to win the
raffle. The prize is then revealed to be somewhat less than grand: an
opportunity to be the first to throw his baseball (America’s pastime!) at an
interracial couple imprisoned onstage in a grotesquely racist tableau of a
wedding (Figure 3.2). (Player can opt to maintain their cover by throwing
the ball at the couple, or instead choose the immensely satisfying route of
hitting the carnival barker instead.) The couple comes onstage to some
familiar music: the raucous crowd, out for blood, joins together in singing
the bridal chorus from Richard Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin (the tune is
often called “Here Comes the Bride”). The music is ironic—a twisted
parody of its appearance at countless joyous weddings.11 Yet like the
musical commentary in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (and numerous
songs throughout the BioShock series), there is another level to the bridal
chorus—and one that is both strikingly apt and deadly serious.
FIGURE 3.2 The penalty for interracial relationships in Columbia, accompanied by Wagner’s
“Wedding Chorus.”

Wagner was a well-known and vociferous anti-Semite, a firm believer in

the purity of the German people and the inferiority of other races—a legacy
that has cast a dark shadow over his music for generations. Exacerbating the
problem is the knowledge that Wagner’s music was much beloved of Adolf
Hitler, inextricably linking the composer and his works to the Nazi Party
and its deeply racist ideology. The appearance of the bridal chorus in
BioShock Infinite thus casts the shadow of white supremacist thought and
forebodingly suggests the tragic endpoint of the route on which Columbia’s
citizens find themselves.12 As with the popular-music covers I have already
examined, understanding Wagner’s music in this way takes some
anachronistic thought on the player’s part. World War II was decades away
in 1912, and of course it might never occur at all in the alternate universe
that contains Columbia. Nevertheless, Wagner’s music still carries the
weight of this baggage, suggesting to historically minded players the true
depravity of Columbia’s social injustice. This fairly brief scene illustrates
how classical music functions as commentary in BioShock Infinite, and
several other instances in the game work in a similar way. Rather than trace
all those examples, however, the rest of this chapter explores one
particularly extended, prominent, and multilayered example: the game’s use
of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, K. 626 (1791) as a sonic manifestation of
the larger issues of quantum mechanics and uncertainty at play in BioShock
Infinite.
At one point in the game, Booker and Elizabeth travel to the memorial
and mausoleum of Lady Annabelle Comstock, the murdered wife of
Columbia’s “Prophet” and leader, Zachary Comstock—and ostensibly
Elizabeth’s mother. The beloved Lady Comstock initially supported her
husband’s vision for Columbia but later came to question his extreme
measures. Elizabeth was the final straw: rendered sterile from the overuse
of Tears, the Prophet sought out an heir by abducting a child from an
alternate universe version of himself. Unable to accept this turn of events,
Lady Comstock threatens to reveal the truth to Columbia’s citizens, at
which point her husband has her assassinated and blames her murder on
anarchists. The martyred Lady Comstock now lies entombed in a
mausoleum, where her body and belongings are venerated like holy relics
by the Prophet’s cultish followers. By way of plaques and sculptures
scattered throughout the mausoleum, players learn the (fictionalized)
narrative of Elizabeth’s birth and Lady Comstock’s assassination, each
room revealing a bit more of the tale. As my preceding explanation likely
makes clear, this narrative is overtly religious, drawing parallels to the
Christian Holy Family. Elizabeth is depicted as Columbia’s messiah, “the
Lamb”; Comstock as its great Prophet and Saint Joseph; and Lady
Comstock as the Virgin Mary.
Mozart’s Requiem can be heard throughout the mausoleum, the hiss and
pops of a phonograph record making clear that the music emanates from
some kind of hidden speaker system. The choice of music is appropriate,
given the memorial and religious functions of the space. A requiem is a
Catholic mass for the dead, a multipart liturgy frequently set to music by
composers from the Middle Ages to the present. Beyond its overall
significance, however, different movements (that is, discrete sections) of
Mozart’s work also cleverly reflect the subject of each room (Table 3.2).
Despite being sung in Latin, the texts work much like the popular songs in
the BioShock series: they contribute to the overall tone, while their texts
provide additional commentary.
TABLE 3.2 Mozart’s Requiem in BioShock Infinite

Location Movement of Requiem

“The Memorial to Our Lady” Lacrimosa
“The Transport of the Child” Agnus Dei (opening only)
“The Murder of Our Lady” Rex tremendae
“The Vengeance of the Prophet” Confutatis
Lady Comstock’s Tomb Lacrimosa

Sometimes that commentary is on a fairly basic level. Consider, for

example, the final room of the memorial, “The Vengeance of the Prophet,”
which tells the story of Zachary Comstock’s retribution on his wife’s
supposed murderers. The fiery Confutatis movement provides musical
accompaniment to this scene, with text describing the damnation of the
guilty:

Confutatis maledictis, When the wicked are confounded,

Flammis acribus addictis, Doomed to flames of woe unbounded,
Voca me cum benedictus. Call me with thy saints surrounded.
Oro supplex et acclinis, Low, I kneel, with heart-submission;
Cor contritum quasi cinis: See, like ashes, my contrition;
Gere curam mei finis. Help me in my last condition.

Here the music and text work largely unironically, unless the player chooses
to consider the irony of Comstock claiming to smite the wicked when he
himself was (by proxy) the murderer.
Similarly, in the room labeled “The Murder of Our Lady,” we hear the
Rex tremendae movement—a text pleading for mercy set to a loud and
oddly accusatory bit of music from Mozart:

Rex tremendae majestatis, King of majesty tremendous,

 Qui salvandos savas gratis, Who dost free salvation send us,
Salve me, fons pietatis. Fount of pity, then befriend us.

On a musical level, the excerpt functions unironically, conveying the sense

of righteous fury the scene would suggest. Yet the text seems out of place—
why reference a king except to suggest Zachary Comstock? The game
designers could easily have chosen the much more suitable text of, say, the
Dies irae (Day of Wrath) portion of the Requiem. On the other hand,
perhaps we can read the text as a subconscious acknowledgment of
Comstock’s guilt, the choir’s loudly repeated cries of “Rex!” casting subtle
judgment on Comstock as much as they do on his enemies.
In other rooms, however, the textual commentary is even more subtle.
“The Transport of the Child,” for instance, depends more on what isn’t said
than what is. That room depicts Elizabeth’s relocation to the secluded tower
where Booker finds her in the game’s first hours. Because Elizabeth has
been raised almost entirely in seclusion, it’s only in this room that she
realizes—much to her chagrin—that Comstock is her father, and Lady
Comstock her mother. Because Elizabeth’s epiphany takes center stage,
there is very little music here. As the pair first enter the room, however, we
hear the opening of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) portion of the Requiem.
Although on first visiting the room we do not hear the text, the title of the
movement in particular is highly significant. Throughout the game,
Elizabeth is portrayed as “The Lamb of Columbia.” Just after Booker
arrives, for instance, a stained-glass window shows a haloed baby Elizabeth
surrounded by her parents, featuring the caption “The Lamb: The Future of
Our City” (Figure 3.3). Again and again, Infinite positions Elizabeth in a
messianic role, Columbia’s counterpart to Jesus (the “Lamb of God”) in the
Christian faith. Mozart’s music introduces the movement instrumentally but
cuts off just before the voices actually sing the text “Agnus Dei.” Yet at that
very instant Elizabeth grasps that she is the Lamb of Columbia, and her
startled outburst takes the choir’s place. Likewise, Booker is referred to
repeatedly throughout the game as the “False Shepherd,” brought to
Columbia to “lead the Lamb astray.” By connecting with these titles (“False
Shepherd” and “Lamb of Columbia”), the Agnus Dei subtly connects
Booker and Elizabeth with the narrative Comstock’s memorial seeks to
create, raising questions of how precisely they fit into Columbia’s story.
FIGURE 3.3 Stained-glass window depicting Elizabeth as “The Lamb.”

Beyond this type of commentary, though, Mozart’s Requiem and its

careful manipulation in the game allow the work to comment not just on the
action at hand but also on the larger metaphysical questions surrounding
BioShock Infinite. The entrance to the memorial (“The Memorial to Our
Lady”) features what is probably the best-known portion of the Requiem:
the Lacrimosa, with melancholic music accompanied by a text that focuses
on lamentation, conjuring images of weeping mourners:

Lacrimosa dies illa, Ah! that day of tears and mourning!

Qua resurget ex favilla From the dust of earth returning
Judicandus homo reus; Man for judgment must prepare him.
Huic ergo parce, Deus. Spare, O God, in mercy spare him.
Pie Jesu Domine, Lord all pitying, Jesu blest,
dona eis requiem. Grant them thine eternal rest
Amen. Amen.13
Booker and Elizabeth encounter the Lacrimosa again shortly after passing
through the memorial, at Lady Comstock’s actual tomb. As with the
entryway, inside the tomb the Lacrimosa replays constantly—an eternal,
unremitting sonic reminder of the tragedy of her loss.
When the pair arrive at the tomb, Elizabeth unwittingly creates a Tear in
reality, opening a window into a universe where Lady Comstock was never
murdered. The results are ghastly. Lady Comstock is only partially
“resurrected,” at least one living version from an alternate universe merged
with the dead version from the tomb. Like Schrödinger’s cat, Lady
Comstock exists in an impossibly liminal space, at once alive and dead—
her rage at her murderer and the cognitive dissonance of her horrific state
drive her instantly insane. Unable to latch onto a single reality, she
manifests as the Siren, a rampaging specter. The soundscape surrounding
the Siren is a distortion of the same Lacrimosa movement players have now
heard on several occasions. Its familiar musical elements are twisted and
manipulated, combined with static, as if heard underwater and from a great
distance. Even more disturbingly, the Siren occasionally seems to hum
along, suggesting that somehow Lady Comstock absorbed the music that
has been her constant companion for years. The persistence of Mozart’s
music suggests that some part of the Siren remains trapped in her glass
coffin in Lady Comstock’s tomb, listening all the while.
The Siren is certainly a dramatic representation of quantum uncertainty,
but at this point in the game, that same idea is also playing out on several
other levels—not all of which are musical. For instance, Elizabeth’s
existence in mutually exclusive realities isn’t entirely unlike Lady
Comstock’s own situation. As I have already mentioned, her powers stem
from her simultaneous existence in two realities. Her parentage is similarly
complicated: Zachary and Annabelle Comstock both are and are not her
parents. This already complex situation is further complicated by the fact
that the alternate Comstock from whom Elizabeth was taken is, in fact,
Booker DeWitt, who in some realities experiences a religious conversion
and becomes the Prophet of Columbia. Thus—like Lady Comstock’s
manifestation as the Siren—all the main characters (and several supporting
characters) in BioShock Infinite are both who they are and not who they are,
as mutually exclusive realities converge in unexpected ways.
First-time players won’t be equipped with all the information necessary
to understand the interplay of these alternate realities, which only become
clear after multiple playthroughs. The distorted version of the Lacrimosa,
however, is an eerie sonic representation of precisely this uncertainty.
Neither music nor sound effect, neither in the tomb nor out of it, the
Lacrimosa inhabits the same impossible space as Lady Comstock.
Moreover, unlike essentially every other example of popular or classical
music in Columbia, there’s no clear source for the sound (aside from
possibly Lady Comstock herself). Its lack of a visible origin—often called
acousmatic sound in film studies—may be unsettling to the player, at least
subconsciously. Is the music/sound that we hear near Lady Comstock
audible to the characters, as her humming would seem to imply? If so, what
could be producing it? On the other hand, Booker and Elizabeth don’t
comment on the sound—but then they seldom draw attention to music.
There is no clear answer, and thus players may interpret the music either
way. It may emerge from the combination of any number of realities—
including our own.
The history of the Requiem itself offers one final example of how the
work becomes a sonic symbol of quantum uncertainty. It occupies a unique
position in Mozart’s life: he died of illness midway through its composition,
leaving sections unfinished; the version we typically hear today was
completed by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr. The Requiem is thus a
work that is simultaneously by Mozart and not by Mozart. But because
typically Mozart is identified as the sole composer (I suspect tickets for the
Süssmayr Requiem would not sell quite so well), it is also a work written
both while its composer was alive and after he had died. This macabre and
pseudo-paradoxical history echoes its use in BioShock Infinite,
corresponding to Lady Comstock’s commingling of life and death and
creating parallels with the game’s numerous other mutually exclusive
realities.

BioShock Infinite focuses on creating a complex and compelling narrative

centered on the relationship between Elizabeth and Booker. Yet it also
touches on a wide range of social and philosophical issues, from class and
race relations to the fundamental nature of our universe. As with previous
BioShock games, carefully selected and placed music plays several
important roles, but whereas this music in the first two games served largely
to establish setting and comment on the on-screen action, in Infinite it takes
on additional—and occasionally contradictory—functions as well. In
addition to its sly commentary on the game’s narrative, here music also ties
into the metaphysical concerns of quantum mechanics in various ways.
Anachronistic popular music creates cognitive dissonance for the player by
simultaneously reinforcing and destabilizing the game’s Gilded Age setting,
while the repeated use of Mozart’s Requiem at key points subtly raises
existential concerns of life and (un)death. In doing so, BioShock Infinite
further expands the musical trends established in the first two games and
continues to explore how music can contribute to the artistic development
of video games.

1
On the scholarly attraction to the BioShock series, see, for example, Ryan Lizardi, “Bioshock:
Complex and Alternate Histories,” Games Studies 14, no. 1 (August 2014), available online at
[Link]
2
Scholars have begun to consider Infinite’s rich soundscape from a variety of fruitful perspectives
—and there is indeed much to say on the topic. The music of BioShock Infinite has been a
prominent topic at music conferences since its release—the only game to receive such individual
attention. See Enoch Jacobus, “Lighter Than Air: A Return to Columbia” (paper presented at the
North American Conference on Video Game Music, Texas Christian University, January 17–18,
2015); Enoch Jacobus, “There’s Always a Lighthouse: Commentary and Foreshadowing in the
Diegetic Music of BioShock: Infinite” (paper presented at the North American Conference on
Video Game Music, Youngstown State University, January 18–19, 2014); Matt Thomas, “Give
Me That Old-Time Religion: American Folk Music in the Video Game BioShock: Infinite” (paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, Sacramento, CA, March 4–8,
2015); and Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey, “Breaking the Circle: Analyzing the Narrative Function of
Music Manipulation in BioShock Infinite” (paper presented at the North American Conference on
Video Game Music, Youngstown State University, January 18–19, 2014). Both of Jacobus’s
presentations are available online at the author’s personal website:
[Link] Pozderac-Chenevey’s presentation is
available online at
[Link]
_Music_Manipulation_in_Bioshock_Infinite.
3
John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (New York: Bantam,
1984), 2–3.
4
On the uses of music for setting in the Grand Theft Auto games (particularly San Andreas), see
Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), chaps. 1 and 2.
5
William Gibbons, “‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in
BioShock,” Game Studies 11, no. 3 (2011), available online at
[Link]
6
John Mix Meyer, “Q&A: Ken Levine’s Brave New World of BioShock Infinite,” Wired (April 26,
2012), available online at [Link] (accessed
 November 11, 2014).
7
These arrangements were created by Scott Bradlee, founder of the music ensemble Postmodern
Jukebox, which specializes in these kinds of antihistorical arrangements. On the arrangements
and their narrative significance, see also Pozderac-Chenevey, “Breaking the Circle,” who
discusses the commentary functions of several of the anachronistic songs found in the game.
8
On popular music in Stagecoach, see Kathryn Kalinak, How the West Was Sung: Music in the
Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), chap. 3.
9
Fallout conveniently justifies these musical selections by suggesting that the atomic blasts
destroyed all post-vinyl recording technology, but that tortured logic seems both unconvincing
and unnecessary.
10
Moreover, because players are likely to know at least some of this music in its form, identifying
the arrangements can even become a kind of metagame, existing outside the narrative framework.
Andra Ivănescu astutely notes that “the player becomes the tourist through time and space,
noticing anachronisms that the characters in the game, even the playable character, would not be
able to identify. The game and its music show the player the cracks forming in the fourth wall,
reminding them that they are just a player.” Andra Ivănescu, “The Music of Tomorrow,
Yesterday! Music, Time and Technology in BioShock Infinite,” Networking Knowledge 7, no. 2
(2014). Available online at [Link]
11
Tim Summers also points out some uses of Wagner’s music in video games to indicate similar
ideas, as in the use of the “Bridal Chorus” during a wedding in King’s Quest VI: Heir Today,
Gone Tomorrow (1992). Tim Summers, “From Parsifal to the PlayStation: Wagner and Video
Game Music,” in Music in Video Games: Studying Play, ed. K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons,
and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2014), 199–216.
12
Pozderac-Chenevey suggests a similar aspect of race conflict in her reading of the use of Frédéric
Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2. Pozderac-Chenevey, “Breaking the Circle.”
13
The texts and poetic translations for the Requiem are taken from Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s
Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which
also provides valuable historical and cultural background on Mozart’s work.
4 Allusions of Grandeur

IN DISCUSSION OF video games and art, one question is virtually guaranteed

to trigger eye rolls from game critics and scholars: “When will video games
have their Citizen Kane?” Ad nauseam repetition has long ago relegated the
issue to cliché and parody, but it illustrates a set of stubbornly persistent
artistic values.1 For one thing, the question reinforces the position of Orson
Welles’s 1941 film as the apex of cinematic “great art”—the masterpiece
that indisputably proved the artistic bona fides of the medium. Claiming
games haven’t found their Citizen Kane is a way of suggesting that they
aren’t yet worthy of being considered art, which is of course a central
concern of this book. Specifically for this chapter, however, the Citizen
Kane trope exposes the balance of artistic power in the relationship between
film and games.
Even outside the realm of so-called art films, cinema enjoys a kind of
cultural capital that games currently don’t possess—and certainly didn’t in
prior decades. Films, and to a lesser degree television, are understood to be
serious business; for the most part, games just aren’t. And so, to bridge this
value gap, games routinely borrow from film in a variety of ways. Most
obviously, for decades there have been games based on well-known film
franchises, as a way of allowing players to experience their favorite movies
interactively.2 Many other games seek to capture this same feel for players
by tapping into cinematic styles. As game designer Cliff Bleszinski wrote in
the introduction to the instruction manual for Gears of War 2 (2008): “This
video game . . . was designed around the idea of cinematic action. We
wanted the gameplay experience to feel like a summer blockbuster where
you, the gamer, are the star.”
Many different audiovisual elements can contribute to creating a
cinematic feeling for players, as designers emulate how movies look and
sound. The laserdisc-based arcade classic Dragon’s Lair (1983), for
example, was notable mostly because its advanced graphics looked like an
animated film. The introduction of CD gaming in the 1990s prompted a
brief era of games that heavily employed full-motion video (FMV)
sequences complete with live actors. Among the most successful of those
were the space dogfighting games Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
(1994) and Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (1996), which lured
sci-fi fans by casting well-known genre actors like Mark Hamill and
Malcolm McDowell.3
Even in games not featuring live actors, however, developers often take
great pains to recreate cinematic experiences. That simulation takes a
variety of forms. Some games, such as the Mass Effect series, offer players
the option to turn on a film grain filter to make the experience feel more
like watching a movie. Others employ more specific types of borrowing to
emulate certain film genres, such as the Western-influenced camera angles
and shots in Red Dead Redemption (2010), or the option to play the noir-
styled game L.A. Noire (2011) in black and white. Cutscenes—
noninteractive scripted moments in games—are even frequently referred to
as cinematics, in reference to their filmlike qualities. Sound also plays a
major role in how games reference film. Developers pay well-known film
and television actors to lend their voices (and sometimes their likenesses) to
games, for example. Geek icons Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean both voiced
characters in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), while Seth Green,
Martin Sheen, and Carrie-Anne Moss lent voices to the original Mass Effect
trilogy (2007–2012). Music plays a large role, as well. Hollywood film
composers such as Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams, and Danny
Elfman, to name a few, have each contributed to video game soundtracks.
These are ways in which games refer back to film in general. On
occasion, however, game designers may use these techniques to allude to a
specific film—whether as a form of homage or parody, or just to draw
connections between the two products. Casting the lead actor from the
original Star Wars trilogy in the space opera Wing Commander series, for
instance, was no accident—the games’ creators hoped to capitalize on the
nostalgia and positive associations players felt toward the films. Music can
serve much the same function. Alluding to music from a specific film or
television program in the context of a game can easily call that source to
mind, even when the music originated someplace else. For example, I can’t
hear the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera Guillaume Tell (1829)
without thinking of the television program The Lone Ranger (1949–1957),
even though I’ve never seen a single episode of the show. Mozart’s Piano
Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 (1785) is now commonly called the
Elvira Madigan concerto because it was used prominently in the 1967
Swedish film of that name. “Ride of the Valkyries” from Richard Wagner’s
opera Die Walküre (1856) is virtually inextricable from the chilling
helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now (1979). And so on.
When a game uses a musical work that’s closely associated with a
different media product—most commonly a film or film series—players
receive multiple levels of signification. The original and new sources
engage in a kind of dialogue—what the musicologist Melanie Lowe
describes as “the additive process of signification and resignification.”4
Much like hiring famous voice actors or replicating cinematic special
effects, the point here is to capitalize on players’ positive experiences with
valued entertainment forms that are meaningful to them.5 In other words,
some of the cultural capital of the film transfers over to the game. Classical
music does double duty in this case, because it also transfers some of its
prestige. Thus, by using classical music associated with particular films,
games can get a double boost, plus the game designers stand a better chance
of connecting with the player’s own experiences by appealing to players’
musical and cinematic knowledge frames of reference.
An example might be helpful to explain precisely what I mean. As
mentioned earlier, one of the best-known instances of classical music in
film is Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” during a helicopter strike in
Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.6 This remarkable scene has
inspired a number of video game allusions, most frequently in games
associated with helicopters. The trend seems to have begun a mere seven
years after the film, with the helicopter-combat simulator Gunship (1986).
“Ride of the Valkyries” features prominently as the game’s title screen
music—and, in fact, as the only music in the game. This placement
reappeared almost a decade later in the Super Nintendo helicopter-combat
game Air Cavalry (1995), which also used “Ride of the Valkyries” for its
title screen music. The same year saw the release of the 3DO game Return
Fire (later rereleased on the Sony PlayStation), which allowed players to
choose whether to control a helicopter, a jeep, or a tank. Depending on that
choice, the soundtrack would be a CD-quality recording of a classical work
—and, of course, the choice for the helicopter is “Ride of the Valkyries.”
 More recent games have taken a slightly subtler approach, but they still
connect the helicopter action to Coppola’s film. In Far Cry 3 (2012), the
“Ride” plays during a helicopter escape; in Battlefield 4 (2013) during a
portion where the player (in a helicopter) attacks targets in the jungle; and
in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014), players hear the “Ride” on
the main character’s Walkman while he sneaks around a helicopter. This list
is far from complete, but hopefully it conveys some sense of how frequently
games make these types of musical references to Apocalypse Now. At a
certain point, however, the allusion becomes recursive. Were the makers of
Air Cavalry alluding to Wagner’s opera, to Apocalypse Now, or to Gunship
(or none of them, or all of them)? What about Metal Gear Solid V? That
reference could be to any or all of the preceding examples, and individual
players could make entirely different sets of connections than the designers
intended.
The rest of this chapter explores a few instances of these complex
intertextual webs that form between games and other media. In the first
instance, I look at how the classical compilation score—a musical
soundtrack made up entirely of classical works—made the transition from
early cinema to video games. I then turn to two examples of games that
draw upon music and imagery from specific films, with remarkably
different results.

Compiling Codes
Compilation scores have been part of cinema from its earliest days and have
persisted into the present in a variety of forms.7 On an aesthetic level, using
familiar music allowed early film musicians to quickly and effectively
communicate essential information to the audience. Practically speaking,
compilation soundtracks were necessary when time and finances precluded
other options. For instance, films were often produced quite rapidly, and
composers had insufficient time (or financial incentive) to create hours of
original music. Using classical music skirted these issues while lending an
“artistic” element to the cinema experience; by the 1920s, many theaters
featured full orchestras, and showings often began with classical overtures.8
The musicologist Neil Lerner has convincingly demonstrated connections
between early cinema practices and early video games with compilation
scores—in this case soundtracks composed of snippets drawn from a
variety of sources, including classical music and folk songs. This technique
was common in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with compilation scores
found in arcade games like Crazy Climber (1980), Kangaroo (1982), and
Crystal Castles (1983).9 From an economic standpoint, this choice makes
perfect sense. Using music from the public domain allowed game designers
to avoid either paying composers to create new works or paying the hefty
fees required to license contemporary popular music.10
Maniac Miner (1983), initially released on the ZX Spectrum (a UK-based
home computer), offers an early example of this classical compilation
approach on a home computer. Or rather, it does so if the incessant
repetition of the eight-measure melody of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the
Mountain King” (1876) counts as a compilation. As mind-numbing as it
might be to hear the tune stuck on replay, the choice makes sense given the
game’s setting in an underground cavern, evoking the cavern-dwelling trolls
depicted in the music.11 In Jet Set Willy (1984), Maniac Miner’s sequel,
players explore Willy’s new mansion, purchased with the proceeds of the
previous game’s mining adventures. I’m aware of two version of the game:
the original release on the ZX Spectrum and a later release for the
Commodore 64. In both cases Jet Set Willy follows Maniac Miner’s model
in using classical music, though mercifully the game includes more than
one piece. Both versions feature the opening measures of Beethoven’s
“Moonlight” piano sonata on the title screen, but they differ significantly
once the game begins. The Spectrum release features both “In the Hall of
the Mountain King” and the song “If I Were a Rich Man,” from the
Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964)—an obvious allusion to
Willy’s newfound wealth. Perhaps fearing copyright issues with “If I Were
a Rich Man,” the Commodore 64 version instead features J. S. Bach’s
Invention in C Major, BWV 772 (1720–1723), likely a last-minute
substitution, given that the piece has no apparent relevance.
This lack of connection between music and images occurs in several low-
budget games of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The NES version of the
action game Captain Comic (1989, original released in 1988) is a case in
point. Its soundtrack consists entirely of classical tunes, shortened into
thirty-second loops and repeated over each level, with seemingly little
consideration of aligning music to image.12 (One possible exception would
be the use of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Blue Danube Waltz in an outer-space
level, which suggests the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—more on
which in the next chapter.) The music in Captain Comic runs the gamut
from well-known works like Mozart’s “Ronda alla Turca” (ca. 1783) or
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” (1900) to obscure
keyboard works by Handel or W. F. Bach (which, it turns out, were
probably chosen by virtue of being in the same collection of easy piano
music).13 Even worse than the seeming randomness, however, are the
wrong notes. In multiple cases the programmer made errors or misread the
music, with occasionally cringe-worthy results. Here the soundtrack
indicates a familiarity with the concept of the compilation score as a way of
saving time and money but not with its cinematic functions as signifier of
emotion or narrative reference point.14
Though less common after the 1980s, entirely classical compilation
scores continue to appear in games for a variety of reasons (see Table 4.1
for a partial list). Recall, for example, the extensive use of French baroque
music in Versailles 1685 and its sequel (see chapter 2) to create a sense of
time and place. In other circumstances, recent games have turned to
classical compilation scores for intriguing artistic reasons. Allow me to
offer two fairly contrasting examples. The 2009 Wii game Little King’s
Story is a cartoonish strategy game aimed mostly at younger players. As
with many strategy games, which lend themselves to repeated playthroughs,
the amount of music in the game is extensive, consisting of more than sixty
(!) lighthearted arrangements of classical works.15 Some pieces suggest
their role in the game by their titles: the Dies Irae from Mozart’s Requiem
(1791) triggers at the king’s death; Chopin’s “Military” Polonaise, Op. 40,
No. 1, as an enemy in the game plots world domination; and the drinking
song from Verdi’s opera La Traviata during a festival, to name three
examples. More often, however, the tracks seem to be chosen for their
musical qualities, tapping into shared musical codes developed in the
concert hall, opera house, and, later, the movie theater—much the same way
that silent-film musicians learned to do.
TABLE 4.1 Selected classical compilation scores in games, 1983–2011
(asterisks indicate that the game also includes a small number of original
cues)

Title Date of Release

Maniac Miner 1983
Jet Set Willy (Maniac Miner 2) 1984
Mountain King 1984
Captain Comic (NES version) 1988
Fantasia 1991
Heroes: The Sanguine Seven 1993
Return Fire 1995
Asterix and the Power of the Gods 1995
Versailles 1685 1997
Wargasm 1998
Versailles II: Testament of the King 2001
Civilization IV * 2005
Little King’s Story 2009
Stacking * 2011

If connecting Little King Story to early cinema practices feels a bit

tenuous, it’s indisputable in the playful adventure game Stacking (2011),
which takes place in a whimsical, vaguely turn-of-the-century fantasy world
populated by living matryoshka dolls (Russian stacking dolls). Its aesthetic
borrows heavily from the musical and visual language of early film;
conversations take place on title cards rather than through spoken dialogue,
and the game’s cutscenes are conveyed through what appear to be staged
dioramas, or perhaps sets. (A particularly self-aware part of the game
involves navigating a silent-film set.) Some of the sepia-toned cutscenes
even feature the clicking sounds of a film camera—a tongue-in-cheek way
of transforming cinematics into cinema. The game’s soundtrack is crafted in
much the same way. The vast majority of musical selections in the game are
nineteenth-century classical works, in live recordings rather than
synthesized performances. Frédéric Chopin’s music dominates—the
Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1 (1830–1832) serves as a kind of
theme for the main character—but there are also significant works by
Niccolò Paganini, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr
Tchaikovsky, and others. Intriguingly, the Chopin piano works are often
rearranged in some way—shortened, lengthened, or recomposed to fit the
needs of the scene. While relatively uncommon in games since the
introduction of CD audio in the 1990s, adapting classical works is highly
reminiscent of early film practices, where major alterations were the
norm.16
Among the most interesting musical moments in Stacking is the
introductory cutscene. Composed by Peter McConnell for piano and cello,
the cleverly written score evokes a sense of improvising silent-film
musicians. Rapid-fire allusions to classical works fly by almost too quickly
to identify, as the music shifts in response to the melodramatic narrative
unfolding on-screen. The result is a score that foreshadows the classical
compilation soundtrack, while also reinforcing that game’s relationship to
musical traditions of early cinema. Like most of the examples in this
section, Stacking aligns itself with cinema in search of a real or imagined
shared heritage, imbuing games with a sense of history and gravitas that
they might not possess on their own. This trend continues in the games
described in the following sections, but in far narrower fashion. Instead of
using classical works to connect to a general cinematic style, these games
use music to allude to a specific high-profile film.

Classical Mouse-terworks
Few films are more closely associated with classical music than Disney’s
Fantasia (1940). As Daniel Goldmark suggests in his book Tunes for
Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon, Fantasia remains both
“probably the most ambitious attempt in the history of film (animated or
otherwise) to integrate classical music into the medium” and an example of
“how one studio used animation to glorify classical music, instead of
seeking to tear it down.”17 Each of the film’s scenes merged a classical
orchestral work—recorded in new performances by conductor Leopold
Stokowski, a household name at the time—with new animated
interpretations. Aside from its pure entertainment value, the film had two
goals: educating young audiences about classical music, and using these
works’ cultural cachet to elevate animation to a loftier artistic level.
Disney’s experiment in blending symphonic music with animation initially
met with a mixed reception. Many critics of the time found it simply
inappropriate to cheapen great classical music by association with lowly
cartoons. To quote Goldmark again, Disney’s “aim proved difficult to
achieve, as animation, no matter how lofty its high-art aesthetic aspirations,
was never seen by the public as anything but pop culture.”18 It fared little
better with fans of cartoons, many of whom were put off by Fantasia’s
length and overtly artistic tone. Yet somehow, in the decades since its
theatrical release, Disney’s experiment in music appreciation has become a
cultural touchstone, a source of enduring enjoyment and education for
generations.
Video games based on Disney films have been common since the early
1980s, but considering its unique format, Fantasia seems an unlikely choice
for that kind of multimedia collaboration. Thanks to its cultural ubiquity,
however, some or all of it has been recreated in at least eight games since
1983—possibly more than any other Disney film (Table 4.2). To a greater
or lesser extent, each of those games depends on players’ existing
knowledge of Fantasia. And since the visual and musical aspects of the
film are virtually inseparable, effectively incorporating classical music
usually becomes an essential part of the games. In most video games
featuring classical music, the designers had at least some choice as to which
works to include. In the case of Fantasia games, however, many of those
decisions are made already, meaning that designers’ choices instead become
more about how to include the music. Most of the more recent games in this
list—those in the Kingdom Hearts and Epic Mickey franchises—treat
Fantasia as one of a number of Disney worlds to which the player travels.
In those cases, the classical music serves as a sonic reminder of the film, the
same way the games include music from other Disney properties (Snow
White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.). More interesting for my purposes are two
relatively early games that attempted to adapt Fantasia into a traditional
narrative game: the Atari 2600 title Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983) and the
Sega Genesis platformer Fantasia (1991).
TABLE 4.2 Disney’s Fantasia in video games, 1983–present

Title Date of Release

Sorcerer’s Apprentice 1983
Fantasia 1991
Kingdom Hearts 2002
Epic Mickey 2010
Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance 2012
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two 2012
Disney Infinity 2013–2016 (online game)
Fantasia: Music Evolved 2014

Both games are loosely based on what is perhaps Fantasia’s best-known

segment: “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Or, to be precise, they are games
based on an animated film that was based on a symphonic work that was
based on a poem. In the film, Mickey Mouse—bedecked in wizard’s cap
and robes—enacts a version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eighteenth-
century poem Der Zauberlehrling, the same poem the French composer
Paul Dukas depicted in his tone poem L’apprenti sorcier (1896–1897). The
story is a familiar one: left alone by his master, an apprentice magician gets
bored with his assigned chores. Shirking his duties, he instead uses his
powers to animate his broom, with predictably catastrophic results.
Although things initially seem to be going well, the apprentice soon realizes
he doesn’t know the magic word to make the broom stop. Panicked, he
chops the broom into ever-smaller pieces with an ax, only to find that each
fragment creates a new broom. Just as disaster looms, the master sorcerer
fortuitously reappears, returning things to normal and chastising his overly
ambitious apprentice.
The first game interpretation of this Fantasia scene, Sorcerer’s
Apprentice (Figure 4.1), was the only title to emerge from a partnership
between Disney and Atari. That sort-lived deal aimed at creating a series of
children’s games that would be both entertaining and in some way
educational. Yet in Sorcerer’s Apprentice the central focus was apparently
capitalizing on young players’—and their parents’—nostalgic fondness for
Fantasia. In keeping with trends in early film-to-game adaptations, the
original story is almost unrecognizable. Apprentice Mickey shoots fireballs
into the sky to prevent stars and meteors from reaching the ground, at which
point they transform, for some reason, into water-carrying brooms. If
enough of them get past his defenses, the brooms flood the sorcerer’s
basement, ending the game. From a game-design perspective, the goal here
was replicating memorable symbols from the film—Apprentice Mickey and
his living brooms—rather than narrative fidelity. In the words of game
scholar Jessica Aldred, “Well-known, iconographic characters that could be
readily translated from film to game were crucial to [the] early period of
movie-game convergence, since, in theory at least, these figures were
typically the easiest way to tap into preexisting brand awareness and set
new titles apart.”19 In other words, Sorcerer’s Apprentice attempts to create
a quasi-cinematic experience by encouraging players to project their
knowledge of Fantasia onto the game.

FIGURE 4.1 Mickey Mouse in Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983).

 Music performs a similar role in Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Because the
game’s narrative differs so greatly from the original story—and because it
lacks the lavish visuals of Disney’s animation—sound is central to bridging
the gap between Fantasia and Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To do so, the Atari
game needed to evoke the soundscape of the 1940 film, which meant
somehow recreating a nine-minute work for a large orchestra. At the risk of
understatement, the Atari 2600 was not well-suited to that task. Its audio
hardware was capable of playing only one sound at a time, including sound
effects. Not only could there be no harmony at all—and the rich harmonies
of Dukas’s music are central to its appeal—but the music had to drop out
whenever a sound effect played. As if that wasn’t enough obstacles, the
memory available for music on the 2600 was so limited that only a short
snippet would be possible. All these limitations meant that a lengthy and
complex orchestral work had to be distilled into a few seconds of melody.
Somewhat like Maniac Miner’s unfortunate use of “In the Hall of the
Mountain King,” the solution was to focus exclusively on the central
melody of Dukas’s piece—an orchestral earworm if ever there was one. In
both the orchestral work and Disney’s film, that main theme symbolizes the
brooms; it first appears (in the bassoons) when the apprentice brings the
broom to life, and gradually increases in volume and urgency throughout
the piece. Sorcerer’s Apprentice begins with a shortened, four-second
statement of the theme, after which it appears in short one- or two-second
bursts to let players know a broom has delivered a bucket of water.20
Dukas’s music thus serves two important functions. On the one hand, it
arms the connection between the musical theme and the brooms, connecting
Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Fantasia (and the original tone poem, for that
matter). On the other hand, the music also becomes part of the gameplay,
letting players know where they need to direct their attention.
Despite the music’s importance to both Fantasia and Sorcerer’s
Apprentice, however, nothing in the game or its manual gives any
information about Dukas or his music. The theme is described only as the
“Sorcerer’s Apprentice tune,” which suggests that players were meant to
associate the music with Disney’s film rather than with classical music—
some might even argue that the music in Sorcerer’s Apprentice isn’t
classical at all. In fact, so far removed is the music from its original
orchestral form and function, we might even understand this cue as a sound
effect rather than as music. More fruitfully, perhaps, we might consider the
tune’s role in Sorcerer’s Apprentice not as music per se but as an abstracted
symbol—a memory trigger that invokes L’apprenti sorcier without trying to
replicate it. Players’ experiences fill in the gaps, they same way players
understand the abstracted collection of pixels as a symbol of Apprentice
Mickey from the film.21 Not surprisingly, Sorcerer’s Apprentice failed to
live up to expectations. This kind of musical abstraction asks a lot of
players—perhaps too much, in this case. It would be almost a decade before
game technology and culture advanced to the point where developers felt
comfortable attempting a Fantasia video game.
Fantasia’s fiftieth anniversary in 1991 saw a massive celebration of the
film, a marketing push that included a major theatrical rerelease with
restored audio and visual elements. The Sega Genesis game Fantasia was
an important part of that celebration—another effort at bringing the title to a
younger, game-obsessed demographic. Although the Genesis Fantasia
game shares with its predecessor a new plot that focuses on the adventures
of Apprentice Mickey, here classical music plays a much greater role. In
fact, the music is the whole point. The game’s backstory is revealed by an
introductory poem (a nod, perhaps, to Goethe’s original text), accompanied
by the ominous opening notes of J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D
Minor. “While the Apprentice Sorcerer slept,” the game tells players, “his
master’s music was stolen away. / Now his dreams must restore the notes /
so the music again can play.” This focus on music was made possible by the
relatively advanced sound hardware of the Genesis, which Sega often
touted as superior to that of its primary competitor, the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System. I suspect the choice to make a Genesis Fantasia
game was in part a way to highlight the system’s audio capabilities.22 One
advertisement for the game, for example, opened with “No wonder Mickey
Mouse has such big eyes and ears. Considering the vivid 16-bit graphics
and crisp stereo sound of his Sega Genesis video games, Mickey is built
just right” (Figure 4.2).
FIGURE 4.2 Advertisement for Fantasia (1991).

Evoking the original film, the silhouette of an orchestra, accompanied by

a digital emulation of the sound of tuning instruments, introduces each of
the game’s four main worlds.23 Those choices immediately draw the
player’s attention to the music, and with good reason. Far from the short
melodic outbursts of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Genesis’s hardware allowed
for synthesized digital instruments that by and large stay reasonably close to
the original orchestration—an impressive technological achievement for the
time. And while the 1983 game had featured only one musical selection,
most of the music from the film appears in the 1991 Fantasia in one form
or another. Each hub world recreates one of the segments from the original
film, as well as several side levels that offer briefer glimpses into additional
scenes. Each of these levels features the associated music from the Disney
film. In all cases, the music is arranged into long repeating loops—often in
excess of one minute. That length was uncommon for the time and would
undoubtedly have required a substantial amount of dedicated memory and
programming effort. And because the fast-paced action means players
switch rapidly between levels, many players might never stay in one place
long enough to reach the end of the loop—creating the illusion that the
game contains even more music than it actually does.24
The Atari 2600 Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Genesis Fantasia share a
number of similarities. Both focus on allowing players to interactively
engage with the Disney film, and both feature classical music to help create
that transmedia experience. Yet the two titles illustrate strikingly divergent
approaches to incorporating music into the gameplay experience. The
earlier game employs a heavily abstracted model, using the bare bones of a
classical work as a sonic signifier of the original source. Sega’s version,
however, focuses on representing as much of the music as possible, in as
much detail as possible. Neither attempt at translating Fantasia into a game
was particularly successful.
In subsequent years, Disney and game developers alike seem to have
realized that replicating the musical and cinematic experience of Fantasia
in a narrative game is a difficult, if not impossible, task.25 The success of
any Fantasia game is dependent on its use of music, but unlike film, games
as a medium are generally ill-suited to replicating lengthy classical works.
In their eagerness to tap into the universal familiarity of Disney’s beloved
film, these early game developers underestimated the challenges of using
classical music in a way that players find meaningful. Imitating the film, in
other words, is not necessarily the same thing as capturing its essence. Like
the sorcerer’s apprentice, these games bring Fantasia to life but without
truly understanding the limits of their own power to recreate what animates
(pardon the pun) the original. My next example, by contrast, explores a
much subtler, and more ambiguous, use of cinematic classical music.

Lives Out of Balance

Despite its impressive attention to detail and clever uses of music, the
violent sandbox world of the Grand Theft Auto series has just never clicked
with me. But the first trailer for GTA IV (2008), “Things Will Be Different,”
caught my attention immediately. Its voice-over seemed to speak for my
experiences with previous games: “I killed people, smuggled people, sold
people. Perhaps here, things will be different.” What I found even more
intriguing, however, were the music and visuals of the trailer, which were at
once brand new and strikingly familiar. What I saw and heard on the screen
was in a sense several decades old, drawn from the 1982 art film
Koyaanisqatsi. In this case, at least, advertising works: I bought GTA IV
specifically with that trailer in mind, eager to discover what connections
might exist between a critically lauded avant-garde film and a video game
series known for its juvenile humor, violence, and misogyny.
Koyaanisqatsi might be a relatively unfamiliar film to general audiences,
but in the years since its release it has greatly influenced filmmakers and
popular culture alike.26 The title of the film, which comes from the Hopi
language, translates loosely as “life out of balance.” That concept is
translated on-screen by a series of wordless scenes exploring the uneasy
relationship between the natural world, on the one hand, and civilization
and its technology, on the other. Because Koyaanisqatsi has no dialogue,
music assumes an unusually conspicuous role in creating the experience—a
bit like Fantasia, in fact. In this case, however, rather than turning to
preexisting works, filmmaker Godfrey Reggio collaborated with the
American minimalist composer Philip Glass to produce an original score.
Glass’s music has continued to develop in the years following the film’s
initial release. In 1998, the Philip Glass Ensemble rerecorded the score with
updated instrumentation and some new music, releasing the result as a
stand-alone album rather than a score designed to accompany the film. In
more recent years, music from Koyaanisqatsi has made its way onto a
number of classical concerts, and the ensemble frequently performs the
music in live screenings of the film (as it does with several of Glass’s other
film scores).
Koyaanisqatsi unfolds as a series of long scenes, each with its own pace
and tone. I’m particularly interested here in two well-known scenes—“Pruit
Igoe” and “The Grid”—which have gradually become reference points for a
variety of media. “Pruit Igoe” refers to the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in
St. Louis, an ill-planned and poorly executed 1950s complex that became
infamous for its crime and urban decay before its demolition two decades
later. The “Pruit Igoe” scene in Koyaanisqatsi lasts about seven and a half
minutes. A long tracking shot along the skyline of what appears to be a
thriving city transitions to close shots of the Pruitt-Igoe projects—
abandoned, dilapidated buildings surrounded by piles of garbage. The scene
climaxes in the projects’ demolition, after which the scene ends with an
iconic time-lapse shot of clouds peacefully passing over the distant
downtown. Although the scene resists simple interpretations, for me the
implication is that close scrutiny reveals the filth and decay beneath the
surface of even the most civilized spaces.
Glass’s score for “Pruit Igoe” echoes the tempo of the visuals—or
perhaps vice versa, since many of the film’s scenes were actually cut to fit
the music. It begins quietly, with simple repeating patterns over a bass
drone and occasional interjections when all the strings play a unison
melody. In typical Glass fashion, however, about two and a half minutes in
(based on the original film recording), the music becomes much more
bombastic. Repeated dissonant chords in the brass coupled with an
increasingly insistent wordless (or unintelligible) choir, lead to a sense of
forward momentum spiraling out of control—a trajectory that culminates
with the destruction of the buildings. As the last of the buildings is
destroyed in slow motion, the music resumes its initial, more contemplative
tone, reflecting the final shots of the time-lapse cityscape. The musicologist
Mitchell Morris has noted this time-lapse function of Glass’s music
throughout much of the film:
 The score . . . contributes to the film’s overall sense of large temporal
spans within which smaller motion that seems at once particular and
de-individualized takes place. Instead of a human-sized world in which
protagonists and antagonists move, or in which the documentarian
presents a particular point of view, there is an impersonalized space in
which aggregates of things come into being, undergo transformations,
and pass out of being.27

The music gives viewers a sense of time on a monumental scale, illustrating

the inevitability of rising and collapsing civilizations. The city itself, a
stand-in for the flaws and beauty of human culture as a whole, becomes in
effect the scene’s only character.
“The Grid,” Koyaanisqatsi’s longest scene and the source of its most
lasting visual impact, also puts the city front and center. But in place of the
monumental time from “Pruit Igoe,” here the film presents modern life as
frantic, monotonous, and thoroughly mechanized. Viewers are subjected to
endless scenes of banal daily life, sped up into a blur—parades of cars on
city streets and highways, factory machines producing Twinkies, subway
escalators ferrying commuters, and so on. As Morris says, “This scene
evokes the phenomenology of the assembly line, and our attendant sense of
overprocessing.”28 “The Grid” links this same overprocessing with media
consumption. Images of people watching television or playing video games
gradually fragment into faster and faster cuts, bombarding the viewer with
almost unrecognizable clips of news, commercials, sports, and more. As
Rebecca M. Doran Eaton has persuasively argued, the time-lapse effect,
combined with Glass’s incessant and indifferent music, renders even the
film’s human beings into machines. “The Grid” in effect “suggests a loss of
subjective experience and the dehumanization and mechanization of
mankind.”29
Yet while Koyaanisqatsi’s cinematic and musical style has proved quite
influential since the film’s initial release, its anti-mechanization message
has often been lost in translation. Several scholars, for example, have noted
the 2006 BMW commercial “It’s Only a Car,” which combines Glass’s
“Pruit Igoe” with time-lapse highway driving footage reminiscent of “The
Grid.”30 In fact, Eaton argues compellingly that Glass’s music and even
minimalism more broadly have become associated with machines,
including automobiles. But the association is anything but negative; if the
prevalence of Glass’s music (or its knockoffs) in car commercials from the
1990s to the present is any indication, the clockwork-like precision of the
music suggests a refined, high-quality driving experience.
The 2009 film Watchmen finds the same music from “Pruit Igoe” (along
with “Prophecies,” also from Koyaanisqatsi) performing a much different
function. Based on the well-known 1986–1987 comic book/graphic novel,
Watchmen is a dark superhero film. In a sense, Glass’s music works here as
a kind of chronological indicator—like Koyaanisqatsi, Watchmen depicts
the ills of 1980s urban life. But it also recalls other uses of minimalism to
evoke Koyaanisqatsi’s dire warnings, represented as “madness, economic
collapse, exploitation, and sci-fi disaster.”31 In Watchmen, Glass’s music is
tied to the hero, Doctor Manhattan, a nearly omnipotent being created from
atomic energy. The connections between minimalism and machinery are
again readily apparent. The film shows the character assembling a clock as
a child, for instance, and later his Martian home resembles a clock
mechanism. Yet the music also conveys the grime and decay of 1980s urban
culture—a connection made most manifest in the use of “Pruit Igoe” during
gritty street scenes in one of the film’s trailers, musically recalling the
desolation from that scene in Koyaanisqatsi. On a larger scale, the music
foreshadows Watchmen’s grim conclusions regarding the nature of social
and cultural unrest. So, to recap: on the one hand, we have Glass’s music
from Koyaanisqatsi associated with technology, and frequently the complex
machinery of automobiles. On the other, we have it associated with urban
decay, a sense of failed civilization.
Grand Theft Auto IV sits at the nexus of these two competing
associations. The story follows Niko Bellic, a new Eastern European
immigrant to Liberty City (GTA’s version of New York). In search of a
better life, Niko instead becomes embroiled in the underworld politics of
the Russian mob. Despite his intentions to leave his past misdeeds behind
him, he lies, cheats, steals, and murders his way through Liberty City’s
various crime families and beyond. But perhaps even more than Niko
himself, Liberty City is GTA IV’s protagonist, as a number of critics noted
upon the game’s release. The New York Times review was typical: “The real
star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New
York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created
it almost even smells like New York. . . . [T]he game’s streets and alleys
ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity.”32 The game’s designers went
to great lengths to capture that authenticity—down to meticulously
recording the ethnic makeup and traffic patterns of individual
neighborhoods—with the end result being a vibrant virtual city.
Music plays a major role in the Grand Theft Auto games, mostly by way
of in-game radio stations. Those expertly curated stations help maximize
players’ enjoyment and immersion—always with an eye toward
authenticity. Indeed, as ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller has noted with regard
to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), developers and players alike are
keenly aware that the music plays a crucial role in creating a sense of place
in these games.33 That sense is clearly in evidence in GTA IV. To quote
again from the New York Times review, the music supervisors “demonstrate
a musical erudition beyond anything heard before in a video game. . . . It is
not faint praise to point out that at times, simply driving around the city
listening to the radio . . . can be as enjoyable as anything the game has to
offer.”34 For the most part, the game’s music comes from a range of popular
styles, from metal to jazz to hip-hop and everything in between. But there’s
one glaring exception: the radio station “The Journey.” This eclectic station
includes “Pruit Igoe” from Koyaanisqatsi alongside a portion of the
landmark electronic work A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) by minimalist
composer Terry Riley—a major stylistic influence on Glass—as well as
minimalist-influenced ambient electronic music from composers such as
Jean-Michel Jarre and Steve Roach.35
“Pruit Igoe” also appears during GTA IV’s bittersweet epilogue. After the
final missions, we overhear a phone call between Niko and the people close
to him, depending on the player’s choices in the game. This conversation
reflects on the game’s events and the tragedy that seems to inevitably
follow in Niko’s violent path. Rather than depicting Niko, these final
visuals are of Liberty City itself. And like the game’s first trailer, these
lengthy time-lapse images of the city strongly evoke Koyaanisqatsi. In
particular, the visuals suggest the closing of the “Pruit-Igoe” scene—the
precise moments in the film where we would hear the same music—
creating an unmistakable, almost ostentatious, parallel.
So what are we to make of these connections between GTA IV and
Koyaanisqatsi? Although it might not be immediately obvious, the two
share some thematic similarities, which are reinforced by allusions to
Koyaanisqatsi (and minimalism more generally) in other media. I noted
earlier, for example, how the film’s focus on technology led to an ironic
association with precision machinery, particularly automobiles. As the title
suggests, cars play a significant role in Grand Theft Auto. Much of the
player’s time is spent behind the wheel of purloined vehicles, and for the
most part, players have to be in a car to hear Glass’s music. Players who
tune in to “The Journey” can in essence live out the fantasies peddled by
those car commercials, driving at will through the streets of Liberty City.
Beyond this fairly straightforward association with the fine-tuned
machinery of cars, however, I also understand this music as a kind of
commentary on the technology of the game itself. The radio stations of GTA
IV each have a scripted DJ, often a kind of celebrity cameo. “Liberty Rock
Radio” is hosted by Iggy Pop, the alt/indie station “Radio Broker” is hosted
by Juliette Lewis, and so on. “The Journey,” by contrast, is hosted by “a
computer”; the script is read aloud by the AppleTalk speech synthesis voice
“Vicki.” The predominantly electronic, minimalist music station is
presented by electronics—technology embodied. Notably, players also hear
“The Journey” whenever they visit Internet cafes in the game, reinforcing
its association with computers. On a self-referential level, the host of “The
Journey” seems to understand its own fictional status, evidenced in the
tongue-in-cheek breaking of the fourth wall that occurs through its
narration. “Do you ever wonder who created your character,” the computer
asks at one point, “and why your life is a computer simulation? Do you ever
wonder who decided the rules of the game? We can only guess at the
longing of the creator.” The station reminds us of its own unreality—of, in
fact, the unreality of everything we see and do in GTA IV. By doing so, it
also calls to mind the advanced hardware and feats of programming
underpinning this incredibly detailed virtual world, again linking
minimalism with the idea of complex technology.
And yet at the game’s end, these technological associations are left by the
wayside. Instead, we return to the association with urban decay and rampant
crime—something much closer to the actual “Pruit Igoe” scene in
Koyaanisqatsi (or, for that matter, its use in the trailer for Watchmen) than it
is to luxury car commercials. As in the Koyaanisqatsi “Pruit Igoe,” here we
are left to ponder the fundamental nature of the city. Despite Niko’s hope
that “maybe this time will be different,” ultimately Liberty City’s decadence
and corruption shatter his illusions, calling into question whether
civilization is truly civilized at all. By evoking the specter of Koyaanisqatsi
repeatedly throughout the game, Glass’s music operates on multiple levels
in GTA IV, and much more deeply than tapping into “the joy of driving.” In
“The Journey,” it reminds players of the game’s fundamental unreality, and
of the almost unfathomably complex technology that creates and animates
Liberty City and its denizens. And in the epilogue, it evokes the unreality of
our own world, the equally complex fantasies we collectively construct
about the nature of civilization.
One final point: it is remarkable that the makers of GTA IV selected an
avant-garde film like Koyaanisqatsi rather than a more mainstream choice.
Previous games in the series had been deeply influenced by existing media,
of course: GTA: Vice City was inspired by the neon lights and pastel colors
scheme of 1980s Miami as depicted in the TV show Miami Vice (1984–
1989) and the Brian De Palma film Scarface (1983). Likewise, GTA: San
Andreas brought its 1990s Los Angeles analogue to life by emulating films
such as Boyz N the Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Friday
(1995).36 While not all those films were blockbusters, they were certainly
closer than Reggio and Glass’s arthouse favorite, which grossed only $1.7
million at the box office. It’s not even immediately clear how many of GTA
IV’s players caught the Koyaanisqatsi references, as obvious as they were.
But perhaps the appeal of the allusions lay at least in part with
Koyaanisqatsi’s status as an art film. As with a number of other examples in
this book, these references were one path toward capturing the cultural
capital that goes hand in hand with art cinema. If games haven’t yet found
their Citizen Kane, GTA IV seems to say, then at least they have found their
Koyaanisqatsi. In the next chapter, I trace this artistic borrowing further,
exploring several games that pay homage to the films of a single well-
known director: Stanley Kubrick.

1
For a representative, if unusually well-thought-out, example of the “Citizen Kane trope,” see
Mikel Reparaz, “The Citizen Kanes of Videogames,” GamesRadar (July 24, 2009), available
online at [Link] (accessed August 1,
2016). As of my writing, there is a very amusing Tumblr account entitled “The Citizen Kane of
Video Games,” which aggregates the many times game critics (and similar authors) fall back on
the cliché. Available online at [Link] (accessed August
1, 2016).
2
On the relationship between films and licensed game spin-offs, see, for example, Robert Alan
Brookey’s study Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game
Industries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
3 FMV games have made something of a recent resurgence, with the most notable example being
the critically lauded independent title Her Story (2015).
4
Melanie Lowe, “Claiming Amadeus: Classical Feedback in American Media,” American Music
20 (2002): 104.
5
Ironically, of course, classical music has been a way of imbuing film with cultural value at a time
when that genre was generally regarded in a less exalted light. I am not the first to identify the
combination of the “low art” of media with classical music as a point of tension. In his discussion
of the uses of pre-existing classical music in Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film The Shining
(1980), film music scholar K. J. Donnelly notes the contrast between the perceived cultural
values of the music and the film. Donnelly explains that some might understand its musical
choices as “subordinating what some may see as ‘great art’ to the leviathan of popular culture.”
Furthermore, he continues, “There is an apparent contradiction between the low status that
traditionally has been accorded to film music and the status of sublime high art, as the apogee of
western culture.” K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London:
BFI, 2005), 41, 42.
6
Apocalypse Now is of course not the only film to employ “Ride of the Valkyries.” As Lowe
points out, for example, this music also features prominently in sources as diverse as D. W.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and the Bugs Bunny animated short What’s Opera, Doc?
(1957). Lowe, “Claiming Amadeus,” 103–104.
7
On compilation practices in early film, see, for example, Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Martin Miller Marks, Music in Silent Film: Contexts
and Case Studies, 1895–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Michael Slowik,
After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014).
8
For an enlightening contemporary description of these practices, see, for example, Erno Rapée’s
Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (1925), the relevant portions of which are reproduced with
helpful contextual information in Julie Hubbert, ed., Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in
Film Music History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 84–96.
9
See Neil Lerner, “The Origins of Musical Style in Video Games, 1977–1983,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
319–347; and Lerner, “Mario’s Dynamic Leaps: Musical Innovations (and the Specter of Early
Cinema) in Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.,” in Music in Video Games: Studying Play, ed.
K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–29.
10
On the other hand, a number of early games simply ignored copyright rules and recreated popular
music anyway, likely assuming (for the most part correctly) that the music industry would remain
unaware.
11
Interestingly, Grieg’s Peer Gynt music—in this case multiple movements—also provides the
soundtrack for the game Mountain King (1983), another straightforward allusion to the title. It
seems unlikely that the similarity of Mountain King and Maniac Miner is totally coincidental, but
may be an intertextual reference or attempt to copy a successful model.
12
On music in Captain Comic, see my article “Blip, Bloop, Bach? Some Uses of Classical Music
on the Nintendo Entertainment System,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2009): 40–52.
13
See Gibbons, “Blip, Bloop, Bach?”
14
The 1993 MS-DOS platformer Heroes: The Sanguine Seven, created entirely by Jeffrey Fullerton,
employed a compilation score in much the same way, though with perhaps a bit more finesse in
the execution (fewer wrong notes, for example). More interestingly, Fullerton lists the composers
in the game’s opening credits—a choice that was at the time unusual.
15
A more-or-less complete listing of the works arranged in Little King’s Story is available online at
[Link] (accessed July 29, 2016).
16
William Ayers has explored this aspect of Stacking in his “Recomposition of Chopin and
Narrative Design in Double Fine’s Stacking” (paper presented at the North American Conference
on Video Game Music, Youngstown State University, January 17–18, 2014). I am grateful to
Ayers for sharing this unpublished research with me.
17
Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 127–128.
18
Goldmark, Tunes for Toons, 130.
19
Jessica Aldred, “A Question of Character: Transmediation, Abstraction, and Identification in
Early Games Licensed from Movies,” in Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, ed. Mark
J. P. Wolf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 94. This effect was not, of course,
limited to early games. See, for example, Mark Rowell Wallin, “Myths, Monsters and Markets:
Ethos, Identification, and the Video Game Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings,” Game Studies
7, no. 1 (2007), available online at [Link]
20
The game manual even includes a “Sound Guide” to make sure players know the meanings of the
various sounds, including what it labels the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice tune.”
21
On this kind of visual abstraction in early transmedia games, see Aldred, “A Question of
Character.”
22
In chapter 6, I make a similar argument regarding the use of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D
Minor in the 1980s arcade shooter Gyruss, which similarly featured advanced hardware for the
time.
23
The four “hub worlds” are based (in order) on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite
of Spring (1913), Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (1808), and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald
Mountain (1867).
24
To my knowledge, the Genesis Fantasia game does, in fact, contain more music from the original
film than any other game to date, despite the vastly increased capabilities of more recent consoles
and computers.
25
Notably, the most recent Fantasia-based game, the Xbox 360 Kinect game Fantasia: Music
Evolved (2014), eschews narrative almost entirely—save for setting up the premise that the player
is the sorcerer’s new apprentice.
26
Koyaanisqatsi is the first of the co-called Qatsi trilogy, which also includes Powaqqatsi (1988)
and the much later Naqoyqatsi (2002).
27
Mitchell Morris, “Sight, Sound, and the Temporality of Myth Making in Koyaanisqatsi,” in
Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer,
and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 121.
28
Morris, “Sight, Sound and the Temporality of Myth Making in Koyaanisqatsi,” 125.
29
Rebecca M. Doran Eaton, “Marking Minimalism: Minimal Music as a Sign of Machines and
Mathematics in Multimedia,” Music and the Moving Image 7 (2014): 7.
30
On the similarities, including comparative images, see Eaton, “Marking Minimalism,” 10–12.
Eaton includes a useful table of Glass’s and similar music in media on p. 13. See also Pwyll ap
Siôn and Tristan Evans, “Parallel Symmetries? Exploring Relationships between Minimalist
Music and Multimedia Forms,” in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media, ed. Graeme
Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Continuum, 2009), 671–691.
31
Eaton, “Marking Minimalism,” 18.
32
Seth Schiesel, “Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York,” New York Times (April 28, 2008),
available online at [Link] (accessed July 28,
2016).
33
Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
34
Schiesel, “Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York.”
35
A full listing of all the radio stations in GTA IV is available online at
[Link] (accessed July 24, 2016).
36
In fact, DJ Pooh, who wrote the screenplay for Friday, was a co-writer for GTA: San Andreas.
See Soraya Murray, “High Art/Low Life: The Art of Playing Grand Theft Auto,” PAJ: A Journal
of Performance and Art 27 (2005): 92.
5 A Clockwork Homage

THE SAINT’S ROW series of open-world crime games is built on a foundation of

sheer audacity, juvenile humor, and over-the-top antics—in other words, not
really my kind of video game. But when I got a free download of Saint’s
Row: The Third (2011) a few years ago, curiosity compelled me to give it a
chance. In the ten or so hours I spent with it, my avatar destroyed an army
of tanks with a grenade launcher while riding on the roof of a car,
fraudulently collected insurance money by throwing himself into traffic,
and attacked a group of gang members with a giant purple sex toy. Pretty
standard for the Saint’s Row universe, all things considered. In fact, what
surprised me the most was the opening sequence. Against the backdrop of a
scrolling introductory text (à la Star Wars), I heard some familiar music:
Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). As a lengthy
orchestral piece based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s complex philosophical
novel of the same title, Strauss’s music seemed very much at odds with
what I knew about Saint’s Row. But, then, I imagine this musical choice
probably had very little to do with Strauss or Nietzsche. Instead, it has more
to do with Also sprach Zarathustra’s appearance at the opening of director
Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The pioneering and provocative director of films including Lolita (1962),
A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Shining (1980), Kubrick remains
among the most influential and highly respected filmmakers in cinema
history—and one of the most frequently imitated. For instance, films as
diverse as History of the World, Part I (1981), Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory (2005), and WALL-E (2008) have used Strauss’s music to parody
the opening of 2001 just as we find in Saint’s Row. These references take on
particular importance in video games, I think. Many of Kubrick’s films are
viewed as artistic masterpieces that elevated cult genres like sci-fi and
horror to a loftier cultural status. References to his films in games often
seem to take that possibility into account, perhaps as a way of elevating
their own status.
Like Saint’s Row, each of the games I examine in this chapter targets the
so-called core gaming audience—players who gravitate toward big-budget
action, sports, and shooter games. Despite welcome shifts in recent years,
that demographic still tends to skew heavily in favor of young men.1 Art
films generally target small groups of connoisseurs, and even many classic
films have limited audiences, despite their cultural capital. On the other
hand, the Hollywood blockbusters that tend to appeal to the core gaming
demographic often lack cultural cachet. Allusions are only as useful as they
are recognizable, so this divide between audience and aspiration poses a
challenge to game developers who hope to raise games’ artistic status. As
one of a small group of directors whose films are both critically lauded and
popular with a core gaming audience, Kubrick presents an ideal solution.
Few, if any, directors are as closely associated with their musical choices
as Kubrick. As the musicologist Kate McQuiston notes, music is “a
consistent, vital force in Kubrick’s imagination and an aesthetic foundation
for the creation and reception of music of Kubrick’s films—and famous
moments within them.”2 Kubrick was among the type of director that
Claudia Gorbman describes as “Mélomanes”—directors, such as Quentin
Tarantino or Wes Anderson, who “treat music not as something to farm out
to the composer or even to the music supervisor, but rather as a key
thematic element and marker of authorial style.”3 Classical music in
particular plays an enormous role in most of Kubrick’s films, in many cases
assuming as much prominence as the characters themselves. “Kubrick’s
deployments of pre-existing music exert a particular force,” Gorbman tells
us—“a tendency to assume an iconic status. . . . Welding themselves to the
visual rhythms onscreen, they become the music of the specific movie
scene rather than the piece one may have known before.”4 Here classical
music loses its concert hall associations and transforms into film music—or
perhaps it becomes a kind of hybrid, existing as both simultaneously.
Players who find musical references to Kubrick’s films are thus likely to
understand them first as cinematic allusions and only secondarily as
references to classical music. This close connection between particular
classical works and specific film scenes allows video games (or any media)
to easily call those scenes to mind—an invaluable asset, as we will see.
 Classical music in Kubrick’s films also often symbolizes high culture.
Many of his works address art (and indeed civilization itself) as an illusory
concept, or at the least one under constant attack. In a way that echoes this
book’s central concern with perceptions of classical music as culturally
valuable and video games as trivial, Kubrick often positions “the classically
refined against modern vulgarity and brutality, the ideal of order against the
reality of the beast.”5 For the rest of this chapter, I explore three games in
which classical music engages with this aspect of Kubrick’s films, the
conflict of classical music and “modern vulgarity.” To greater or lesser
extents, each of the three games also employs these allusions to legitimize
themselves artistically by piggybacking on Kubrick’s artistic legacy.

Elite Company
If the opening credits are the best-known part of 2001, the space station
docking sequence is a close second. Near the beginning of the film, a
spacefaring plane arrives at a space station, famously accompanied by the
sounds of Johann Strauss Jr.’s An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314
(1866)—commonly known as the Blue Danube Waltz (Figure 5.1). The
striking ambiguity of Kubrick’s musical selection has led to a wide range of
critical and scholarly interpretations. Some recurring themes are the
perceived irony of the music, and, relatedly, how familiarity renders even
the most wondrous technologies banal. Others suggest the scene’s use of
music is sincere rather than ironic. These interpretations note the balletic
quality of the scene’s choreography, and the music’s lightness (perhaps
weightlessness) as reflective of the environment and on-screen action.6 For
my part, I take an all-of-the-above approach; the brilliance of Kubrick’s
musical selection is that it works on multiple levels simultaneously.
FIGURE 5.1 The arrival at the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

From a special-effects standpoint, the docking sequence astounded

audiences in 1968 and remains impressive today. The science historian and
journalist Piers Bizony, for instance, recalled in his book on 2001, “I
thought the orbiting station and the other ships looked so real, I could never
quite believe they didn’t exist.”7 Despite the lack of gravity, the scene’s
remarkable realism weighed heavily on the minds of Ian Bell and David
Braben, the Cambridge undergraduates who created the video game Elite
(1984). Bell and Braben set out to create a game that featured 3D space
combat, a seemingly impossible goal given the limited technology available
at the time. Against all odds, they succeeded. Yet the pair quickly realized
that despite their technological achievements, the game quickly got old.
They began adding new features, including space station docking explicitly
modeled on 2001, in which players align their ships to the station’s rotation
(Figure 5.2).8 These new elements helped make Elite a massive success.
After its humble beginnings on the BBC Micro computer system, the game
was released on virtually every existing computing platform over the
following seven years.
FIGURE 5.2 The space station docking sequence in Elite (1985 Commodore 64 version).

Like many BBC Micro games of the early 1980s, Elite originally had no
music—the technology and memory restrictions simply wouldn’t allow for
it. Subsequent versions, however, began to include more and more sound.
The 1985 Commodore 64 version of the game was, to my knowledge, the
first to include a significant amount of music. There was an apparently
original composition for the title sequence, and a piece reserved for the
docking sequences: the Blue Danube Waltz. If the homage to 2001 wasn’t
clear enough previously, the music leaves no doubt whatsoever. Just as in
Kubrick’s film, the Blue Danube begins when players approach a space
station and accompanies their efforts to safely dock the ship. Later versions
of the game follow the Commodore 64’s lead, though sometimes in slightly
different ways. The only music in the 1987 IBM-compatible PC version, for
example, is the melody of the Blue Danube, accompanying a three-
dimensional model of a starship during the title screen—an image evoking
the rotating station and ship in 2001. The 1991 PC remake, Elite Plus,
employs exactly the same technique, albeit with far enhanced sound
quality.9
The Nintendo Entertainment System version of Elite was released in
1991, quite late in the console’s life span. Unique among the versions I’ve
encountered, the NES Elite includes a large amount of newly composed
music, looped to create the wall-to-wall placement common on consoles of
the time. This fast-paced, drum-heavy music differs sharply from its
predecessors—yet even here, during docking sequences the music shifts to
the Strauss waltz. And the length of that loop suggests its importance.
Typically, on the NES cues longer than about thirty seconds were looped to
conserve resources, but the Blue Danube lasts almost two minutes.
Evidently, the developers found its presence important enough to merit
taking up a fairly large chunk of valuable memory.
There are many other versions of Elite, but I hope these examples suffice
to illustrate the game’s fundamentally allusive quality. Over and over,
designers and programmers devoted time and processing power to
musically recreating Kubrick’s famous scene. But why? What’s the purpose
of this allusion, aside from a sly nod to a sci-fi classic? A number of
possible explanations present themselves. Admittedly, it makes sense from
a musical and technological perspective. The melody and accompaniment
texture of the Blue Danube are well-suited for the limited audio capabilities
of 1980s gaming, and the waltz’s repetitious structure makes for easy
looping. In fact, Kubrick himself repeats a portion of the waltz in the film,
presumably for timing purposes, without creating any significant issues.10
Yet any number of musical works could do that job just as easily, including
with newly composed music.
A much grander reason for evoking 2001 was to tap into players’
memories of experiencing Kubrick’s film. For instance, recalling the
technical accomplishments of 2001’s special effects might be a subtle way
of drawing attention to Elite’s own impressive graphics. Just as Kubrick’s
film created a startling level of realism for viewers, Elite gave players what
was at the time an extraordinarily lifelike spacefaring experience. The game
hardly compares to the visual splendor of 2001, but by triggering players’
memories, it encourages them to imagine the cinematic splendor of
Kubrick’s scene. The musicologist Peter Kupfer has noted how Strauss’s
waltz works in a slightly similar way in a 2011 Apple iPhone commercial,
building on the advanced technology on display in the space station docking
sequence to make the smartphone seem even more technologically
impressive.11 In other words, Elite enhances players’ gaming experience by
building on their prior knowledge.
While intertextual homages and parodies are by no means unique to
games, certain types of allusion are particularly salient to the interactive
nature of games as a medium. Players who project their knowledge of 2001
onto their gameplay may experience Elite in dramatically different ways
from those who do not, and that distinction might affect how the game
proceeds. Players might choose to re-enact 2001’s docking sequence, for
example, or they might simply understand their avatar’s position in the
universe differently—either way could radically alter how they choose to
play the game. Because their actions may affect how the game unfolds,
players themselves become part of the intertextuality. My next two
examples both pay homage to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a
controversial film that addresses the coexistence of sublime artistry and
unfathomable violence. One of the reasons Kubrick’s film is both so
effective and so alienating lies in how it subtly implicates viewers in the
horrible acts of violence. In games, however, implication becomes action—
players are both affecting and affected by the events occurring on-screen.
Evoking Kubrick’s film becomes a form of self-critique, encouraging
players to reflect on their own actions, and perhaps on the nature and
content of games as a whole.

Squirrels, Bats, and Thieving Magpies

In 1997, Rare Entertainment announced the development of a new family-
friendly game for the Nintendo 64. Starring an adorable red squirrel named
Conker, the game got as far as magazine previews before Rare took it in a
dramatically different direction. Changing demographics and market
research had made it clear that, as the average player was getting older,
there was more demand for an adult-oriented title instead. Understandably
hesitant to abandon all the valuable development time spent on Conker,
Rare replaced the cutesy squirrel with a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed
doppelgänger. The resulting game, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, was released
(appropriately for this chapter) in 2001.12 Its gameplay was highly praised,
but the core appeal of Conker’s Bad Fur Day lay in its humor—it was,
especially for the time, a genuinely funny game. Part of the fun stems from
watching cartoon characters behaving badly, a bit like the film Who Framed
Roger Rabbit? (1988), for instance. But Conker’s Bad Fur Day is also a
highly intertextual game, rife with references and parodies of all kinds of
popular culture, especially film. No movies were safe from Conker, from
classics like The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), and Blue Velvet (1986) to films that would have been new at the
time, such as The Matrix (1999) and Gladiator (2000). Kubrick’s films are
especially well represented. At various points in the game, Conker’s Bad
Fur Day references Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and A
Clockwork Orange. This last parody is one of the most prominent, taking
up the entire opening cutscene and establishing the game’s tone.
Film audiences first encounter Alex, the sociopathic protagonist of A
Clockwork Orange, sitting in the Korova Milk Bar. His head tilted down,
his blue eyes peer out ominously from under the brim of his bowler hat
(Figure 5.3). As a voice-over from Alex provides some exposition, the
camera never wavers from Alex’s piercing gaze, even as it slowly pulls
back to reveal the room and its other occupants. The opening of Conker’s
Bad Fur Day references this memorable scene in several ways. Conker,
head tilted down, greets us with a blue-eyed stare from under his crown; he
holds and drinks from a glass of milk, as Alex does in the film; he provides
an expositional voice-over; and the camera gradually pulls back in precisely
the same fashion (Figure 5.4). The visual similarities are obvious enough to
make the homage clear—but the music makes it unmistakable. Both scenes
feature a synthesized version of Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary
(1695) by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. Kubrick’s film
features Purcell’s music in an electronic arrangement by Wendy Carlos, the
pioneering musician best known for the album Switched-On Bach (1968).
Conker’s Bad Fur Day includes a different adaptation, but one clearly
inspired by Carlos—an adapted synthesized version of an adapted
synthesized version of the original baroque work. (I assume the choice to
commission a new arrangement rather than use Carlos’s music stemmed
from a desire to avoid paying licensing fees.)
FIGURE 5.3 Opening shot of Alex from A Clockwork Orange (1971).

FIGURE 5.4 Screenshot from the opening cutscene of Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001).
 On one level, this parody is just another of many in-jokes scattered
throughout the game, a wink at players familiar with Kubrick’s film. And as
a joke, it works. Conker’s impossibly large eyes and cartoonish voice (think
Alvin and the Chipmunks) contrast hilariously with the steely gaze and
British accent of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex. Digging a little deeper, there’s
also another joke in the choice of music—although maybe not a very good
one. The opening scene of Conker’s Bad Fur Day reveals that Conker has
become the king, and the game unfolds as a flashback explaining how this
remarkable turn of events occurred. Just before his ascendancy to the
throne, however, his girlfriend and would-be queen, Berri, is murdered.
Thus the music is, in effect, Funeral Music for Queen Berri, rather than
Queen Mary—a bit of foreshadowing, and one among many groan-worthy
puns scattered throughout the game.
Beyond those fairly straightforward associations, this opening scene also
reveals the (relatively) serious undertones that lurk beneath the game’s
superficially comic surface. Conker’s Bad Fur Day challenged games’
reputation as kids’ stuff. Despite its colorful, cartoonish appearance, it
earned—and indeed reveled in—one of the few “M for Mature” ratings
issued for Nintendo 64 games, which it received for “animated violence,”
“mature sexual themes,” and “strong language.”13 Game designers and
marketers knew the game would be controversial. Nintendo declined to
advertise the game in its Nintendo Power magazine, and some toy retailers
even refused to carry it, preventing children (or parents) from accidentally
purchasing a copy. Conker’s ad campaign did, however, involve a
nationwide tour of college campuses with Playboy magazine, and it was
featured in adult- and male-focused publications like Maxim magazine.14
Everything about how Conker’s Bad Fur Day was presented to potential
players, in short, emphasized its adults-only character. The Clockwork
Orange reference works in the same way, reinforcing right off the bat that
this was a game created with adult players in mind.
At the same time, however, Conker’s Bad Fur Day was a big risk for its
developers. Games were (and remain) under intense scrutiny, constantly
battling spurious claims that they contribute to moral decline in the younger
generation. But games are certainly not the first media to endure such
accusations. Upon its release, in fact, A Clockwork Orange was widely
condemned for its extreme violence and the amorality of its central
character, among other complaints.15 Perhaps the developers hoped that by
invoking A Clockwork Orange, they could remind players and critics of
other controversial but ultimately successful media products. If A
Clockwork Orange could do it, why not a video game? Using Purcell’s
Funeral March for Queen Mary played a part in that effort. It not only
helped call to mind Kubrick’s film but did so with classical music—a
double dose of sophisticated, high-art allusions. At the same time, there’s
also an absurdity to juxtaposing cultural touchstones like art film and
classical music with the immature antics of a deviant squirrel. In that sense,
the allusion to A Clockwork Orange in Conker’s Bad Fur Day is
simultaneously both a parody of Kubrick’s film and an homage to his clever
uses of classical music.
As we’ve seen many times already in this book, classical music is often
perceived as a force of cultural and moral uplift.16 In A Clockwork Orange,
however, Alex’s amorality and love of classical music present the audience
with a seemingly irresolvable contradiction. Kubrick subverts our
understanding and appreciation of art, just as in the film Alex’s affinity for
Beethoven becomes a source of physical and psychological torment.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day defies these same assumptions. By parodying an art
film in a video game, and by subjecting supposedly serious art music to use
in a video game (and for a joke!), it challenges perceptions of who plays
video games, just like A Clockwork Orange questions the sophistication of
classical music audiences. In other words, the Kubrick reference in
Conker’s Bad Fur Day tells us something about the game, but it tells us just
as much about our relationship to the game—and particularly about our
expectations for what video games can and should be.
Conker addresses these philosophical concerns in an oblique and
playfully transgressive way. My final example, however, uses classical
music to deal with these concerns more directly, aiming less at humorous
parody than at invoking the seriousness and aesthetic aspirations of
Kubrick’s film. The overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra
(The Thieving Magpie; 1817) makes two significant appearances in A
Clockwork Orange. In both cases, the lighthearted standard is ironically
combined with scenes of extreme violence: once when Alex and his gang
engage in a brutal showdown with a rival gang in a derelict theater, and
slightly later when Alex lashes out after his leadership of his gang is
challenged (Figure 5.5). The violence in these scenes assumes a surreal,
choreographed quality. In the first scene, the fight feels obviously staged,
befitting its theatrical setting, while the slow-motion cinematography of the
second scene lends it an uncannily balletic quality.17 The resulting
aestheticization of violence—a transformation of violence into a kind of
pleasurable visual experience—is a device found in centuries of visual arts,
and more recently in media products like the hyperviolent films of Quentin
Tarantino.

FIGURE 5.5 Alex exacts revenge on his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

This same kind of aestheticization of violence can be found in many

video games, including Batman: Arkham Origins (2013), which also bears
several other similarities to A Clockwork Orange.18 The plot of Origins,
which follows Batman’s early adventures, is as complicated as the comics
from which it draws inspiration. A cabal of assassins attempts to claim a
large bounty on Batman’s life offered by the game’s initial antagonist, the
crime lord Black Mask. Midway through the game, however, a shocking (?)
plot twist reveals Black Mask to be another villain in disguise: the Joker.
Although in Origins’s narrative this is Batman’s first encounter with the
Joker, the relationship between the two would be old hat for most players.
Not even taking into account the various Batman comic books, films, and
television shows, Origins isn’t even the first video game in this series to
feature the Joker as the primary antagonist. Both Batman: Arkham Asylum
(2009) and Batman: Arkham City (2011), which feature a more mature
Batman, already introduced and developed the Joker’s character.19 Arkham
Origins is, in other words, tasked with introducing players to a character
they almost certainly already know.
Wisely, Arkham Origins doesn’t spend much time explaining the Joker’s
backstory. It does, however, take the opportunity to delve more deeply into
his psychosis than did previous game—partially through the use of classical
music. For the most part, the classical music in Origins fits comfortably
within the cinematic trope of classical music-loving evil geniuses, as, for
example, when classical music plays in the background of a meeting of
villains.20 Fortunately, however, Origins also occasionally reaches beyond
the conventional. Its most intriguing use of classical music occurs in a
surreal sequence that is quite unlike any other portion of the game. After the
Joker is apprehended and briefly imprisoned, the focus switches to an
extended conversation between the villain and his assigned therapist.
Strapped to a gurney, the Joker reveals his supposed motivations, giving
players some insight into his twisted psyche. The conversation begins as a
noninteractive cutscene, but the analysis soon fades into a voice-over, with
players’ control restored. During this sequence, players control the Joker as
he relives significant past moments from his distorted perspective. The most
notable of these is an ultraviolent free-for-all in a comedy club—a scene
underscored by Rossini’s overture to La gazza ladra, the same work
featured in those two memorably violent Clockwork Orange scenes. Just as
in Kubrick’s film, Rossini’s music runs counter to the action, its joviality
clashing with the brutality on screen. This type of musical irony in this
scene is at odds with the straight-faced, relatively unsubtle tone of the rest
of the Arkham series and seems intended to reflect the Joker’s highly
unbalanced mental state. On the other hand, perhaps there’s no irony at all
for the Joker. Just as A Clockwork Orange’s Alex sees no contradiction in
loving Beethoven and committing acts of wanton violence, the Joker might
find Rossini’s music to be a perfectly appropriate pairing for his rampage.
In fact, I believe this entire scene can be fruitfully interpreted through the
lens of A Clockwork Orange. We might point to similarities between the
Joker and Alex, for instance. Both are of course murderous, amoral
psychopaths—“criminal heroes,” in the sense that they are “brutal,
individualistic, ambitious, and doomed,” and seem to associate violence
with pleasure.21 There are also some plot similarities: both characters are
imprisoned for violent crimes; both are strapped to gurneys and subjected to
psychological examination; and so on. Indeed, in its overt theatricality and
sense of choreography, the comedy club scene in Arkham Origins strongly
evokes the theater gang fight in Kubrick’s movie. The cinematic allusion
becomes a valuable form of shorthand characterization, helping players
better understand this interpretation of the Joker by associating him with
someone familiar: Kubrick’s Alex.
But here, crucially, players aren’t just passive observers of Alex’s
misadventures. In Arkham Origins, they are the psychopaths. To advance in
the game, players must use their controllers to inflict virtual violence over
and over, and they presumably enjoy doing so (or else why play?). By the
time players step into the Joker’s shoes, they have fought their way through
countless criminals and been rewarded with slow-motion, cinematic close-
ups of particularly violent moments. The precisely timed button presses the
game requires for combat even have an almost musical quality to them—a
choreographed, rhythmic performance reminiscent of the stylized violence
in A Clockwork Orange. By connecting with Kubrick’s film, then, the
Joker’s surreal dream offers a kind of metacommentary on players’
relationship with the game, and perhaps on the aestheticization of violence
in games more broadly speaking. In the opening moments of Kubrick’s
film, Alex’s disturbing gaze seems to make viewers somehow complicit in
his deeds. Arkham Origins goes a step further, alluding to A Clockwork
Orange as a way of encouraging players to reflect on their own actions—
forcing them to question whether they’re really so different from Alex or
the Joker, after all.
My interpretations in this chapter are to a large extent dependent on the
player’s prior knowledge—in this case, a familiarity with Kubrick’s films. It
is certainly likely, however, that many players enjoy these games while
remaining entirely unaware of the references. Or, even if they do catch the
allusions, players might differ greatly in what they think those references
mean—including the larger questions I believe they pose regarding morality
and the cultural value of art. Far from negating the value of these
Kubrickian allusions, however, that ambiguity is itself fully in keeping with
Kubrick’s idiosyncratic style of musical placement in film. As the director
opined in a 1971 interview, “I particularly enjoy those subtle discoveries
where I wonder whether the filmmaker himself was even aware that they
were in the film, or whether they happened by accident. I’m sure that
there’s something in the human personality which resents things that are
clear, and, conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas,
and allegories.”22
Indeed, perhaps the most significant aspect of classical music in
Kubrick’s films is the space it allows for many equally rewarding
interpretations.23 Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz and Rossini’s Overture to La
gazza ladra will mean something different to each viewer depending on his
or her frame of reference. In games, that kind of ambiguity often becomes a
necessity. As enigmatic as 2001 might be, for example, the film remains
fundamentally the same no matter how many times you watch it. In Elite,
on the other hand, every playthrough might be dramatically different. A
player might avoid the space station altogether on one playthrough, or crash
on trying to dock, or any number of variables. Inspired by Kubrick’s
ingenious and sometimes inscrutable musical selections, this ambiguity
enables a wide variety of equally valid gameplay experiences.

1
“Hardcore” gamers, the top 10 percent of the core group, skew even younger and more male-
dominated. Data are somewhat difficult to come by—and definitions for terms like “core gamers”
are often nebulous—but a 2015 study from the Pew Research Center is instructive in this regard.
See Maeve Duggan, “Gaming and Gamers,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech
(December 15, 2015), available online at [Link]
gamers/.
2
Kate McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 1. For an overview of Kubrick’s musical uses, see also Christine
Lee Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films (London: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014).
3
Claudia Gorbman, “Auteur Music,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema,
ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 149.
4
Claudia Gorbman, “Ears Wide Open: Kubrick’s Music,” in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-
existing Music in Film, ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 4.
5
Robert Philip Kolker, “Oranges, Dogs, and Ultra-violence,” Journal of Popular Film 1 (1972):
167, 169.
6
See, for example, McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, chap. 6; as well as David W. Patterson, “Music,
Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” American Music 22
(2004): 444–471.
7
Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 1994), 8. McQuiston discusses this
passage with relation to the docking sequence in We’ll Meet Again, chap. 6.
8
Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (East Sussex, UK: Yellow Ant, 2010),
118.
9
This placement on the title screen of Elite rather than during the docking itself may seem a bit
surprising, but the game’s processors likely couldn’t handle the complex graphics, sound, and
music simultaneously in actual gameplay. Additionally, although the Blue Danube is most
associated with the space station docking scene of 2001, we may recall that it also accompanies
the film’s ending credits, so the idea of using the piece as a framing device as we see in the PC
version of Elite is actually in keeping with Kubrick’s own usage.
10
For an in-depth analysis of the waltz in 2001, see McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, chap. 6.
11
Peter Kupfer, “Classical Music in Television Commercials: A Social-Psychological Perspective,”
Music and the Moving Image 10 (2017): 24.
12
The game was rereleased in 2005 as Conker: Live and Reloaded for the Microsoft Xbox.
Throughout I am specifically referring to the original 2001 version, as I have not personally
investigated any possible difference in music or content between the two versions.
13
ESRB rating information for Conker’s Bad Fur Day is available online at
[Link]
Certificate=5327&Title=Conker%27s%20Bad%20Fur%20Day (accessed June 3, 2016).
14
See, for example, “KB Skips Conker,” IGN (March 6, 2001), available online at
[Link] (accessed September 1, 2016); and
“Conker Goes on Tour with Playboy,” IGN (March 28, 2001), available online at
[Link] (accessed September
1, 2016).
15
McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, 163. See also David J. Code, “Don Juan in Nadsat: Kubrick’s
Music for A Clockwork Orange,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 339–340.
16
Code, for example, notes that this aspect of Alex’s personality is central even in the Anthony
Burgess novel on which Kubrick’s film is based. “In addition to his enthusiasm for sex and
violence, Alex maintains a passionate love of classical music, which features prominently at all
three stages of his story: violence, cure and retribution.” Code, “Don Juan in Nadsat,” 341.
17
On the balletic choreography of violence (and other elements) in Kubrick’s films, see, for
example, Elisa Pezzotta, “The Metaphor of Dance in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5
(2012): 51–64.
18
Arkham Origins was released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U consoles. Several pieces
of downloadable content were released after its initial release. Although I do not believe the
expanded material altered the musical examples discussed in this chapter in any way, for clarity’s
sake, note that I refer throughout this section to the base game (i.e., without DLC).
19
Since Arkham Origins, the series has returned to its original timeline, wrapping up the story with
Batman: Arkham Knight (2015).
20
See, for example, Thomas Fahy, “Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence
of the Lambs and Se7en,” Journal of Popular Culture 37 (2003): 28–42.
21
McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, 163.
22
Quoted in Alexander Walker, Ulrich Ruchti, and Sybil Taylor, Stanley Kubrick, Director: A
Visual Analysis, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2000), 38. As McQuiston points out, “For Kubrick,
a good film leaves blanks for the audience to fill in, and leaves them free to discover the films for
themselves.” Kate McQuiston, “The Stanley Kubrick Experience: Music, Nuclear Bombs,
Disorientation, and You,” in Music, Sound and Filmmakers, ed. James Wierzbicki (London:
Routledge, 2012), 141.
23
Mike Cormack, for example, goes so far as to suggest that this ambiguity as a central aspect of
pre-classical music in film. See Mike Cormack, “The Pleasures of Ambiguity: Using Classical
Music in Film,” in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, ed. Phil Powrie and
Robynn Stilwell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 19–30.
6 Remixed Metaphors

ASIDE FROM POLITE nods, there’s one response I get most often when I tell
people I’m writing a book on classical music and video games: “Oh, you
mean like Gyruss!”1 For players who fondly remember 1980s arcades, it
seems the notion of classical music in video games is inextricably tied to
Konami’s 1983 shoot-’em-up. And for good reason. To quote from the
Gyruss review on the gaming website HardcoreGaming101: “Gyruss, one
of Konami’s more popular games in the early 80s, [is] an impressive bit of
technology for 1983. . . . It’s also notable for its fast paced arrangement of
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, one of the first—and best—uses of
music in an arcade game.”2 The Toccata and Fugue, originally a work for
solo organ, occupies a prominent position in Gyruss.3 Its opening notes
accompany the game’s first stage, initially suggesting that the music will be
a straightforward transcription (Figure 6.1). About five seconds in,
however, the music quickly skips to the ending chords of the opening slow
section, followed by a jarring drum fill. When the piece picks back up, it’s
in a much freer—and decidedly popular—form. It’s a remix.
FIGURE 6.1 Gameplay screenshot of Gyruss (NES version, 1988).

By and large, game designers of the late 1970s and 1980s tried to keep
classical music as close to its original form as possible, but before the
middle to late 1990s all classical music in games was in some way remixed.
Game technology of that time couldn’t replicate the sounds of acoustic
instruments or accommodate the number of simultaneous pitches required
for most classical music. Though not exactly remixes, these adaptations
nevertheless create a similar effect, bringing classical music into closer
contact with popular culture. A few early games like Gyruss, however,
directly and obviously experimented with juxtaposing classical and popular
musical styles, a strategy that has persisted into the present day in a variety
of forms. Previous chapters have explored some ways in which tension
between art and entertainment comes into play in games. In this chapter, I
turn to games that engage this perceived conflict directly, in the form of
musical remixes. To be clear, by remixes I mean classical music that is
significantly altered in style from its original form, usually by incorporating
elements of popular music styles—and thus becoming a work of hybrid
authorship.
In Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, cultural critic Eduardo
Navas outlines three basic forms of musical remix, all of which apply to
some extent in video games: (1) the “extended” remix, in which the length
of the work is expanded; (2) the “selective” remix, in which portions of the
original are omitted and/or new material is added; and (3) the “reflexive”
remix, which “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling.”4 It’s fairly
clear how the first two types work in video games: most game remixes of
classical music, for example, are designed to be looped infinitely, in effect
creating the ultimate “extended” remixes. Likewise, nearly all the examples
I’ve found take only a few elements of the piece being remixed. In most
cases, that means only limited melodic and harmonic material, typically
fragmented into short, immediately understandable sections—a hook, in
other words. I don’t know any game remix, for example, that contains an
entire movement of a symphony. That would simply be too long—and not
nearly repetitive enough—to combine effectively with the pop-remix
medium. At the same time, remixes add new musical elements to the
original works, most often in the form of drumbeats, but frequently also
added harmonies and melodic lines.
Most interesting for my purposes, however, is the reflexive aspect of
remixes. There the remix takes on an allegorical meaning, adding new
layers of meaning to both the original work and to the added elements.5 In
other words, the work becomes both old and new; it’s the original work and
something entirely different. The works chosen for game remixes tend to be
the same few well-known pieces, a practice that we might assume stems
from a lack of music-historical knowledge on the part of game designers,
composers, and audio directors. That argument does have some merit,
especially when considering early games, but it also sells short these often
highly educated and knowledgeable professionals. Recognizing the
classical music as classical is critical to the function of a remix. As Navas
tells us, these types of hybrid works “will always rely on the authority of
the original composition, whether in forms of actual samples, or in form of
reference. . . . The remix is in the end a re-mix—that is, a rearrangement of
something already recognizable.”6 In other words, a remix with an
unidentified original source ceases to function as a remix at all—and, more
important, it loses its ability to harness the cultural value attached to that
original. Yet as the musicologist Mark Katz notes regarding digital
sampling, “Any sound, placed into a new musical context, will take on
some of the character of its new sonic environment,” and through this type
of manipulation music can be “decontextualized and recontextualized, . . .
giving it new sounds, functions, and meanings.”7 To become something
new, it must first be recognizable as something old.
This reflexive remixing process has appeared in other media for decades,
including with regard to classical music. Popular musicians have long taken
advantage of classical tunes, as Michael Broyles and Matthew Brown have
recently explored with the music of Beethoven and Debussy, respectively.8
Consider, for example, Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s novelty
disco remix “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1976), which takes its inspiration and
musical material from the Fifth Symphony (1808).9 Or the extensive
reworking of classical music common in progressive rock of the 1970s, as
in the music of the bands Renaissance and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. On
the other hand, although classical music is a common feature in traditional
narrative media like film and television, with a few notable exceptions
(such as Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), the music usually appears in
something like its original form. Remixed classical music in games is thus a
melding of these two traditions: popular reinterpretations of classical music,
on the one hand, and narrative cinematic uses of classical, on the other.
Given these traditions, why might Masahiro Inoue have chosen Bach’s
Toccata and Fugue as Gyruss’s main theme? Part of the answer may lie with
perceptions of Bach’s music as the apex of musical complexity—classical
music at its most classical. In the early 1980s, arcade cabinets in particular
were in a state of constant technological development. Each game was
unique, and game developers and programmers were always looking for
new ways to attract players. And in the loud, crowded atmosphere of the
1980s arcade, it was often the sound above all that drew players to a
particular machine.10 Gyruss’s remixed Toccata and Fugue became a kind
of technological benchmark—a dramatic way to illustrate the game’s
advanced sound capabilities. In contrast with the sporadic musical outbursts
of Galaga (1981), for example, Gyruss simultaneously offered wall-to-wall
music and multiple sound effects, no mean task with 1983 game audio
technology.11 The choice of Bach added another dimension—not only could
Gyruss play music constantly, but it could play Bach, the composer of what
some regard as the most technically perfect music ever written. The
grandiose opening statement of Bach’s music echoes similarly bold
promises that Gyruss’s creators were making about the game’s technical
achievements.
 The Gryuss Bach remix has enjoyed a long afterlife well into the twenty-
first century and has itself been remixed on several occasions. The original
arcade version was updated and altered for the Nintendo Famicom and NES
ports (1987 and 1988, respectively), the DJ/composer JT. 1Up’s electronic
remix “Gyruss—Full Tilt” appeared in the game Dance Dance Revolution
Ultramix 2 (2004), and the Xbox Live Arcade re-release of Gyruss (2007)
featured yet another meta-remix. At what point, then, is Bach’s music less
the subject of the remix than Inoue’s Gyruss music? Clearly, it’s nostalgia
for Gyruss rather than for the original organ work that motivates these new
versions. This distinction highlights another, and I think beneficial,
consequence of removing a classical work from its privileged status: music
becomes inherently more fluid as outmoded concepts of faithfulness to the
work give way to a sense of musical play.12 As Vanessa Chang points out in
a study of musical sampling, “Rather than clinging to the myth of the
composer savant, sampling maintains an ethics of inclusion that is social as
well as musical, creating a tradition that involves the past without
submitting to its structures and limitations.”13 Gyruss illustrates how
remixing allows for kinds of artistic freedom and play that are usually off
limits with classical music.
In more recent years, remixed classical music has become the domain of
independent games rather than major studio releases. Perhaps that change
results from the perceived intellectual rigor of classical music, but it could
also be nostalgia for the 1980s, when classical music was more prominent
in games. The indie game FEZ (2012), a product of game designer Phil
Fish, illustrates both categories. An homage to platformer games of the 8-
bit era, FEZ features deliberately crude graphics designed to appear as two-
dimensional pixels, despite actually being three-dimensional polygons
(Figure 6.2). As Chris Suellentrop writes in the New York Times:

Mr. Fish is a Quentin Tarantino of 8-bit gaming, prodigiously quoting

from the pop culture of his childhood (in this case, the Nintendo
Entertainment System, rather than blaxploitation films). The oddly
shaped blocks from Tetris can be seen everywhere in Fez: on the walls,
on the ground, on signposts, scrawled on chalkboards, even in the
constellations in the sky. Gomez, Fez’s protagonist, beams with joy,
adorably, when he finds an important item in a treasure chest, much
 like Link, the hero of Zelda. But it is to Super Mario Bros. that Fez
owes its greatest debts.14

The game’s soundtrack, by composer Richard “Disasterpeace” Vreeland,

matches the gameplay’s retrospective quality—as critic Matt Miller pointed
out in Game Informer, the music “drives home the ’80s nostalgia vibe.”15
Buried innocuously on FEZ’s soundtrack is one piece of remixed classical
music: “Continuum,” a remix of Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, Op.
28, No. 4 (1839). A highly distorted opening—I initially thought something
was wrong with my speakers—evolves into a Vangelis-style synth
arrangement before slowly reintroducing the distortion, ultimately
transforming from music into pure static.

FIGURE 6.2 Gameplay screenshot of FEZ (2012).

This remixed work sonically illustrates FEZ’s efforts to transcend mere

entertainment. As Suellentrop’s comparison of Fish to Tarantino illustrates,
FEZ is often portrayed as an artgame—the critic also refers to it as “a
Finnegans Wake of video games,” for its impenetrable narrative and lack of
clear direction. As in Gyruss, remixing the Chopin prelude in FEZ is a kind
of play, but here including classical music is also a subtle way of elevating
the game artistically. Notably, the review of FEZ in game magazine Edge
Online observes that “Disasterpeace’s mesmerising quasi-chiptune
soundtrack suggests [Gustav] Holst’s back catalogue put through a Mega
Drive [Sega Genesis].”16 The same techniques Gyruss used in 1983 to
showcase the game’s cutting-edge sound hardware ironically exude a retro
nostalgia in FEZ. Yet both games appeal to classical music’s artistic
authority, whether to demonstrate technological or artistic achievement. In
Gyruss and FEZ, the remixed classical music remains in the background,
separate from both gameplay and narrative. In the following section,
however, I explore games in which remixes either form a core component
of the game or become an important expression of its central themes.

Carnival Games
Boom Boom Rocket (2007) is simplistic by design. Players rhythmically
push buttons on their controllers in response to on-screen indicators—like
Dance Dance Revolution, say, without the dance mat—and that’s all. The
reward for doing well, aside from earning points, is visual. Correctly timed
button presses trigger colorful fireworks displays against the backdrop of a
nighttime cityscape (Figure 6.3). The required inputs correspond to
elements of the music, but Boom Boom Rocket is less a music game than a
music visualizer game. That is, players add a visual accompaniment rather
than contributing to the music itself, as they would in a game like Guitar
Hero. In fact, Boom Boom Rocket even contains a music visualizer mode,
which creates a noninteractive fireworks display based on any music files
players stored on their Xbox 360 hard drives.
FIGURE 6.3 Gameplay screenshot of Boom Boom Rocket (2007).

The connection between music visualizers and video games can be traced
back as far as the Atari Video Music (AVM) system (1976), which
connected to a stereo system and provided an abstract graphical
accompaniment.17 Though the AVM system was not a game per se—there
were no rules, or ways to score points—its knobs and buttons nonetheless
created a kind of interactivity. As game scholar Ian Bogost suggests, “While
primitive, Atari Video Music offers a sign of what would become the
unique contribution videogames offer to music. Instead of listening,
watching, dancing, or otherwise taking in music, videogames offer a way to
perform it.”18 Bogost’s observation that there is a kinship between the AVM
system and games is an astute one, but I disagree that it allowed players to
perform music in any meaningful way. I would argue instead that it afforded
listeners an opportunity to visually interpret music—an important
distinction. Boom Boom Rocket is thus in some respects closer in design to
the AVM system than it is to most music games. Players are not active
participants in music making; the audio track is coldly indifferent to all their
frantic button mashing. Not surprisingly, the game also lacks what Jesper
Juul would call a “mimetic interface”—some kind of object-shaped
controller that “allows players to play from the perspective of their physical
presence in the real world.”19 As Kiri Miller, Karen Collins, and others
have illustrated, in music games this type of mimetic interface—the plastic
instruments of Rock Band, for example—allows players to assume some
agency in the music’s creation.20
Like the AVM system, Boom Boom Rocket is a visual interpretation of
music—albeit in a gamified and altogether less abstract fashion. Although
the self-directed play of the AVM system’s buttons and knobs gives way to
the structure of preassigned button presses, Boom Boom Rocket is as close
to a pure listening experience as one could expect to find in a video game.
It’s essentially a gamified AVM system, with fireworks as an updating of
the original abstract light show. And as with Atari’s early experiment, the
music remains the focus of the player’s attention. Boom Boom Rocket’s
soundtrack is heavily influenced by electronic music styles, perhaps not a
surprising choice, given the long-standing relationship between electronica
and the technological visualization of music. The AVM system, for
example, was featured prominently as the backdrop of the synth-pop band
Devo’s video for “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise” (1979), as well
as the background of the video for electronica duo Daft Punk’s “Robot
Rock” (2005). In video games, the same kinds of connections between
electronic music and music visualization crop up in titles like Rez (2001),
Child of Eden (2011), or iS: Internal Section (1999).21 What’s surprising
about Boom Boom Rocket’s music is that each track in its soundtrack is also
a remixed classical work (Table 6.1). When the game was released, its
soundtrack consisted of ten classical works remixed by composer Ian
Livingstone, each piece retitled with a clever pun. These remixes largely
focus on electronic dance music but they also include the ska-influenced
“Rave New World” and the disco-funk “Carmen Electric.” A downloadable
“Rock Pack” enhanced this stylistic range by adding five songs remixed by
Chris Chudley in a variety of rock styles.
TABLE 6.1 Remixed classical music in Boom Boom Rocket (2007)

Track Title Source Original Source

Composer
“Smooth Léo Delibes “Flower Duet,” from Lakmé
Operetta”
“Rave New Antonin Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95,
World” Dvořák “From the New World,” IV
“William Tell Gioachino Overture to William Tell
Overload” Rossini
“Hall of the Edvard Grieg “In the Hall of the Mountain King”
Mountain from Peer Gynt
Dude”
“1812 Pyotr 1812 Overture, Op. 49
Overdrive” Tchaikovsky
“Valkyries Richard Wagner “Ride of the Valkyries,” from Die
Rising” Walküre
“Tail Light Ludwig van Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Op.
Sonata” Beethoven 27, No. 2 (“Moonlight”), I
“Carmen Georges Bizet Overture to Carmen
Electric”
“Game Over Ludwig van Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, I
Beethoven” Beethoven
“Toccata and J. S. Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV
Funk” 565
DLC “Rock Pack”
“Sting of the Nikolai “Flight of the Bumble Bee” from The
Bumble Bee” Rimsky- Tale of Tsar Saltan
Korsakov
“Explode to Joy” Ludwig van Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125,
Beethoven IV
Track Title Source Original Source
Composer
“Sugar High” Pyotr “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,”
Tchaikovsky from Nutcracker
“Eine Kleine Wolfgang Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525, I
Rochtmusik” Amadeus
Mozart
“Cannon in D” Johann Canon in D
Pachelbel

More than in either Gyruss or FEZ, these remixes are obviously supposed
to be funny, or at least lighthearted. But there’s also a bit of a subversive
edge, evident both in the new titles and in the music itself. “Game Over
Beethoven” recalls Chuck Berry’s song “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), a
call for classical music to make way for popular styles. In one way or
another, most of the rest of the titles suggest replacing boring classical
elements with exciting modern ones. For example, two remixes update the
generic title “overture,” once with “overdrive” and once with “overload.”
Some titles even hint at a violent break with tradition, particularly in the
“Rock Pack”: Pachelbel’s infamous Canon in D becomes a “cannon,”
Beethoven’s Ode “explodes,” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s bumble bee “stings.”
The end result is both a celebration and a carnivalesque mockery of the
remixed classical works. Players aren’t forced to choose one interpretation
or the other, of course; as Katz notes, a newly created hybrid work “can be
understood as derivative and novel, exploitative and respectful, awkward
and subtle.”22
The remixes revel in this liminal space. To my mind, it’s a bit similar to
the pleasure 1970s DJs took in introducing contradictory elements; Joseph
Schloss points out that “many deejays are known to have taken a special
delight in getting audiences to dance to breaks that were taken from genres
that they professed to hate.”23 Certainly, some of Boom Boom Rocket’s
players recognize this playfulness. As one user-contributed review to the
website GameFAQs notes:
 The songs—what I have played—are great and fun to listen to. And
this is coming from a person who listens to rap and nothing else. Most
of the music in this game is remixed Classical, and Classical bores me
. . . but not the music in this game. Why? I honestly don’t know. . . .
Another thing that makes this game fun for a person like me that
enjoys Rap, RnB, and music of that nature is that the songs actually
have somewhat of a beat (for the most part) and the fireworks flow
with that.24

More than any other game I explore in this chapter, Boom Boom Rocket
illustrates the pleasure derived from combining supposedly incompatible
musical styles.
And yet its message was a bit muddled. In this sort of remix, audiences
eventually have to be in on the joke. Critics and players alike, however,
were for the most part unsure what to make of Boom Boom Rocket. Its few
media reviews reveal a profound ambivalence toward its score in particular.
Some found the music and gameplay repetitive, its initial ten-song
soundtrack insufficient to hold their attention for long. (For comparison’s
sake, Rock Band—also released in 2007—included fifty-eight songs on the
disc and regularly introduced new downloadable content up to a total of
more than two thousand songs.) The response to the music itself is even
more revealing; oddly, most reviewers made almost no mention of the
classical-based soundtrack. What little attention critics did pay to the
remixes was fairly dismissive. The critic Douglass C. Perry, writing for the
prominent gaming website IGN, offers a lukewarm assessment, noting that
the game was “good but not great, likeable but not loveable, somewhat but
not terribly addictive, and doesn’t drive home that memorable soundtrack to
keep you around for weeks.” Perry goes on isolate the score as a major
cause of the game’s mediocrity: “Part of the problem . . . is the lack of great
songs and the simplicity of the song design. These tunes are decent takes on
familiar songs, but they don’t grab you the way songs in Guitar Hero do.
The addictive quality inherent in BBR quickly rubs off, then, because as a
music game it’s short on the quality and quantity of songs.”25
Perry’s review is worth a bit of unpacking. A few themes emerge: a lack
of interest in the specifics of the music, an uncertainty even in how to
describe it, and yet—most interestingly—a reluctance to directly deride it.
Of course, game journalists aren’t usually music experts, and they rarely
have the time or inclination to explore it beyond a cursory appraisal. It is
nonetheless remarkable, however, that I have yet to find even one review of
Boom Boom Rocket that mentions a single composer’s name (aside from
Livingstone, who was identified on occasion). Critics mostly just describe
the works as familiar, or well known. Tom Bramwell of [Link]
comes the closest to discussing the classical works, identifying some of the
pieces but not their composers: “Each level is built around one piece of
music, and while they’re all new, composed by a Mr. Livingstone . . . ,
they’re all derived from well-known classical tunes. There’s William Tell,
the 1812 Overture, Ride of the Valkyries, and seven others.”26 Like other
reviewers, Bramwell puts more emphasis on the remixes than on the
original classical works.
Then again, maybe critics ignoring the classical works and their
composers isn’t that surprising. Thanks to their constant appearances in
media and generic orchestral pops concerts—the kind that often accompany
fireworks displays in the United States—these works become part of our
collective musical unconscious. One user-contributed review on the website
GameFAQs, for example, intriguingly notes that the soundtrack “consists of
10 remixed classical songs, [that] everyone knows (even if you don’t want
to admit it).”27 In other words, they’re not as much individual works as they
are representations of classical music in general.
As put off as critics and players were by Boom Boom Rocket’s
soundtrack, however, few openly questioned the music’s quality or
appropriateness. Bramwell, for example, equivocates—writing that “aurally
it’s novel, but you won’t be rushing out to buy the songs.”28 Perry, too,
hoped that the game’s “new downloadable stuff equates to more and
preferably licensed tracks.”29 In other words, he thought licensed pop music
would vastly improve Boom Boom Rocket, but he hesitated a bit to say so
directly. Game critics aren’t known for pulling punches when a key
gameplay element is lacking. So why were critics of Boom Boom Rocket so
confused by the game’s soundtrack, and why were they so timid about
lambasting it? The answer to both questions, I think, is tied to classical
music’s cultural position. Nobody wants to seem uncultured, so critics may
have been reluctant to suggest that these classical tracks just weren’t that
enjoyable to listen to. At the same time, players are faced with the cognitive
dissonance of so-called masterpieces being playfully combined with
popular styles, and all for a simple game about fireworks. How could critics
and players make sense of this conflicting information—and how, for that
matter, can we? Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot suggests that “these updated
takes on classical music are pretty cheesy, though they’re exactly the sort of
tracks you’d expect to hear at a fireworks show. . . . The soundtrack isn’t
bad, but it’s all a little goofy.”30 “Cheesy” and “goofy” are hardly high
praise. But those words do tell us something about the game: Boom Boom
Rocket pulls high art off its pedestal. But why?
In search of some answers about a game based on fireworks displays, it
feels appropriate to turn to the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept
of “carnival.” Named for the raucous period of pre-Lenten celebration in
Western Christian traditions, Bakhtin’s carnival describes any time when
traditional values are suspended or inverted, creating a safe place to laugh at
even the most serious topics. By viewing issues through a lens of humor,
Bakhtin tells us, “the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more)
profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore, laughter
is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as
seriousness.”31 By learning to laugh at these classical works in their goofy
new setting, we can see them in a different light, visualizing the music (as
the carnivalesque fireworks do) in a unique way. Through laughter, carnival
breaks down the walls between the high and low arts through laughter. As
literary scholar Renate Lachmann has pointed out:

The inventory of carnival acts, symbols, and signs derives its meaning
from this parodistic and profane inversion of canonized values, but
also from the utopian dimension of the myth. . . . The provocative,
mirthful inversion of prevailing institutions and their hierarchy as
staged in the carnival offers a permanent alternative to official culture
—even if it ultimately leaves everything as it was before.32

Applying that concept to the literally carnivalesque context of Boom Boom

Rocket causes some underlying meanings to emerge. Seen through the lens
of carnival, the game highlights the arbitrary nature of cultural hierarchies.
The soundtrack pokes fun at classical music, yes, but not to denigrate it.
Instead, the remixes reveal the compatibility of classical and popular styles
—and seeks to bridge the perceived gaps between them. One obscure video
game can’t permanently upend centuries-old cultural hierarchies, of course.
Yet Boom Boom Rocket allows for a brief moment in which the playful
spirit of carnival can remove the barriers between art and entertainment.
Boom Boom Rocket isn’t alone in tackling these issues in a carnivalesque
way. Consider, for example, the Parodius games. If that doesn’t sound
familiar, it might be because unlike most of the games I discuss in this
book, the Parodius series has never been released outside Japan—the
games are just too idiosyncratic and bizarre. Konami created the first game
in the series, Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth (Parodiusu: Tako wa
Chikyū o Sukū, 1988) as a parody of one of its own games: the hit shooter
Gradius (1985). The humor in Parodius largely emerges from sheer
absurdity. Players fight not only aliens borrowed from other Konami games,
but also characters drawn from Japanese culture and mythology, as well as
cartoonish animals—including, on one notable occasion, what appears to be
a giant space anteater. This formula proved unexpectedly (inexplicably?)
popular. There are five Parodius sequels to date, expanding the parodic
aspects of the original by introducing references to other Konami games,
ranging from the Castlevania series to the arcade shooter Lethal Enforcers
(1992).
The music of the Parodius series is every bit as bizarre and referential as
its other aspects. Each of the original game’s nine looped tracks remixes
classical works, mostly in a progressive rock style (Table 6.2). Supposedly,
the classical-based soundtrack resulted from a rushed development process
—although the complexity of the arrangements makes me doubt that claim
—but the quality and quirkiness of the music were crucial to the game’s
success.33 Original music is combined with elements of one or more
classical pieces, often requiring significant alterations to pitches and
rhythms. Later entries in the series added even more complexity,
incorporating music from other Konami games, folk songs, popular music,
and classical music—sometimes all in the same remix. For example, in Sexy
Parodius (1996) we find cues like “Welcome, Kid,” a mash-up of a track
from the original Castlevania (1986) with Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian
Dance, No. 5, WoO 1 (1869). Another track, “Tanuko’s Destiny,” combines
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1808), with both Mozart’s Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik (1787) and a Japanese children’s song.34
TABLE 6.2Remixed classical music in Parodius: The Octopus Saves the
Earth (1988)

Track Title (as Original Original Source(s)

listed on Composer(s)
soundtrack)
“Crime of Pyotr Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat
Century” Tchaikovsky Major, Op. 23
“Light of Octopus” Ludwig van Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Op.
Beethoven 27, No. 2 (“Moonlight”), III
“Illusion of (1) Edvard (1) “In the Hall of the Mountain
Octopus” Grieg King” from Peer Gynt
(2) Frédéric (2) Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 66
Chopin
“Crazy World” (1) Antonin (1) Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op.
Dvorak 95, “From the New World,” IV
(2) Leon Jessel (2) “The Parade of the Tin Soldiers,”
Op. 123
“The Waltz of the Pyotr Finale from Swan Lake, Op. 20
Octopus” Tchaikovsky
“Fate of Octopus” (1) Richard (1) “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die
Wagner Walküre
(2) Ludwig (2) Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op.
van 67, I
Beethoven
“Sweet Emotion” (1) Georges (1) “March of the Toreadors” from
Bizet Carmen
(2) Franz Liszt (2) Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, S.
244
“Crisis 4th Ludwig van Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op.
Movement” Beethoven 125, IV
Track Title (as Original Original Source(s)
listed on Composer(s)
soundtrack)
“Boss BGM” Nikolai “Flight of the Bumblebee” from The
Rimsky- Tale of Tsar Saltan
Korsakov

Why has classical music become such an integral part of Parodius’s

identity? For one thing, the musical combinations echo the surreal
hodgepodge of visual elements drawn from other games, popular culture,
mythology, and more. Parodius only works if players understand it’s a
parody; likewise, its soundtrack only works if players recognize the
diversity of musical sources. Well-known classical pieces fit that bill nicely.
Furthermore, by reflecting Parodius’s anarchic design, the music taps into
another aspect of the carnivalesque: the grotesque. In contrast to Gyruss,
Fez, or even Boom Boom Rocket, the remixes in Parodius transform and
distort in an almost manic, slapstick fashion. Like the ridiculous caricatures
of characters from other games and from Japanese culture, Parodius’s
music renders classical works comically absurd. These games are neither
mean-spirited nor particularly profound—they draw the line at playful,
madcap transgression. And yet this grotesqueness contains a hint of
something unsettling. The next chapter is devoted to following that thread,
investigating the darker possibilities hidden within the musical
carnivalesque.

1
Since its initial arcade release, Gyruss has enjoyed a long life on a variety of home consoles,
ranging from the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System to a rerelease on Xbox Live
Arcade in 2007. A full list of ports is available at the Arcade History website, available online at
[Link] (accessed July
15, 2014).
2
“Gyruss,” [Link], available online at
[Link] (accessed July 15,
2014).
3
The Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565, appeared in a number of games during (and after) the 8-bit
era. Dana Plank examined a number of instances of its appearance (including in Gyruss) in “From
the Concert Hall to the Console: The 8-Bit Translation of BWV 565” (paper presented at the
 North American Conference on Video Game Music, Youngstown State University, January 18,
2014). I am grateful to Plank for providing me with a copy of her research.
4
Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna: Springer, 2012), 65–66.
5
Here Navas draws heavily on the work of Craig Owens, in particular his two-part article “The
Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (1980): 67–86; and “The
Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part 2,” October 13 (1980): 58–80.
6
Navas, Remix Theory, 67.
7
Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), 174, 154.
8
Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), chap. 11;
Matthew Brown, Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012).
9
On the cultural importance of Walter Murphy’s transgressive disco reworking, see also Ken
McLeod, “‘A Fifth of Beethoven’: Disco, Classical Music, and the Politics of Inclusion,”
American Music 24 (2006): 347–363.
10
See, for example, Karen Collins, Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and
Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 9.
11
Collins has noted the abnormal amount of sound hardware that went into the making of Gyruss,
which included “as many as five synthesis chips and a DAC [digital-to-analog converter].” The
game seems, she notes, “to use at least two chips for sound effects, one for percussion, and at
least one chip to create a rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” Collins, Game
Sound, 19.
12
For an insightful study of musical play versus fidelity to a work concept, see Roger Moseley,
Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2016), Key 4, 178–235.
13
Vanessa Chang, “Records That Play: The Present Past in Sampling Practice,” Popular Music 28
(2009): 156.
14
Chris Suellentrop, “A New Game Delights in Difficulty,” New York Times (May 16, 2012),
available online at [Link]
[Link] (accessed July 17, 2014).
15
Matt Miller, “Fez: Change Your Perspective,” [Link] (April 11, 2012), available
online at [Link]
[Link] (accessed July 18, 2014).
16
“Fez Review,” Edge Online (April 11, 2012), available online at [Link]
[Link]/review/fez-review/ (accessed July 18, 2014).
17
In more recent years, electronic music visualizers like the AVM have given way to software
versions, most commonly on personal computers. Many media player programs (iTunes and
Windows Media Player, for example) include built-in visualization modes, and there are a
number of freestanding programs devoted to music-generated visual displays. Some game
consoles have also included built-in (or downloadable) music visualizer programs, including the
Atari Jaguar’s Virtual Light Machine and the Xbox 360’s Neon, both built into the consoles’
media player functions.
18 Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), 32.
19
Alternative inputs were allowed in Boom Boom Rocket, though that was not the default method of
play. It was possible, for example, to play Boom Boom Rocket with Rock Band or Guitar Hero
instruments, or with the dance mat from Dance Dance Revolution games. Jesper Juul, A Casual
Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010),
107.
20
On the player-participant aspect of mimetic interface music games, see Kiri Miller, Playing
Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), chaps. 3 and 4; and Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with
Sound and Music in Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), chap. 3.
21
On soundtrack-based level design in games, see Steven Beverburg Reale, “Transcribing Musical
Worlds; or, Is L.A. Noire a Music Game?,” in Music and Video Games: Studying Play, ed. K. J.
Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2014), 77–103.
22
Katz, Capturing Sound, 160.
23
Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 32.
24
Cuzit, “Boom Boom Fun!,” GameFAQs (April 17, 2007), available online at
[Link]
(accessed July 18, 2014).
25
Douglass C. Perry, “Boom Boom Rocket Review,” IGN (April 12, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed July 12, 2014).
26
Tom Bramwell, “Boom Boom Rocket,” [Link] (April 12, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed July 12, 2014).
27
ULTSF [username], “Enough Boom for Your Buck?,” GameFAQs (April 16, 2007), available
online at [Link]
(accessed July 13, 2014).
28
Bramwell, “Boom Boom Rocket.”
29
Perry, “Boom Boom Rocket Review.”
30
Jeff Gerstmann, “Boom Boom Rocket Review,” GameSpot (April 11, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed July 13,
2014).
31
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 66.
32
Renate Lachmann, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-culture,” Cultural Critique 11
(1988–1989): 125.
33
Jeremy Parish, “An Interview with Konami’s Hidenori Maezawa, Pt 3,” [Link] (January 15,
2009), available online at [Link]
bId=8978659&publicUserId=5379721 (accessed June 23, 2016.).
34
For a complete listing of the music in the Parodius series, see “Parodius music,” Wikipedia,
[Link] (accessed June
23, 2016).
7 Love in Thousand Monstrous Forms

“THE GROTESQUE,” LITERARY critic Wolfgang Kayser once wrote, “is an

attempt to control and exorcise the demonic elements in the world.”1
Kayser was writing in the 1950s, but his definition seems tailor-made for
Catherine (2011), one of the most thoroughly unusual video games I’ve
ever encountered. Despite its pedigree from the developer Atlus, the edgy
and experimental Catherine feels more like an independent computer game
than a major console release. Players take on the role of Vincent, a thirty-
something slacker in the midst of a major life crisis. His longtime girlfriend,
the professionally successful but somewhat emotionally distant Katherine,
is pressuring him to improve his job prospects and to get married—with
both demands only intensifying after a pregnancy scare. In the midst of his
internal struggles, Vincent meets the young, attractive, fun-loving
Catherine, with whom he enters a second relationship (Figure 7.1). That
much alone is enough to separate Catherine from the vast majority of
games—but that’s not even close to its most unusual aspect.
FIGURE 7.1 To Vincent’s dismay, Catherine (left) meets Katherine (right) in Catherine (2011).

Here’s where the demonic element comes into play: after he starts seeing
Catherine, whenever Vincent goes to sleep he’s transported to a nightmare
world. In this bizarre dreamscape, “cheating” men have to solve puzzles to
survive the night. Late in the game, players learn that demons are to blame,
and that Catherine is a succubus tasked with luring Vincent away from
Katherine. Based on the player’s choices, there are ten potential endings to
Catherine, covering a range of possibilities. Vincent might atone for his
philandering and marry Katherine, for instance—or he might decide to rule
the underworld together with Catherine instead. Or, maybe he rejects both
women and becomes the first space tourist. For all its tongue-in-cheek
moments, though, Catherine also addresses a number of serious issues
regarding the transition into adulthood: marriage, parenthood, and
disappointment, to name a few. I argue that the chief way Catherine
engages with these topics is through the grotesque—what Philip Thomson
succinctly describes as “the unresolved clash of incompatibles.”2
It’s by exploring that “clash of incompatibles” that Catherine’s unusual
structure starts to make sense. In implicit and explicit ways, Catherine deals
in dualities—diametric opposites that yield grotesque results when forced
into interaction. This construction is evident even in basic gameplay, which
is divided into two starkly contrasting parts. In the day and early evening,
players guide Vincent through his everyday life, which unfolds in
conversations, text messages, and so on. In the evenings, players wind up at
the Stray Sheep, Vincent’s regular bar, where he can, for example, order
drinks, play a minigame, or engage in conversations. This part of the game
is essentially a “dating simulation,” a (typically Japanese) genre focused on
using clever tactics to win over potential partners.3 Catherine shares a
number of features with dating sims, in fact—a focus on binary choices, the
existence of multiple endings, and the obvious influence of Japanese anime.
In this portion of the game there is no need to hurry, and there are no right
or wrong choices. The only goal is advancing the narrative.
The dreamworld sequences, however, are an entirely different story—
almost literally. Instead of a dating sim, players instead experience yet
another generic hybridization: a blend of horror and puzzle games.4 Players
ascend towers by pulling blocks to create stairs, a timed puzzle mechanic
that provides the most obviously “gamey” experience in Catherine,
complete with points, level names (3-1, 3-2, etc.), and so on (Figure 7.2).
The pace is frenetic. In place of the slow-paced feel of Catherine’s daytime,
here a few small mistakes could end in a gruesome death, followed by the
game-over screen (which ominously reads “Love Is Over”). As if that
weren’t nerve-racking enough, at the end of each level players face a
macabre version of one of Vincent’s waking preoccupations. The final boss
of the fourth stage, for instance, is “The Child,” a repulsive symbol of
Vincent’s fear of fatherhood (Figure 7.3). Hopefully at this point it’s
becoming clear how playing Catherine feels like an exercise in trying to
synthesize—or at least survive—seemingly irreconcilable gameplay
elements. Not only is each night’s combination of puzzle and horror
mechanics unusual, but that combination gets combined with the daytime
dating sim elements, and so on. This fundamental duality manifests
throughout the game with almost fractal repetition: dating simulation versus
puzzle/horror; day versus night; the effervescent, blond Catherine (dressed
in white) versus the older, serious, brunette Katherine (dressed in black);
and more, stretching into infinity.
FIGURE 7.2 Vincent climbing in Catherine.

FIGURE 7.3 “The Child,” the culminating boss of the Fourth Night in Catherine.

Given the prevalence of duality as a motif in Catherine, it’s no surprise

that composer Shoji Meguro’s musical score illustrates these same
structures. Music for the daytime and evening portions of the game (the
dating sim part, in other words) favors a piano-heavy smooth jazz idiom. As
Vincent is carried to his dreamworld each night, the music takes on a much
darker tone, with dissonant strings and piano evocative of horror films.
More interesting for my purposes, however, is the music that accompanies
each of the puzzle sequences. With a few exceptions and repetitions, each
level features a different piece of remixed classical music. The music
selections are all well known, similar to those in the previous chapter—
works you might hear in any concert hall (Table 7.1). This juxtaposition of
classical and popular styles is another of Catherine’s many dualities—and
one that has significant ramifications for how we understand both the
nightmarish nighttime scenes and the game more broadly.
TABLE 7.1 Classical music in Catherine (2011)

Placement in Original Original Source

Game Composer
Levels 1 and 2 Gustav Holst “Jupiter” and “Mars,” from The
Planets
Level 3 Ludwig van Symphony No. 5, III
Beethoven
Levels 3 (boss), 4 Modest “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs” (“Baba
(boss), and 8 Mussorgsky Yaga”), from Pictures at an
Exhibition
Level 4 J. S. Bach “Little” Fugue in G Minor
Level 5 Antonin Symphony No. 9, “From the New
Dvořák World,” I
Level 6 Gioachino Overture to William Tell
Rossini
Level 7 Alexander Polovtsian Dances, from Prince Igor
Borodin
Level 9 Georges Bizet “Farandole,” from L’Arlésienne suite
Final Boss Frédéric “Revolutionary” Étude
Chopin
Victory of each G. F. Handel “Hallelujah,” from Messiah
level (not
remixed)
Death (arranged, Pablo de “Zigeunerweisen” (“Gypsy Airs”)
but not Sarasate
remixed)
Break-Ups (in Frédéric Piano Sonata No. 2, “Funeral March”
“real world”) Chopin
 The play of dualities within Catherine’s use of classical music is a
testament to the complexity of the game’s structure. Every element focuses
on creating a compelling narrative, and as a result the musical selections
become deeply integrated into its story. Particular classical pieces, rather
than simply works that serve as general signifiers of classical music,
assume significantly more importance. Some of the musical selections in
Catherine were chosen for relatively straightforward reasons. Handel’s
“Hallelujah Chorus” (which, while obviously synthesized, is not actually
remixed) symbolizes triumph, appearing at the finish line of every level.
Chopin’s “Funeral March” is only slightly more complicated, representing
not the death of an individual but the death of a relationship. Uniquely
among the remixed classical music in Catherine, Chopin’s music appears in
the daytime real world on two occasions: when Vincent breaks up with
Catherine, and when Katherine breaks up with him. In both cases, it’s
remixed into a piano-jazz idiom, blending in with the typical underscore for
the game’s daytime segments. In reflecting the concepts of triumph and
death, the “Hallelujah Chorus” and “Funeral March” echo their uses in
countless films, television programs, and video games. Chopin’s
“Revolutionary” Étude, which appears in the game’s final level, works in a
similar way. Vincent effectively revolts against the demonic forces
responsible for his nightly torments—an echo of the political overtones of
Chopin’s étude.
Other classical works illustrate Catherine’s central ideas much more
subtly. Sometimes, for instance, the selections appear to be alluding to other
media products. I’ll focus here on two strikingly different examples. The
nineteenth-century French composer Georges Bizet’s “Farandole”—
remixed in Catherine as a kind of stadium-rock anthem—is best known
today as a purely instrumental work, but it originated as incidental music
for Alphone Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne (1872). In the play, a young man is
torn between two women, one more sexually liberated and one more
reserved. After becoming (briefly) engaged to the first of these two, he’s
driven mad by her involvement with another man and ultimately commits
suicide by throwing himself from a high balcony. Clearly, this situation
parallels Vincent’s in several ways: the protagonist struggles to choose
between two very different women, infidelity is a central a plot device
(although in Catherine the infidelity is Vincent’s own), and both feature the
motif of death by falling.
 The violinist/composer Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen for
Catherine’s game-over screens suggests an equally obscure source.5
Sarasate’s piece appears prominently on several occasions in Suzuki
Seijun’s 1980 Japanese cult film of the same name. Though the film’s
quasi-surrealist plot is nearly impossible to summarize, it deals with many
of the same issues found in Catherine, especially complicated sexual
relationships—polyamory and infidelity, for example—as well as death.
Moreover, as Japanese studies scholar Rachel Dinitto notes, Zigeunerweisen
(the film, that is) explores duality and “double vision,” a concept that
extends to the same actress portraying two separate (and contrasting) roles
as love interests. “In addition to the obvious doppelgänger effect,” Dinitto
suggests, “Suzuki reuses or doubles images, scenes, dialogue, and sounds.
These replications, be they false or true, tie the film together.”6 Catherine
evokes Suzuki’s film in both plot themes and narrative structure, using
concepts of duality to frame a complex and occasionally unintelligible
work. These examples from Bizet and Sarasate illustrate how the selection
of a particular piece of music may deepen our understanding of the game’s
central narrative themes. To be clear, I do not expect that most players
would approach Catherine with a frame of reference encompassing
nineteenth-century French plays and Japanese cult films of the 1980s. I
certainly didn’t when I first played it. For that matter, I don’t believe it
necessary for the game designers to have consciously intended these
references. Yet in both cases, Catherine’s play of dualities extends even to
these minute details.
On a larger scale, the musical choices and their remixes join with the
visual and narrative aspects of Catherine to almost obsessively dwell on the
grotesque. Though grotesque elements appear throughout Catherine’s
imagery and narrative, nowhere are they more apparent than during the
battles at the culmination of each level. As mentioned earlier, each of these
bosses is a twisted, grotesque incarnation of Vincent’s waking
preoccupations: the allure of the female body, marriage to Katherine,
incipient fatherhood—or, more generally, a fear of adulthood and a sense of
self-loathing. These manifestations are certainly hideous and misshapen,
but they’re also grotesque in the sense of being composed of irresolvable
contradictions. Some bosses are made up of a collection of assorted parts,
both animate and occasionally inanimate. Others are both living and dead—
suggesting, perhaps, that Vincent fears that marriage or fatherhood would in
a sense end his old life. In the following section, I turn to how these
grotesque elements play out in the remixed classical works.

Catherine/Katherine
In the previous chapter, I explored how Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of
carnival might apply to the playful remixes of classical music in games like
Boom Boom Rocket and Parodius. The musical selections in Catherine echo
some of the same issues. Yet in this new context, juxtapositions that seemed
humorous in other games instead contribute to an atmosphere of horror,
revulsion, and disgust. The musical results often feel like a collection of
disparate elements that are uncomfortably, perhaps violently, fused. For
example, composer Shoji Meguro seems to have been drawn to classical
works that contain some type of internal dichotomy. His remix of Rossini’s
overture to William Tell, for example, contains the most dramatic and most
serene moments of the original work: “The Storm” and the “Ranz des
Vaches” (a kind of pastoral Swiss folk tune). In the same way, the remix of
Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets incorporates elements of two radically
different sections of the larger work: “Jupiter” (“The Bringer of Jollity”)
and “Mars” (“The Bringer of War”). In the Rossini and Holst examples,
there are extreme contrasts in both musical and extramusical content—the
notes themselves, in other words, as well as the larger story being told. The
act of remixing thus creates a nested duality. Two contrasting portions of
the original classical work are combined, but then what results gets remixed
with popular styles, creating a second level of juxtaposition. This kind of
multilayered musical design resonates strongly with the game’s visual and
narrative construction—dualities within dualities within dualities.
The history of classical music offers a number of instances of high and
low arts brought grotesquely into dialogue. Claude Debussy’s piano prelude
Golliwog’s Cakewalk (1913), for instances, distorted the central musical
theme of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (1865) into ragtime,
evoking the the grotesquely racist doll for which the piece is named. The
effect is remarkable, rendering one of the most influential musical moments
of the nineteenth century into a comic parody (and, intentionally or not, one
suggestive of Wagner’s own racism). The music theorist Yayoi Uno Everett
has located a similar use of the grotesque in the Hungarian composer
György Ligeti’s opera Le grand macabre (1977, rev. 1996), which borrows
and distorts supposedly highbrow and lowbrow musical styles.7 In one
scene, Ligeti twists a theme from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Op. 55
(1804) into an almost unrecognizable form, then combines it with elements
of ragtime, Brazilian samba, and Greek Orthodox chant. Everett’s
description of the final scenes of Le grand macabre, in fact, resonates
strongly with Catherine:

By combining music drawn from high and low styles into a massive
collage, this passage turns into an ultimate macabre dance, . . . in
which the ludicrous and horrifying states co-mingle. As a musical
corollary to Bakhtin’s grotesque body . . . [as] the procession of
incongruous tunes unfolds, chaos reigns on stage as people fight, eat,
drink, copulate, and so forth, in coping with the final moments of life.8

Combining the classical works with their electronic or rock remixes in

Catherine achieves much the same effect, creating a dizzyingly
incomprehensible musical accompaniment to Vincent’s frantic block
pulling.
In both Ligeti’s opera and Catherine, the irreconcilably diverse musical
styles reflect the same tendency to juxtapose carnal excess with the specter
of death, whether literal, metaphorical, or—as in Vincent’s nightmares—
both. In Catherine, moreover, that aspect of the grotesque becomes a
fixation on equivocating death with the female body. That uncanny
combination is in keeping with what scholars have identified the “female
grotesque,” building on Bakhtin’s considerations of ancient Greek terra
cotta figurines depicting pregnant old women:

This is typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent.

It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing
completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags.
They combine senile, decaying, and deformed flesh with the flesh of
new life, conceived but as yet unformed.9

Vincent’s dream-monsters frequently embody this female grotesque,

corrupting either female forms or infants—combining the death/life binary
that Bakhtin identifies in the terra cotta figurines (Table 7.2). In level 5, for
instance, he confronts “Doom’s Bride,” a repulsive, decaying version of
Katherine clad only in a wedding veil and wielding a knife covered in
flowers (Figure 7.4).

TABLE 7.2 Bosses in Catherine and possible interpretations of their meaning

Level Boss Name Description

Level 2 Fist of Two female hands with a fork, silver hair;
Grudge represents fear of commitment to Katherine
(with whom he has just had an uncomfortable
dinner)
Level 3 Immoral Picasso-esque amalgamation of female body with
Beast Catherine’s eyes, vagina dentata; represents
affair with Catherine
Level 4 The Child Huge “undead” newborn; represents fears of
parenthood, appears the night Katherine reveals
possible pregnancy
Level 5 Doom’s Huge, nude “undead” Katherine with wedding veil
Bride and knife “bouquet”; represents fear of marriage
to Katherine
Level 6 Child with a Newborn as mechanical doll with cybernetic
Chainsaw attachments; represents continued fear of
fatherhood coupled with fear the child is not his
Level 7 Shadow of Shadowed, masked version of Vincent himself;
Vincent represents self-loathing and the conflict of inner
and outer selves
Level 8 Catherine Fanged, nude, demonic version of Catherine;
represents fears of Catherine’s reprisal after
Vincent ends their relationship
Level 9 The Demon Demonic final boss; concrete manifestation of
Dumuzid Vincent’s own wrongdoing and fears of
(final judgment
boss)
FIGURE 7.4 “Doom’s Bride,” the boss of level 5 in Catherine.

This focus on the female grotesque also manifests musically. Only one of
Catherine’s remixes appears more than once: “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs,”
also known as “Baba Yaga,” from Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). What about “Baba Yaga” singles it out
this way? Although Mussorgsky’s ominous music certainly fits the game’s
macabre tone, I think the answer once again lies in the score’s extramusical
meanings. Baba Yaga is a recurring figure in Russian folklore, whose
identity and motivations always remain cloaked in mystery. She appears as
a beautiful young woman in some tales and as an old hag in others.
Sometimes she helps lost travelers or murders them, seemingly with no
rhyme or reason.10 Already Baba Yaga’s grotesqueness is apparent in her
dualities: youth and old age, kindness and malice. But Baba Yaga is also
significant for her role as a manifestation of femininity. The Russian
folklorist Joanna Hubbs, for example, identifies Baba Yaga as an
embodiment of “feminine power”: “the expression of realized potential
fulfillment of the cycle of life associated with woman. . . . In her the cycles
of feminine life are brought to completion, and yet she contains them all.”11
Like Bakhtin’s terra cotta figurines, Baba Yaga is pregnancy and decay—
life and death, and life from death. But although she may seemingly
embody the “cycles of feminine life,” upon closer inspection Baba Yaga is,
like Vincent’s nightmares, a grotesque perversion of the feminine and the
maternal.
Vincent’s nightmare monsters illustrate the same concerns—and,
tellingly, it is there that players encounter Mussorgsky’s music. For
instance, “Baba Yaga” plays when Vincent faces the “Immoral Beast.” An
amalgamation of female body parts, the Beast is disturbing. Catherine’s
eyes are relocated to what Bakhtin would call the “lower bodily stratum,”
associated with “degradation, filth, death, and rebirth.”12 The Beast conveys
Vincent’s animalistic lust for Catherine, combined with his conflicting
shame and excitement. The depiction of the Beast itself is also strikingly
reminiscent of Baba Yaga’s home—“The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”—which is
often represented in stories and artworks as “composed of parts of the
human body, with legs for doorposts, hands for bolts, and a mouth with
sharp teeth as a lock.”13 Likewise, The Beast’s fanged mouth is placed in
such a way as to suggest a vagina dentata, recalling the lock on Baba Yaga’s
door. “The Child” which Vincent faces in the next level, functions in much
the same way. The new life promised by Katherine’s pregnancy instead
heralds to Vincent a kind of death of the self. Again, the presence of
Mussorgsky’s music suggests a connection to Baba Yaga, who combines
birth with death: “Yaga is a mother, but a cannibal mother. She whose
children are many . . . is also the hungry one who devours them.”14 Finally,
Mussorgsky’s music reappears near the end of the game, when Vincent
squares off against a giant, demonic incarnation of Catherine. As Vincent
flees, she tries to consume him with her razor-sharp teeth, echoing both the
Immoral Beast and Baba Yaga’s propensity for eating unwary travelers.
Remixed into its new form, Mussorgsky’s music sonically reflects the
grotesque dualities that recur in so many ways throughout Catherine. Yet
through its evocation of Baba Yaga, it also contextualizes Vincent’s fears as
something akin to fairy tales—which is to say, manifestations of lingering,
if often subconscious, cultural obsessions.15 Embedded in these grotesque
musical remixes is a set of cultural values that goes far beyond the confines
of Catherine, and beyond even video games as a whole, revealing
underlying beliefs about the nature of classical music.

Classical/Klassical
In The Female Grotesque, literary theorist Mary Russo succinctly
summarizes the differences between artistic depictions of the idealized
human body and its grotesque counterpart:

The classical body is transcendent and monumental, closed, static,

self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with the “high”
or official culture of the Renaissance and later, with the rationalism,
individualism, and normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The
grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and
changing; it is identified with the non-official “low” culture or the
carnivalesque, and with social transformation.16

Substituting a word here and there, these descriptions are in many ways
similar to the stark contrasts between the social position of high art and
popular culture. In Catherine, that contrast is made clear through
juxtaposing classical music with popular music—but the same concepts
apply throughout this book in the relationship between classical music and
video games as a whole. Classical music, like Russo’s “classical body,” is
“transcendental and monumental,” associated with the upper classes and
with intelligence. That’s why classical music in media frequently signifies
that a product or character is “adult oriented,” “serious,” “refined,” or
“complex.” Or, in a less positive light, classical music also frequently
indicates something out of touch, a product that has outlived its usefulness
(assuming it had any to begin with). Popular music, on the other hand, often
indicates that someone or something is “youth oriented,” “fun,”
“unpretentious,” “exciting,” or—more cynically—“superficial.” Like the
grotesque body, it pushes constantly for transformation, discarding the
cultural shackles of the old guard.
This constantly reinforced dichotomous relationship between classical
music and popular culture is something most players will have encountered
long before picking up a controller to play Catherine. In this setting,
however, these old meanings assume new significance. The game’s central
duality, around which all the others seem to revolve, is the contrast between
Katherine and Catherine. Even the game’s title seems to place more focus
on the love interest(s) rather than on the protagonist. It’s fitting, then, that
the same ingrained meanings so frequently ascribed to classical and popular
music styles map neatly onto Katherine and Catherine, who—like the music
itself—become jumbled in Vincent’s dreaming mind. Katherine embodies
Vincent’s anxiety at the onrushing responsibilities of adulthood: his
concerns over settling down, finding financial stability, and becoming a
boring middle-class adult. The vibrant and significantly younger Catherine,
however, provides an antidote to these fears, offering Vincent a fun, if
superficial, relationship that reinforces his youthful irresponsibility.17 The
music thus offers us another window into Vincent’s troubled psyche,
revealing—sometimes on multiple levels—his internal conflicts between
adulthood and youth, or responsibility and freedom. Players may view the
contrasting musical styles in any way they choose: the game gives no
indication of whether the original classical piece or its newly found popular
style is more desirable. Catherine’s remixed music presents a challenge:
like many aspects of the game, the music forces players to create their own
meaning.
I conclude this chapter by suggesting one final meaning of the grotesque
dualities that occur in Catherine—and, indeed, in many of the more
artistically oriented games in this book. Whatever we might think of its
aesthetic merits, Catherine is an unlikely fusion of high-minded artistic
aspirations and social commentary with low-art sensationalism and basic
puzzle-style gameplay mechanics. It is Aristotle meets Angry Birds,
Tennyson meets Tetris. It strives, in short, to be simultaneously art and
entertainment. Its soundtrack of uncomfortably juxtaposed classical and
popular styles thus becomes a symbol of this larger conflict—a mirror of
the precarious and arguably impossible space many video games inhabit.
This music, like the game, blends art with entertainment. Yet its narrative
effect ultimately relies on that combination remaining unconvincing; the
grotesque must always be repulsive. The music only makes sense if the
player still perceives classical music and popular music as one of the
game’s dualities, like day and night, adulthood and youth, stability and
freedom, or Catherine and Katherine. Tellingly, players can’t have
everything at once: there is no synthesis to the dialectic Catherine presents,
no perfect ending. Eventually, players have to stop juggling and choose one
(or neither) of the options before them. What does that ultimate choice
mean for players? Can Catherine and its remixed music exist at once as art
and entertainment—or must they, like Vincent, choose one path or the
other? These are questions with no easy answers, yet exploring them
illustrates in unique ways the complex nexus of meanings inherent in any
combination of classical music and video games.

1
Quoted in Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972), 18.
2
Thomson, The Grotesque, 27.
3
On dating sims, see, for example, Emily Taylor, “Dating-Simulation Games: Leisure and Gaming
of Japanese Youth Culture,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 192–208; and Patrick
W. Galbraith, “Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human in Japan,” Game
Studies 11, no. 2 (May 2011), available online at [Link]
(accessed July 19, 2014).
4
The blending of horror and puzzle genres in Catherine isn’t entirely without precedent. The PC
title The 7th Guest (1993), its sequel The 11th Hour (1995), and titles such as Phantasmagoria
(1995) and its sequel Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996) each combined a horror
narrative with puzzles that would advance the plot. In a more humorous and not strictly “puzzle”
vein, in 1999 Sega remade its popular arcade shooter/horror game House of the Dead 2 into The
Typing of the Dead, an edutainment game in which players defeated zombies by quickly typing
words on a keyboard. It has thus far spawned two improbable sequels: The Typing of the Dead 2
(2007) and Typing of the Dead: Overkill (2013).
5
The Zigeunerweisen is, like the “Hallelujah Chorus,” not stylistically remixed in Catherine, but
its resonance with the game’s narrative merits some mention here.
6
Rachel Dinitto, “Translating Prewar Culture into Film: The Double Vision of Suzuki Seijun’s
Zigeunerweisen,” Journal of Japanese Studies 30 (2004): 46.
7
Yayoi Uno Everett, “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand
Macabre,” Music Theory Spectrum 31 (2009): 26–56. On how the grotesque figures into classical
music, see also Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of
Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000); and Julie
Brown, Bartók and the Grotesque: Studies in Modernity, the Body and Contradiction in Music
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007).
8
Everett, “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque,” 43.
9
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 25. For a discussion of this passage in the context of the female
grotesque, see Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York:
Routledge, 1994), chap. 2.
10
For an overview of Baba Yaga’s history and interpretations, see Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The
Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
11
Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 39, 37.
12
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 20; Russo, The Female Grotesque, 8.
13
Hubbs, Mother Russia, 38.
14
Hubbs, Mother Russia, 39.
15
The literature on fairy tales as reflections of social pressures and/or fears is vast. Best known,
perhaps, is Bruno Bettelheim’s controversial book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976). See the several monographs on the topic by
Jack Zipes, most recently The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). See in particular chapter 4, on Baba Yaga.
16
Russo, The Female Grotesque, 8.
17
We may think here of Matthew Brown’s suggestion (building on several studies) that adolescents
turn to popular music “as a means of controlling their moods. It does so in several ways: by
relieving them of tension or boredom, by distracting them from their troubles, and even by
pumping them up for important social events.” Matthew Brown, Debussy Redux: The Impact of
His Music on Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 97.
8 Violent Offenders and Violin Defenders

AS THE PREVIOUS chapters illustrate, classical music crops up frequently in

even the most unexpected of video games. Yet in most of the games
described in this book, this music lingers in the background—always
important but seldom directly acknowledged. On rare occasions, however,
games bring classical music and all its cultural baggage into the spotlight,
explicitly calling it to the player’s attention. This might be something as
simple as mentioning the name of a composer or acknowledging a piece of
music playing on a radio. But the games considered in this chapter go much
further, personifying classical music by incorporating musicians into their
narratives. Each in its own way, these titles self-consciously call attention to
the music’s artistic value, often placing it in opposition to games’ typical
status as commercial products. Despite—or perhaps because of—their
rarity, depictions of classical musicians in games effectively encapsulate
discussions of music and the arts in postmodern culture. Through bringing
players into direct contact with the musicians of these fictional worlds,
these varied games encourage players to engage with the meanings of art.
This use of classical musicians to personify larger artistic concepts has
antecedents in film and television. Consider, for example, the protagonist of
Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (2002), who comes to symbolize the
struggle to preserve art and beauty amid the unthinkable brutality of World
War II.1 As the musicologist Lawrence Kramer notes, “The film’s plotting
and frame structure idealize classical music. As a pianist, [Władysław]
Szpilman is marked for survival by everyone though there is nothing to
distinguish him otherwise from anyone else. If he lives, the music lives.”2
As The Pianist illustrates, classical music and its practitioners are
frequently reflected in media as bastions of civilization—cultural bulwarks
against cruelty, ignorance, and violence. The post-apocalyptic role-playing
game Fallout 3 (2008) offers an example of how this exploration of
classical music’s humanizing role makes the transition to video games.

Pleasure in the Pathless Woods

Fallout 3 is a game about making choices and accepting the consequences.
Set in the centuries after a massive nuclear war in 2077, the Fallout series
presents players with a retrofuturistic blend of science fiction and ironic
1950s optimism—a brave new world filled with angry mutants, persistent
radiation, and rampant cruelty. Fallout 3 explores the lives of settlers who
eke out meager lives in the post-apocalyptic “Wasteland” that used to be the
Washington, DC, area. In the course of their travels, players may stumble
across Agatha, a senior citizen living modestly in a secluded area. Like
many other characters in the game, Agatha needs the player’s help. In this
case, she wants a family heirloom—a Stradivarius violin—returned to her.
This surprisingly daunting task requires players to undertake a lengthy and
perilous journey to Vault 92, a shelter designed with the intent to preserve
artistic talent for future generations. In an example of the painful irony of
the Fallout universe, however, Vault 92 was actually a psychological
experiment. Instead of providing sanctuary, it was designed to barrage its
musician inhabitants with constant subliminal messages, to which their
advanced listening skills supposedly made them more susceptible. The
experiment triggered extreme paranoia in the residents, eventually causing
them to violently turn on one another. Classical music’s ability to bring
peace amid war is flipped on its head; the innocent musicians themselves
were turned into tools of violence.
Retrieving Agatha’s violin gives the player a chance to symbolically
restore classical music and its civilizing powers to the Wasteland.
Completing the quest is a tacit acknowledgment that music’s presence
improves the Wasteland in important, if invisible, ways. The material
reward for completing Agatha’s request is fairly paltry—a unique handgun
that had supposedly belonged to Agatha’s late husband. Yet the intangible
rewards are more significant. Fallout 3’s soundtrack consists mostly of mid-
twentieth-century popular music, which in this case emerges from radios
and a computer attached to the protagonist’s arm. The computer picks up
several in-game radio stations, to which the player can tune in any time the
signal is available. If the player helps Agatha, she creates a new radio
station featuring several pieces of classical music and a few of her own
(obviously precomposed) improvisations. If requested, she’ll even perform
a piece “live” for the player, visibly—if inauthentically—holding and
bowing the instrument as the music is produced (Figure 8.1).

FIGURE 8.1 Agatha and her violin in Fallout 3 (2008).

Agatha’s music calls attention to its own existence as art, and to her
status as its protector. As in The Pianist, through a solitary practitioner,
classical music somehow survives amid the desolation of war-torn ruins.
Yet here that survival is entirely up to the player. While in a film viewers
watch helplessly as events unfold on-screen, in Fallout 3 the music’s
existence depends on the player’s willing participation. Perhaps that act
even in some way helps players atone for the many acts of violence they
commit in the game. Because even if its violence is often tongue-in-cheek,
Fallout 3 is a gory game. As Tom Bissel points out in Extra Lives: Why
Video Games Matter, “When Bethesda [Studios] posted a video showcasing
Fallout 3’s in-game combat . . . many could not believe the audacity of its
cartoon-Peckinpah violence. Much of it was rendered in slo-mo as
disgusting as it was beautiful: skulls exploding into the distinct flotsam of
eyeballs, gray matter, and upper vertebrae; limbs liquefying into
constellations of red pearls; torsos somersaulting through the air.”3 Agatha
and her music offer us a brief respite from this hyperviolent world—an
island of sanity in a sea of blood.4
In his study of music and morality in Fallout 3, musicologist William
Cheng considers some possible meanings of Agatha’s music.5 He recalls a
moment when, while recording some game footage for academic
presentations, he inadvertently had an artistic experience:

I remember thinking that, for the purposes of my presentations, this

setting would make an elegant showcase for Agatha’s music, free of
violence, dialogue, and excessive ambient noise. The sky started out
dark, but as the station’s music played on—cycling through more
Bach, a couple of improvisations, Dvořák—my surroundings got
brighter by the minute. It eventually dawned on me that I was
witnessing sunrise. Slowly, some light—bright, but for once, not too
bright.
As this morning glow yawned across the horizon, I realized that, in
all my hours wandering the wasteland so far, this was the first time I
was listening to the radio while definitely not playing the game in a
conventional sense. In that half hour, I hardly touched my mouse or
pressed a key.6

Cheng’s reasons for this interlude may be unusual—most players probably

don’t record themselves doing nothing—but his experience seems fairly
common. In fact, I had several such experiences myself while playing the
game. But while I agree with Cheng about the importance of Agatha’s radio
station in understanding the hazy morality of Fallout 3, for me the game’s
emotive success is rooted in the idea of its liveness. As Cheng
acknowledges, Agatha is the only character actually performing live music
in the game, or participating directly in the creation of an artwork. As Philip
Auslander reminds us, the concept of liveness depends entirely on the
possibility of recording; it gains a special cachet through its ephemerality.7
In the age of mechanical reproduction, even simulated liveness is often
perceived as a central aspect of artistry. Walter Benjamin, for example,
invoked the “presence” of live music, a long-lasting suggestion that there is
something fundamentally meaningful about live performance as opposed to
recordings.8 As musicologist Emanuele Senici summarizes, for Benjamin,
“live performance . . . promises a psychologically and emotionally authentic
experience . . . while the video can only offer a fake or at best feeble
substitute.”9 In other words, players can’t help but connect the liveness of
Agatha’s performance with the relative sociocultural importance of the
music she plays.
Ironically, the oldest music in the game, performed by one of the oldest
human characters, is also the newest. Apparently, little or no new music is
being created in the world of Fallout. Only the vestiges of the Old World
remain, musical ruins that—like the statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s
poem—exist as memorials to both humanity’s boundless hubris and art’s
ability to withstand the ravages of time. In a literal sense, then, Agatha
embodies art’s tenacity even in the most adverse of circumstances. Her
liveness (admittedly a suspension of disbelief on our part) stands in stark
contrast to the “dead” records we hear on other radio stations. And if the
music lives—as Agatha’s does—then civilization survives, humanity
endures, and hope persists.

Rapture on the Lonely Shore

On the other hand, not all video game classical musicians are heroic, and art
doesn’t always resist violence. Scattered throughout this book are examples
of film, television, and game villains whose love of art stands in stark
contrast with their depraved acts. The villain as musician, however, ratchets
this dichotomy to a higher level. The demonic organist is a remarkably
hardy trope in horror film, for example, from Boris Karloff’s Bach-playing
madman in The Black Cat (1934) to more recent films and media, such as
the organ-playing creature Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean
films, or a satanic killer in a 1993 episode of the Inspector Morse television
series.10 We can’t just blame organists, however. There’s also the Haydn
piano sonata performed by the diabolical Lestat in Interview with the
Vampire (1994) or, to keep the vampire-musician theme, the deranged
Ernessa’s Chopin nocturne in The Moth Diaries (2011). In both of those
instances, the characters’ command of classical music makes their utter
disregard for human life all the more chilling. The same kinds of musical
villainy appear in video games, albeit less frequently, with BioShock (2007)
as one particularly notable example. I’ve already spent some time exploring
the BioShock series in this book—chapter 3 was devoted entirely to
BioShock Infinite—and some of the same musical characteristics explored
in that chapter are present here as well. Yet the original BioShock stands
apart for its on-screen representation of musicians.
A first-person shooter with a highly developed narrative, BioShock takes
place in 1960, in an underwater dystopia called Rapture. Its plot is a dire
warning of the dangers of rampant capitalism, depicting a self-contained
society where Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy has gone horribly wrong.
In addition to original music, BioShock’s soundtrack makes frequent use of
popular music of the midcentury. As I have argued elsewhere, these popular
songs carry a great deal of narrative weight, underscoring Rapture’s
dystopian atmosphere while commenting ironically on the game’s action.11
BioShock contains only one example of classical music, but it appears at a
particularly significant moment. In the course of the game, players must
traverse “Fort Frolic,” Rapture’s entertainment center. Once replete with
high-end shopping and arts venues—a theater, concert hall, art galleries,
and so on—by 1960 Fort Frolic is a war-torn shell of its former glory,
inhabited by murderous psychopaths. The warden of this asylum is Sander
Cohen, a visual artist, filmmaker, and composer driven mad by his pursuit
of aesthetic perfection. The game critic Leigh Alexander astutely captures
Cohen’s essence as “Rapture’s poster child for the creative elite”: “Cohen
held court in Fort Frolic, his musical scores the toast of the city, his artwork
held up as the standard of genius. In his battered suit, his hair a nest of
pomade and his face a white pancake mask, holding court now over none
but a grim army of plaster-cast statues . . . a city that should have become
his joy became his madness.”12
BioShock reveals Cohen’s artistic bona fides before players ever interact
with him directly. In a gruesome display, players witness Cohen forcing a
captive pianist to perform one of his compositions over and over before
eventually murdering the unfortunate musician for insufficient artistry. To
secure passage through Fort Frolic, however, players must strike a Faustian
bargain. They agree to help Cohen create his masterpiece, the Quadtych,
which requires killing and photographing Cohen’s former protégés (Figure
8.2). At a certain point near the end of this unsettling mission, however, the
capricious artist flies into a rage, ordering his followers to attack the player.

FIGURE 8.2 Cohen and his “masterpiece” in BioShock (2007).

The confrontation that follows features an unlikely piece of music: the

“Waltz of the Flowers,” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (1892). That
musical choice works here on several levels. Classical music sets Fort
Frolic apart from the rest of Rapture, and Cohen from the rest of the villains
who populate it. Just as the game’s initial antagonist, Andrew Ryan,
represents the dangers of ultra-free-market capitalism and Randian
philosophies, Cohen illustrates the dangers of art without conscience.
Tchaikovsky’s elegant, ethereal waltz runs counter to the action it
accompanies, a grotesquely misplaced bit of refinement.13 Yet, as
Tchaikovsky’s music makes us aware, there is also something balletic about
the combat in BioShock, a gracefulness to the wanton acts of destruction
and the graphic(al) beauty with which they are depicted on the screen. This
transformation of violence into art recalls, for example, the films of Quentin
Tarantino. The critic Xavier Morales lauds the director’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1
(2003) for “elegantly blurring the distinction between beauty and
violence”—a description that applies equally well to BioShock.14
Music plays an important role in that aestheticization of violence. In a
study of Tarantino’s uses of popular music in his film scores, the
musicologist Lisa Coulthard identifies an example from Reservoir Dogs
(1992) as an “instance of a new mode of self-knowing, reflexive, and
excessively graphic violent representation.” She continues, “Sometimes
called the ‘new brutality’ or ‘Hollywood ultraviolence,’ this kind of ironic
representation of on-screen graphic film violence in the last two decades of
American cinema has been characterized as evincing a new atmospheric
and aesthetic cinematic trend toward cynical, dystopic, extreme, and
explicit violence.”15 In Tarantino’s films and elsewhere, this trend is often
marked by popular music. Yet the “Waltz of the Flowers” in BioShock
creates a similar moment of self-reflexivity, ironically calling attention to
art amid the violence. This uncomfortable juxtaposition mirrors Cohen’s
horrific Quadtych and perhaps even reminds players of their own
complicity in its creation. But it also raises questions about BioShock itself,
and whether games like it should be considered artworks.
Despite fully deserving its “Mature” rating, BioShock frequently arises in
discussions of video games as art.16 The critic Harold Goldberg, for
instance, notes that BioShock “made people who eschewed videogames see
the art in an entertainment that dealt with profound ideas and twisted
emotions.”17 Cohen’s artistic goal of transforming violence into art is, in a
sense, BioShock’s own mission, and the Quadtych episode represents a
microcosm of the game as a whole. The “Waltz of the Flowers” scene is
obviously a performance—after the Quadtych’s completion, Cohen
descends a flight of stairs in a spotlight, with confetti streaming from the
ceiling. All of Fort Frolic is a grisly variety show of his own devising, much
as the developers created the ultraviolent Rapture as a game space for the
players’ amusement. From that perspective, the “Waltz of the Flowers”
scene becomes analogous to players’ relationship with the game; they find
art amid BioShock’s violence just as Cohen finds beauty in death.

A Wide Realm of Wild Reality

For all their fantastic science fiction trappings, both Fallout 3 and BioShock
take pains to connect their musicians to classical music history. Fallout’s
Agatha plays a Stradivarius violin, for instance, and she performs actual
classical works. And BioShock’s Cohen was based on two real-world
figures: George M. Cohan—who like Cohen in BioShock was involved in
many fields of the arts—and the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. These
connections reveal a desire to connect these obviously fictional characters
with real-world music culture. Yet in some ways, the closer games get to
reality, the more challenging representing musicians becomes. That
becomes particularly evident in the representation of actual historical
musicians. The idea seems straightforward; film audiences, after all, have
long been entertained by depictions of famous composers. Beethoven, as
one example, has been depicted on-screen a staggering number of times
beginning as early as the 1920s.18
Yet real-world historical figures—let alone musicians—are much less
common in video games. Or, to be more precise, it’s rare for them to be
incorporated into a game’s narrative successfully. Consider Shaq Fu (1994),
in which the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal travels to another
dimension where he defeats an evil mummy with his martial arts prowess.
Or Dante’s Inferno (2010), which “for gameplay reasons” reimagined the
medieval poet as a vengeful Knight Templar rampaging through hell.19 In
both cases, critics and players found the premises laughable. In their quest
to create a viable premise for a video game, the developers stretched reality
too thin.
Popular musicians are also subjected to these kinds of quasi-parodic
representations, usually as a kind of market synergy between the recording
and gaming industries.20 In addition to direct musical tie-ins—band-specific
titles like Beatles Rock Band (2009), for instance—popular musicians have
also appeared in narrative games, from Journey Escape (1982) to Michael
Jackson’s Moonwalker (1990) and 50 Cent: Bulletproof (2005).21 These
games all feature the same superheroic transformations as Shaq Fu, a way
of playing with the lines between historical truth and fiction.22 In Michael
Jackson’s Moonwalker the performer defeats his foes with a combination of
physical attacks and dancing abilities; 50 Cent: Bulletproof sees the rapper
and his crew take down criminal organizations in epic action scenes
reminiscent of James Bond or Die Hard films.23 These kinds of tongue-in-
cheek portrayals are almost always a bit silly, which is all part of the fun.
Yet when cultural icons are perceived as more serious, the balance between
history and metafiction can be more difficult to achieve, and games often
lean toward deference to historical reality. Assassin’s Creed III (2012) offers
one such example. Set in and around the events of the American
Revolution, the game lets players take part in events like the Boston Tea
Party and to interact with historical figures, including George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams (Figure 8.3).24 Two
design choices are crucial to making this unusual historicity work: these
characters are not playable, and the events of the game don’t deviate too far
from established history—by which I mean the kind of fictionalized history
found in media adaptations. If players could perform overtly antihistorical
acts like, say, assassinating George Washington, the resulting cognitive
dissonance might be counterproductive to the gameplay experience.25

FIGURE 8.3 George Washington (right) in Assassin’s Creed III (2012).

Probably because of restrictions like these, classical musicians have fared

poorly in games. For that matter, even composer-based films have often
struggled to navigate the fine line between dramatic viability and historical
fidelity.26 Taking Beethoven as an example again, films vary widely in their
approach, all “working within the Beethoven story but never hesitant to
enhance or invent entire situations for dramatic purposes,” in the words of
musicologist Michael Broyles.27 These necessary liberties have frustrated
some scholars and critics, however. In his provocatively titled article “Film
Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven,” the musicologist
Lewis Lockwood wrote of the 1994 Beethoven biopic that “the pablum this
film doles out to the masses is not just of poor quality but should carry a
warning to say that it is deleterious to their health.”28 Nor is such vitriol
unique to Beethoven’s defenders. The changes to Mozart’s life (and death)
in the film Amadeus (1984) were endlessly decried in musicological circles
as well as popular press articles, where every “inaccuracy” was seized upon
as evidence of Hollywood’s insensitivity to classical music and its cultural
contributions.29
More sensible voices might suggest, as Broyles does, that “to expect or
complain about historical accuracy would be to misunderstand the film
genre itself.”30 No film, game, or biography, after all, can ever present a
complete account of a composer’s life—and even if it could, who would
want to watch it? And yet this fanatical concern for fidelity highlights the
reverence with which classical composers are often viewed. Admittedly,
video game players are not known for their dedicated perusal of
musicological literature. Yet the underlying perception of classical music as
a serious subject explains why few games would take the risk of featuring a
well-known composer. Reinterpretations of composers’ lives might meet
with skepticism, confusion, or outright animosity—but more historically
grounded depictions would be highly unlikely to make entertaining
gameplay.
In fact, I know of only one game featuring a real-world composer
presented in an even relatively straightforward style: Mozart: Le Dernier
secret (2008), a relatively unknown French title. Mozart places the
composer in Prague in the days leading up to the premiere of his opera Don
Giovanni (1787), where a series of mysterious murders forces him to
unravel an assassination plot hatched by a malevolent secret society.
Needless to say, these events didn’t actually occur. Given his supposedly
vast intellect and propensity for solving puzzles, Mozart is a natural fit for
this kind of Da Vinci Code intrigue, so this seems like a successful recipe
for a composer-based game if ever there was one. Yet despite a small
European fan base, Mozart never garnered much success. Perhaps players
were unwilling to accept the cognitive dissonance of a classical composer
solving crimes, or maybe the whole concept just smacked of bad
edutainment. In any case, it seems clear that successfully including real-
world composers in video games would require a drastically new approach
—one that could draw on a composer’s cultural cachet while avoiding the
narrative shackles of history.

1
On Chopin’s music in The Pianist, see Lawrence Kramer, “Melodic Trains: Music in Polanski’s
The Pianist,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark,
Lawrence Kramer, and Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 66–
85.
2
Kramer, “Melodic Trains,” 68.
3
Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 6. The
descriptor “Peckinpah” here refers to Sam Peckinpah, a director notorious for his Westerns
(particularly The Wild Bunch [1969]) and their unflinching and unromanticized depictions of
violence.
4
Interestingly, Fallout 4 (2015) features (without explanation) a classical radio station available to
the player from the beginning of the game. It turns out, however, that the radio station is a tool of
The Institute, an “enlightened” and scientifically advanced organization that views most dwellers
of the post-apocalyptic world as savages. In a way, then, the use of classical music here is both
similar to and divergent from its appearance in Fallout 3; it is a “civilizing” force, but of a
patriarchal and arguably nefarious kind rather than Agatha’s benevolent influence.
5
William Cheng, Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), chap. 1.
6
Cheng, Sound Play, 52.
7
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999),
chap. 2.
8
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations,
trans. and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 217–252. “Even
the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and
space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220).
9
Emanuele Senici, “Porn Style? Space and Time in Live Opera Videos,” Opera Quarterly 26
(2010): 66.
10
On the prevalence of the organ in horror film, see Julie Brown, “Carnival of Souls and the Organs
of Horror,” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 1–20; and Isabella van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach,” Bach Perspectives 7
(2012): 7–20. My reference to Inspector Morse is drawn from van Elferen’s article.
11
William Gibbons, “‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in
BioShock,” Game Studies 11, no. 3 (2011), available online at
[Link]
12
Leigh Alexander, “The Aberrant Gamer: An Evening with Sander Cohen,” GameSetWatch
(September 6, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed July
26, 2014).
13
We might find parallels here with the use of Tchaikovsky’s music in Darren Aronofsky’s film
Black Swan (2010). in which the gracefulness of the ballet Swan Lake is frequently juxtaposed
with violence and psychosis.
14
Xavier Morales, “Kill Bill: Beauty and Violence,” Harvard Law Record (October 16, 2003),
available online at [Link]
15
Lisa Coulthard, “Torture Tunes: Tarantino, Popular Music, and New Hollywood Ultraviolence,”
Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2009): 1.
16
Though discussions of BioShock as “art” peaked in the months after its initial release, they
continue even a decade later, as a recent article in Vox illustrates. Peter Suderman, “BioShock
Proved That Video Games Could Be Art,” Vox (October 3, 2016), available online at
[Link] (accessed
October 3, 2016).
17
Harold Goldberg, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered
Pop Culture (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011), 287.
18
See, for example, Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011).
19
On the adaptation of Dante for the game, the game’s producer, Jonathan Knight, summarized the
approach, nothing that “whenever we could do something that was more in line with what
happens in the poem or had to make a choice about this character or that or this environment or
that, we always tried to do what was in the poem first. But sometimes you have to change things
for gameplay reasons.” The most notable departure from the source material, of course, was the
transformation of the main character into a warrior archetype as opposed to a poet; presumably
the same attitude would carry over to representations of composers, as well. Quoted in David
Wildgoose, “From Poetry to Playability: How Visceral Games Reimagined Dante’s Inferno,”
Kotaku (February 2, 2010), available online at [Link]
to-playability-how-visceral-games-reimagined-dantes-inferno/ (accessed July 20, 2014).
20
On the commercial synergy between the popular music and gaming industries, see, for example,
Holly Tessler, “The New MTV? Electronic Arts and ‘Playing’ Music,” in From Pac-Man to Pop
Music: Interactive Audio in Games and New Media, ed. Karen Collins (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
2008): 13–25; and Antti-Ville Kärjä, “Marketing Music through Computer Games: The Case of
Poets of the Fall and Max Payne 2,” in From Pac-Man to Pop Music: Interactive Audio in Games
and New Media, ed. Karen Collins (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 26–44.
21
Karen Collins briefly outlines the appearance of these musician-themed games in her book Game
Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound
Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 111–112.
22
Literary theorists describe that kind of artwork as historiographic metafiction—a genre in which
historical truths are included in a fictional context. On historiographic metafiction in general, see
Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in
Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con
Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–32.
23 On Michael Jackson in video games, see Melanie Fritsch, “Beat It!—Playing the ‘King of Pop’ in
Video Games,” in Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play, ed. Michael Austin
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 153–176.
24
Assassin’s Creed III is not the first game in the series to incorporate historical figures; Assassin’s
Creed II and its sequels Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
featured characters from the Italian Renaissance, including several members of the Borgia family,
Leonardo da Vinci, Catarina Sforza, and so on.
25
Notably, however, Assassin’s Creed III’s multipart expansion pack The Tyranny of King
Washington explores a version of the 1780s in which Washington has become a brutal dictator.
This narrative deviates enough from history to be easily recognizable as an example of
“alternative history” fiction, and furthermore it is identifiable as “separate” from the main (more
historically oriented) game.
26
On Hollywood’s obsession with the past, see Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of
Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); and Toplin, History by Hollywood:
The Use and Abuse of America’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
27
Broyles, Beethoven in America, 168.
28
Lewis Lockwood, “Film Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven,” Musical
Quarterly 81 (1997): 192.
29
See, for example, the meticulously prepared lists of Amadeus’s “inaccuracies” in Jane Perry-
Camp, “Amadeus and Authenticity,” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1983): 116–118. For more
judicious discussions of the film, see Robert Marshall, “Film as Musicology: Amadeus,” Musical
Quarterly 81 (1997): 173–179; and Jeongwon Joe, “Reconsidering Amadeus: Mozart as Film
Music,” in Changing Tunes: The Uses of Pre-existing Music in Film, ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn
Stilwell (Ashgate, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 57–73.
30
Broyles, Beethoven in America, 191.
9 Playing Chopin

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN makes an unlikely video game hero. Dubbed the “poet of
the piano,” the nineteenth-century composer seems a far cry from the
hypermasculine heroes that still populate many video games. Against all
odds, however, video games have offered players several chances to step
into Chopin’s shoes, first in the Japanese role-playing game Eternal Sonata
(2007), and a few years later in the mobile games Frederic: Resurrection of
Music (2011) and its sequel, Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back (2014).1 This
chapter explores the first two of these titles, which raise intriguing
questions about the cultural value of classical music in the twenty-first
century. Both make an effort to update Chopin’s image for modern players,
introducing the composer and his music to a generation more familiar with
Mario than Mahler. In doing so, however, these games also grapple with the
complex and often contradictory cultural meanings of art.2 As is often the
case with well-known composers, a number of myths have coalesced
around Chopin’s life. In particular, the musicologist Jim Samson has
outlined three identities that have profoundly shaped how audiences have
understood Chopin’s life and music: the salon composer, the Romantic
composer, and the Slavonic composer.3 Each of these three mythic
identities plays a role in Eternal Sonata and Frederic, either aiding or
hindering Chopin’s transformation into a mainstream game character.
After Chopin left his politically troubled native Poland, he sought his
fortunes as a pianist and composer in Paris. He eschewed the public concert
life adopted by many piano virtuosos, such as his friend and rival Franz
Liszt, preferring instead the intimacy of salons—smaller musical gatherings
in the homes of wealthy Parisian patrons. These salons were predominantly
feminine social and musical spaces, and Chopin’s association with them
encouraged a view of him as “a composer ‘for the ladies,’ ” as Samson puts
it—a perception that was “reinforced not just in critical writing but in
portraits, drawings and pictorial representations on nineteenth-century
editions.”4
At the risk of understatement, the classical music world has long been
rife with gender bias, and women’s musical activities and contributions
were (and unfortunately still are) often met with derision. Thus, for many
years, Chopin’s association with the feminine drawing room raised
questions about his status as a serious composer.5 The historian Whitney
Walton, for example, has traced some of the challenges Chopin’s
feminization posed for his reception, a problem exacerbated by his
relationship with the writer George Sand, who provoked scandals with her
propensity for stereotypically masculine behavior.6 Walton succinctly
summarizes how Chopin and Sand flipped traditional gender roles: “Sand
did . . . dress in men’s clothes, smoke little cigars, live an independent life,
and succeed in literature—all practices that violated feminine norms of
behavior in her time. And Chopin was . . . usually in poor health, thin,
weak, and careful about his dress and interior decoration—all
characteristics associated with femininity rather than masculinity.”7 In
short, Chopin was effeminized though his musical and personal lives, as the
composer of trivial salon music and as the stereotypically feminine half of a
romantic relationship.
These gender issues are further complicated by Chopin’s reputation as a
somehow otherworldly figure—an angel or a fairy. As the musicologist
Jeffrey Kallberg notes, “These terms . . . engaged a complex of unstable
meanings having to do with sex and gender, and so ultimately helped forge
a changing image of Chopin as an androgynous, hermaphroditic, effeminate
and/or pathological being.”8 Kallberg suggests that Chopin’s critics may
have (perhaps subconsciously) found evidence of these qualities in his
physical frailty and disease—a corporeal manifestation of his deviation
from sexual and gender norms.
The question of his physical frailty brings up the second Chopin myth:
the Romantic suffering artist. Quoting Samson again:

From childhood his heath was delicate and at the end of his short life
consumption took a cruel toll on his creative energies. Yet the image of
Chopin the consumptive, with “the pallor of the grave,” came to take
on additional significance, interpreted almost as a philosophy of life
 and even as an explanation of his creative output. Through music he
“discloses his suffering.”9

Thankfully, in recent years video games have begun to embrace a more

diverse range of protagonists. Yet the idea of a physically weak, vaguely
androgynous game hero still stands sharply at odds with the standard
archetypes.10 In fairness to games, even films struggle to depict Chopin as a
compelling leading character, although he has been the subject of several
biopics: A Song to Remember (1945), Impromptu (1991), the French film
La note bleue (1991), and the Polish-English Chopin: Desire for Love
(2002). Not surprisingly, to satisfy the dramatic necessities of a cinematic
narrative, each of these films manipulates or wholly fabricates events from
the composer’s life—but even the relatively successful Impromptu leaves
moviegoers with the impression that Chopin was, again in Kallberg’s
words, “an enervated weakling.”11
To avoid falling prey to the same obstacles, Eternal Sonata and Frederic
lean disproportionately on Chopin’s third identity: the Slavonic composer.
Despite the fact that the composer was actually quite apolitical, “the issue
of Chopin as a Polish ‘national’ composer” has become “one of the central
features of our perception of Chopin,” as musicologist Jolanta Pekacz
writes.12 Pekacz argues that biographers and interpreters have unduly
emphasized Chopin’s nationalistic impulses in an effort to bring him into
conformity with heroic stereotypes. That strategy is readily apparent in both
Eternal Sonata and Frederic. The former, for example, prominently touts
Chopin’s desire to “use the piano as a weapon to fight for Poland.”13 Yet
even emphasizing (or inventing) the composer’s nationalist motivations
seems insufficient to compensate for his frail, effeminate reputation. And so
both games employ innovative narrative and musical strategies to wholly
transform Chopin, dramatically reinventing the composer for the benefit of
twenty-first-century gaming audiences.

Sleep Hath Its Own World

Even among the wacky plots of Japanese role-playing games (or JRPGs),
Eternal Sonata’s premise seems a bit bizarre. To quote from the ad copy on
the back of the game’s box: “On his deathbed, the famous composer,
Chopin, drifts between this life and the next. On the border between dreams
and reality, Chopin discovers the light that shines in all of us in this
enduring tale of good and evil, love and betrayal.” As this description
suggests, the plot involves several narrative levels, which I describe as
“real,” “fictional,” and “metafictional.” The first two of these appear only
sporadically and never involve player interaction. The real world—our
reality, in other words—interjects itself through slideshows depicting
important locations and events in Chopin’s life. The fictional world, by
contrast, appears in a series of cutscenes set in 1849 Paris, where Chopin
lies on his deathbed.
The majority of the game, however, takes place in the metafictional
dreamworld inside the fictional Chopin’s mind—a colorful fantasy realm
filled with quirky characters, hordes of monsters, and ample melodrama.
Metafiction can mean a number of things, but here I mean what literary
theorist Patricia Waugh describes as “fictional writing which self-
consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in
order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”14
For reference, examples of that kind of reality-bending metafiction might
include William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride (1973) or Michael
Ende’s novel The Neverending Story (1979) and its film adaptation. In
Eternal Sonata’s metafictional world, a highly stylized version of Chopin—
fully aware that this world exists only in his mind—joins a ragtag group of
youths in a rebellion against an oppressive government (Figure 9.1). This
fantasy clearly draws on Chopin’s experiences as a musician—towns and
characters are all named after musical terms, and many of the characters
fight with weapons based on instruments. The political struggles also evoke
the composer’s life: as the game repeatedly implies, the oppression he fights
is reminiscent of that in Chopin’s native Poland. By actively contributing to
the battle, the metafictional Chopin engages with conflict in a direct way
that the real composer never could.
FIGURE 9.1 Screenshot of a cutscene in Eternal Sonata (2007, metafictional Chopin at right).

By keeping the three versions of Chopin separate, Eternal Sonata’s

elaborately multilayered narrative serves an important structural purpose.
This isolation cleverly sidesteps issues of historical fidelity, allowing the
metafictional Chopin to become a video game hero without negating his
real-world biography.15 In this fantasy, the game seems to say, Chopin can
appear as he wants to be—or, perhaps, as we want him to be. The game
minimizes the effeminacy and illness that might have prevented his video
game success, but without denying their existence. The text that
accompanies chapter 1 (“Raindrops”), for example, describes his
relationship with George Sand—“a somewhat masculine woman who wore
pants and smoked cigars in public”—and notes that “Chopin was not in the
best of health.” Yet neither of those biographical realities seems to influence
his metafictional incarnation in the slightest.
Eternal Sonata also avoids the salon composer problem by diverting
attention instead to his nationalism. From the opening to chapter 4 (“Grande
Valse Brillante”):

Chopin appeared at salons and dinner parties, performing music for

small audiences. It is said that after these performances, Chopin
returned to his room and played his piano furiously.
 He must have felt a frustrating anger towards himself, forced to
suppress his true feelings, put on a mask, and perform music to please
people. In contrast to the cheerful style of this piece, Chopin’s heart
was most likely not nearly as high-spirited.

Chopin might have played in salons, the text implies—but that was a
repression of his true, masculine self, which he expressed later through his
“furious” playing. The nationalist tinge recurs in many of the real-world
slideshows. Five of the seven, in fact, make explicit reference to political
turmoil in Poland, with the final chapter (“Heroic”) being the most blatant:

Perhaps [the “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53] is a

culmination of the feelings that Chopin had for his homeland. . . . It’s
almost as if one can feel the invisible power of the entire nation of
Poland behind it. If one ever wondered just how proud Chopin was of
his home country, this piece answers that question eloquently.16

On the other hand, although these passages fall prey to stereotypes that are
all too common in Chopin reception, Eternal Sonata’s designers also made
extensive efforts at historical realism. As a blog entry by one staff member
reveals, the game’s localization team was in close communication with the
Frederick Chopin Society for “double checking our facts related to Chopin,
as a historical figure, and his music.”17 The end result of this complex
navigation between reality, fiction, and metafiction is that Eternal Sonata
has its cake and eats it, too. Players get a suitably heroic metafictional
version of Chopin, while the real Chopin is left more or less intact.
One possible downside to that strategy, however, is that in practice the
multiple narrative levels might be confusing. That’s where the game’s
soundtrack becomes particularly important. Music helps keep this complex
structure understandable, providing players with sonic cues that
differentiate the narrative levels. The fictional Paris scenes take place in
musical silence, meaning players hear only the noises the characters hear:
voices, and an ominous ticking clock that reinforces the inexorable
approach of Chopin’s death. The metafictional world features newly created
music by Motoi Sakuraba, a veteran JRPG composer. Indeed, the score
could just as easily be from any other JRPG. Aside from the prominence of
piano—a frequent feature of Sakuraba’s music—nothing in Eternal
Sonata’s score hints at the game’s subject matter. The placement of the
music is equally typical, with most towns and dungeons in the game
associated with an endlessly looped musical cue unique to that location.18
Chopin’s compositions appear in Eternal Sonata only during the real-
world slideshows between game chapters. During each of these transitional
interludes, players hear one of the composer’s piano works in its entirety,
featuring new recordings made for the game by the Russian pianist
Stanislav Bunin (Table 9.1). The treatment of music in these sections differs
strikingly from the rest of the game. In the metafictional world, the game
music mostly stays in the background. The slideshow interludes, on the
other hand, treat the music reverentially. The flood of aural and visual
information players receive during most of the game is dramatically
reduced, muted photographs replace the usual cartoonishly colorful
graphics, and written text replaces recorded dialogue—all changes that
encourage players to give the music their full attention.

TABLE 9.1 Chapters of Eternal Sonata (2007) with musical selections

Game Chapter Title of Piece

Chapter 1: Raindrops Prelude in D-flat Major (“Raindrop”), Op.
28, No. 15
Chapter 2: Revolutions Étude in C Minor (“Revolutionary”), Op. 10,
No. 12
Chapter 3: Fantaisie- Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 66
Impromptu
Chapter 4: Grande Valse Grande Valse Brillante, Op. 18
Brillante
Chapter 5: Nocturne Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2
Chapter 6: Tristesse Étude in E Major, Op. 10, No. 3
Chapter 7: Heroic Polonaise in A-flat Major (“Heroic”), Op. 53

The split narrative levels also help explain why classical music plays no
part in the metafictional world. Unlike the newly composed music, players
recognize Chopin’s works as products of the real world—as such, they’re
reserved for that portion of the game. Yet this treatment of classical music
seems to make a larger statement: art shouldn’t be reduced to background
music. Eternal Sonata positions classical music as something special, to be
protected and isolated from the game around it. For most of the game, these
barriers remain impermeable—yet even the strongest walls eventually
develop cracks. Near the end of the game, once Chopin and his group
liberate his dreamworld, the composer muses at length on the unknowable
nature of reality. In a final bid to return to his version of reality, the
metafictional Chopin attempts to destroy the world his mind has created. As
this final struggle pits him against his former friends, the boundaries
between reality and fiction that have held Eternal Sonata’s narrative
together begin to collapse—Chopin the composer merges with Chopin the
video game hero.19
This breach manifests dramatically in the music. As the worlds collide,
Chopin forcibly imposes his reality onto the other narrative levels. As he
does so, his music, previously kept isolated from the game’s original score,
begins to bleed over into the metafictional world. The result is an
underscore that blends the “Revolutionary” Étude with Sakuraba’s musical
style just as the two Chopins intersect. This startling moment of rupture
draws connections between the dichotomies of reality/fiction and art/not-
art. As the narrative levels implode, the game calls attention to the
metafictional Chopin’s hierarchical constructions of reality. Ultimately, the
defeated composer rejects his simplistically dualistic perspective,
sacrificing his real life to save the lives of his imaginary (?) friends. In the
same way, juxtaposing Chopin’s music with Sakuraba’s video game score
raises questions about the nature of art, suggesting that perhaps the
privileging of classical music that the game previously encouraged might be
equally naive.

Chopin, Hero
The walls surrounding art come tumbling down only in the final moments
of Eternal Sonata, at the culmination of a forty-plus-hour journey. The
Polish-produced mobile title Frederic: Resurrection of Music, in contrast,
embraces that chaos from the outset, reveling in musical and narrative
juxtapositions. Frederic is a music-based game in which players perform
Chopin’s music by touching the correct part of an on-screen keyboard at the
right time (Figure 9.2).20 A series of cutscenes between stages hold together
a tongue-in-cheek plot: in a cartoonish version of modern-day Paris, a
mysterious hooded figure resurrects the long-dead Chopin and quickly
departs the scene.21 Befuddled, the composer receives some much-needed
guidance from the three Muses, who reveal the sorry state of today’s music.
Case in point: as the composer ponders his next move, a self-declared
master of electronic music challenges him to a musical duel. After a
decisive victory, Chopin sets off across the globe in search of answers. Who
brought him back, and why? And, even more important, what role does his
art play in this new world?

FIGURE 9.2 Gameplay screenshot from Frederic: Resurrection of Music (2011).

Like Eternal Sonata’s metafictional narrative, Frederic’s premise avoids

a need for game designers to stick to historical fact. That being said, in stark
contrast to the historical vignettes of Eternal Sonata’s slideshow sequences,
Frederic is far less concerned with educating its audience about Chopin’s
life than it is with revitalizing his image. Initially he appears in nineteenth-
century clothes and with a sickly blue pallor that makes him appear
“undead” compared with the modern musicians. Combined with his
antiquated speech and mannerisms, these characteristics cause Chopin to
come across as a man entirely out of his element. Near the end of the game,
however, he undergoes a transformation, rebranding himself with a new
rock-star persona (Figure 9.3). Any suggestion of the effeminate or sickly
Chopin is absent—Frederic unabashedly aims to maximize its protagonist’s
appeal even at the risk of historical inaccuracy. The composer literally
wields music as a weapon, with lightning bolts or other pyrotechnics
frequently exploding from his piano to wreak havoc on his opponents.
Frederic, clearly, is a game about the power of art.

FIGURE 9.3 Chopin “updated” in Frederic: Resurrection of Music.

In contrast to the strict separation of musical styles in Eternal Sonata,

much of the appeal of Frederic’s entirely remixed soundtrack stems from
crossing those barriers. Frederic follows Chopin to a number of locations
around the world, each one featuring an opponent to defeat. (That premise
will sound familiar to players of fighting games like Street Fighter II: The
World Warrior [1991]—and indeed it’s helpful to understand Frederic as a
hybrid music/fighting game.) Each of these musical duels features one of
Chopin’s works remixed with stereotypical musical styles from its graphical
location: Celtic music in Ireland, reggae in the Caribbean, hip-hop in New
York, and so on (Table 9.2). Each time, Chopin and his music triumph—
symbolically demonstrating not only his virtuosity as a performer but also,
by implication, the superiority of classical music.
TABLE 9.2 Classical remixes in Frederic: Resurrection of Music

Track Title Musical Style Title of Original Piece

Midnight EDM Prelude in E Minor, Op. 28, No. 4
Flight to
Paris
Jamaican Reggae Polonaise in A Major (“Military”),
Coconuts Op. 40, No. 1
New Deputy Country/Western Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor,
in Town Op. 35, III (“Funeral March”)
The Big Wild Hip-hop Nocturne in F Minor, Op. 55, No.
Apple 1/Polonaise in A-flat Major
(“Heroic), Op. 53
Exploding EDM Waltz in A Minor (Op. post)
Star
Classical Easy Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No.
Feelings listening/classical 2
Chasing the Ambient/Irish Étude in G-flat Major (“Butterfly”),
Leprechaun Op. 25, No. 9
Whales in the EDM Lithuanian Song, Op. 74, No. 16
Sky
The Epic Chiptunes Étude in C Minor (“Revolutionary”),
Battle Op. 10, No. 12
Oriental JPop (Japanese Prelude in A Major, Op. 28, No. 7
(Bonus pop)
track)

Like Eternal Sonata, Frederic initially privileges classical music, but

later complicates that position. In this case, what starts as a celebration of
classical music’s power eventually becomes a manifesto against the dangers
of commodifying art. Players eventually learn that the man who resurrected
Chopin was Mastermind X—the most powerful record-company executive
in the world. All along, his nefarious goal was to trick Chopin into
defeating the world’s last independent musicians, thus forever eliminating
the scourge of noncommercialized music. After this dramatic revelation,
Frederic abruptly pivots from a celebration of classical music into an
indictment of capitalist society’s aesthetic bankruptcy. In this dark outlook
on the present day, even the Muses aren’t immune to crass pandering: they
cut short their conversation with Chopin to film a commercial for a fast-
food Greek salad.
It’s tempting to attribute Frederic’s surprising change of tone to the lack
of a clear thematic vision—a claim not without some merit. But the shift
also acts as a kind of metacommentary on musical prejudice. Players have
presumably been perfectly willing to accept what the Muses told us in the
game’s opening moments: Chopin is a composer whose talents have yet to
be equaled. The enjoyable but generally unsophisticated musical
juxtapositions that accompany each level encourage this belief in his
superiority, giving the impression that popular styles are simple, derivative,
and repetitive. Likewise, in contrast with Chopin’s earnest politeness, his
opponents are depicted as buffoons, incapable of treating music seriously—
not to mention the ways in which they sometimes raise uncomfortable racial
and cultural stereotypes.22 When Mastermind X’s plan is revealed, Frederic
pulls the rug from under these assumptions, and by the end of the game, the
idea of music as an art form is effectively detached from the concept of
classical music. Art, Frederic’s protagonist and players learn, encompasses
all music created apart from commercial consideration.23
But even that message isn’t totally clear. Frederic’s story suggests that
Chopin’s art is inherently superior to commercialized music (whatever that
means). Yet a large part of the game’s appeal emerges from enjoying how
classical music can be transgressively remixed with nonclassical styles.
This playfully postmodern approach to Chopin’s works might help engage
players who don’t typically listen to classical music—yet it runs completely
counter to the game’s central message. Despite its idealistic, if off-kilter,
ruminations on the nature of art and commercialization, Frederic is itself a
commercial product that earns revenue through the commodification of
Chopin’s music. Viewed in this light, Frederic becomes a self-reflexive
contemplation of its own emptiness. It’s an unresolvable contradiction,
simultaneously celebrating and satirizing music’s cultural authority. It lures
players into believing in the powers of art, then mocks them for their
naiveté.

Classical music in video games often destabilizes the status quo, disrupting
players’ understandings of art and entertainment. Its presence erodes
cultural boundaries, subverting generic expectations of video games and
shaping new understandings of where, when, and how it is appropriate to
engage with classical music. It’s by playing as, and playing with Chopin
and composers like him that games can alter cultural perceptions of
classical music. Although Eternal Sonata and Frederic feature an unusual
protagonist, their treatment of classical music reflects many of the trends
explored throughout Unlimited Replays. Both games to a greater or lesser
extent embrace postmodern stylistic remixes, at once defamiliarizing
classical music and rendering the other genres more artistic. Each also
offers a reinterpretation of music history, combining Chopin’s music with
scenes of his heroism, rewriting his persona to suit the necessities of
gameplay. These games try to make classical music look cool, or at least
mitigate its profound lack of coolness—hence Frederic’s rock-star
Chopin.24 Reimagining Chopin is a way of rewriting music history,
transforming the foreign country of the past into a more familiar locale.
Importantly, this reinterpretation emerges from an educational impulse.
In an interview with the popular gaming website GameSpot, Eternal
Sonata’s director, Hiroya Hatsushiba, opined:

People who play games and people who love classical music are not
necessarily sharing [the] same type of interests. Most people in Japan
know the name of Chopin; however, most of the people who know of
Chopin think he is just some kind of a great music composer without
knowing any more about him. Most of them have heard Chopin’s
music but not a lot could put his name to it immediately. . . . I was
hoping that people would get into this game easily and also come to
know how great Chopin’s music is.25

In other words, Eternal Sonata encourages players to explore music history

by bringing art and entertainment together, and can thus make a claim that it
serves an important cultural function. A number of critics certainly took
note of this educational potential. One reviewer for IGN, for example,
suggested it “teaches music appreciation and history”—stressing the
educative value by invoking the names of two standard college courses. But
this music, the reviewer makes clear, doesn’t hamper players’ enjoyment:
“It uses his music and life to bring context to what is happening in front of
you. . . . It’s educational, but it’s also incredibly fun and interesting.”26
Players have noticed the same kinds of educational aspirations,
suggesting that Hatsushiba at least partially realized his lofty goals.27 In a
user-submitted review for Eternal Sonata on the website GameFAQs,
MizuruTakagi writes: “For once you can think of video games as
‘educational’ with this one. I personally, was amazed at how much I
learned. Seeing photographs about Chopin’s life telling his story, really got
me hooked. And for most of you, it will do the same.”28 Another reviewer
identifying as ShadowAspect echoed the same thoughts but added an
intriguing connection: “Amazingly, you can actually LEARN something
about the man while you play the game. It’s really refreshing to see and
adds a lot to classifying this [game] as ‘art.’ ”29 For this reviewer, evidently,
including educational aspects in games elevates them to artworks. This
complex and revealing process—entertainment becoming art, and art
becoming entertainment—is the subject of this book’s final pair of chapters.

1
Although throughout this chapter I will be referring to the original 2011 release, Frederic was
rereleased in a director’s cut in 2016, adding several new levels. The overall narrative, however,
remains unchanged.
2
For more on stylistic and chronological juxtapositions as aspects of musical postmodernity, see,
for example, Jonathan Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” in
Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thoughts, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 13–26.
3
Jim Samson, “Myth and Reality: A Biographical Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Chopin, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–8.
4
Samson, “Myth and Reality,” 3. Samson expands on these ideas somewhat in his “Chopin
Reception: Theory, History, Analysis,” in Chopin Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–17.
5
On the gendering of the salon (and Chopin), see, for example, Jeffrey Kallberg, “The Harmony of
the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne,” Representations 39 (1992): 102–133.
6
Whitney Walton, “Gender and Genius in Postrevolutionary France: Sand and Chopin,” in The
Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Halina Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2004), 224–243.
7 Walton, “Gender and Genius in Postrevolutionary France,” 230–231. Walton argues compellingly
that these transgressions of gender norms complicated perceptions of Sand—and, to a lesser
degree, Chopin—as artistic geniuses.
8
Jeffrey Kallberg, “Small Fairy Voices: Sex, History, and Meaning in Chopin,” in Chopin Studies
2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57.
9
Samson, “Myth and Reality,” 5.
10
Japanese role-playing games in particular have a disturbing history of characters whose
androgyny is an indicator of their villainy, as with, for example, Kefka in Final Fantasy VI
(1994), Flea in Chrono Trigger (1995), and Kuja in Final Fantasy IX (2000).
11
Jeffrey Kallberg, “Nocturnal Thoughts on Impromptu,” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 200.
12
Jolanta T. Pekacz, “Deconstructing a ‘National Composer’: Chopin and Polish Exiles in Paris,
1831–49,” 19th Century Music 24 (2000): 161.
13
The slideshow that opens Eternal Sonata’s chapter 2 (“Revolution”) contains the following text,
directly connecting the “Revolutionary” Étude to Polish independence and projecting profoundly
martial impulses onto Chopin: “On November 29th, 1830, an insurrection occurred in Warsaw,
the capital of Poland. It was the November Uprising. At the time, most of Poland was Russian
territory, and the desire for independence had been growing. About four weeks before the
insurgence, on November 2nd, Chopin left the increasingly dangerous Warsaw and headed for
Vienna. It is said that Chopin’s friends encouraged him to leave the country, because they knew
rebellion was certain. But Chopin was unaware of this, and his trip had been planned many
months in advance. Chopin was unusually talented, as well as physically weak, so his friends
wanted him to use the piano as a weapon to fight for Poland. On November 23rd, approximately
twenty days later, Chopin arrived in Vienna. And six days after that, the insurrection in Warsaw
started. It went on for almost a year. Then, on September 8th, 1831, Warsaw fell. Ten months of
fighting had ended in defeat. Chopin, then age twenty-one, learned of the insurrection’s failure
while in Stuttgart, Germany. The feelings with which he played the piano at this time took the
form of this composition, ‘The Revolutionary Étude.’ To Chopin, who genuinely loved his
homeland of Poland, the insurrection’s failure was difficult to bear. But perhaps he found it even
more difficult to bear the fact that he was safe in a foreign country. Chopin would never set foot
in his native land again.”
14
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1984), 3.
15
Interestingly, in the Japanese version of Eternal Sonata, the “real-world” slideshows take place
with a single static image throughout, perhaps to reduce distractions from the music and text.
16
Samson and others have observed the Romantic tendency to ascribe autobiographical meaning to
Chopin’s music, a desire to “seek out either a specific referential meaning in this musical work . .
. or a hidden emotional content.” Samson, “Myth and Reality,” 5.
17
The author notes: “Communicating with the Frederick Chopin Society provided us with a
resource for double checking our facts related to Chopin, as a historical figure, and his music. We
sent them a copy of all the text we were going to include in the game that related to Chopin. They
reviewed everything and pointed out any information that was erroneous or misleading. So, of
course, we made any changes they requested or suggested until all of our text met with their
approval. We wanted our facts to be as historically accurate as possible without diverting too
much from the text as it was originally written . . .. As you can imagine, we were very grateful to
 get help like that from such a knowledgeable source!” Stephanie Fernandez, “Lost in
Translation,” IGN (September 12, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed September 15,
2015).
18
On typical music placement in JRPGs, see, for example, William Gibbons, “Music, Genre, and
Nationality in Postmillennial Fantasy Role-Playing Games,” in The Routledge Companion to
Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters (London: Routledge,
2017), 412–427.
19
There is, debatably, a smaller and quite subtle moment of rupture earlier in Eternal Sonata. After
one of the game’s interludes, players hear applause, and as the next chapter begins, the
metafictional Chopin has just performed a concert of his music. One plausible interpretation is
that these two scenes are connected, implying that Chopin diegetically performed the work
players just heard. Interpreting the scene this way means that the real and metafictional worlds
briefly overlap.
20
The game mechanics function similarly to the display for the keyboard in Rock Band 3, although
that game features an actual keyboard controller rather than a touchscreen. KeyboardMania
(Konami, 2000) was an earlier keyboard-based music game, which allowed players to use MIDI
keyboards connected to PCs for input.
21
Joseph Leray, reviewing the game for Touch Arcade, noted that Frederic “isn’t a game so much
as it is a rewriting of Chopin’s cultural identity . . .. Resurrection ultimately leads him back to a
culturally reinvigorated Warsaw, but only after he uses his musical gifts to destroy the
stereotyped, corporate shills that populate the rest of the world. Chopin is cast as the savior of
music, but it’s odd that he uses modern remixes, not his traditional compositions, to further his
cause.” Joseph Leray, “Frederic: Resurrection of Music Review,” Touch Arcade (February 1,
2012), available online at [Link]
review/ (accessed October 3, 2015).
22
The critic for Slide to Play, for example, writes: “What isn’t necessarily . . . respectful . . . is the
game’s illustrations of different kinds of people. Frederic doesn’t feel like an encyclopedia of
stereotypes, but it does have some questionable depictions in its narrative. For example, Ireland is
represented by a leprechaun-like man, and Jamaica’s avatar is a Rastafarian who’s way into
certain psychoactive plants. At some point these kinds of images can cross lines of decency, but
we’re not sure if Frederic is guilty of such an offense or not. It’s worth considering, but we’ll
leave it up to you to decide if Forever Entertainment was tactless or not in this regard.” Devin
Wilson, “Frederic—Resurrection of Music Complete Review,” Slide to Play (February 17, 2012),
available online at [Link]
review/ (accessed October 1, 2015).
23
Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back returns to these issues. The gameplay is identical to that of the
original Frederic, but here Frederic challenges caricatures of well-known pop musicians around
the world (Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga, for example) who are supposedly destroying music
with their soulless, mass-produced hits. The game’s soundtrack, consequently, parodies popular
songs by these artists (“Bad” and “Poker Face,” respectively) rather than remixing Chopin’s
music.
24
Here again there are parallels with media dictions of Beethoven, who Broyles notes often appears
“somewhere between a Romantic god and a rock star.” Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 195.
25
“Eternal Sonata Director Q&A,” GameSpot (August 7, 2007), available online at
[Link]
page=1&sid=6176358 (accessed January 15, 2016).
26
Erik Brudvig, “Eternal Sonata Review,” IGN (September 13, 2007), available online at
[Link] (accessed January 16, 2016).
27
Raising awareness of the subject is, of course, a major goal for any kind of biographical
cinematic project. As cinema historian Robert Brent Toplin writes (summarizing the views of
historical documentary producers), “A film can only introduce a subject . . .. If it is successful, it
will bring a subject to the attention of people who did not know much about it before, and it will
encourage them to ask questions and seek further information through reading.” Robert Brent
Toplin, “The Filmmaker as Historian,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1213.
28
MizuruTakagi, “An Ingenious Masterpiece Portrayed with Innovative Art and Beauty,”
GameFAQs (June 30, 2008), available online at
[Link] (accessed January 17, 2016).
29
ShadowAspect, “A Masterful Example of Artistry in Gaming.,” GameFAQs (September 28,
2007), available online at [Link]
(accessed January 17, 2016).
10 Gamifying Classical Music

THIS WAS IT—THE ultimate showdown. Several minutes of intense thought

had gone into this final challenge, but now I was nearing the goal. Looking
down at my iPad, I triple-checked that everything was ready to go. Then,
holding my breath, I tentatively tapped the screen, and . . . victory! As a
musical fanfare played, I let out a satisfied sigh and watched a tally of how
many experience points I’d earned. But who was this dread foe? Not the
usual evil wizard, mad scientist, or supervillain. This time, I was locked in a
battle of wills with—French. The language. More specifically, the past
tense of the conditional, which I still can’t quite master. (Fortunately, so far
I’ve been able to survive without being able to say “I would have been
going to go to the museum.”) Rather than a game in the traditional sense, I
was playing Duolingo, a language-learning program that combines a web-
based learning platform with gamelike apps.
Duolingo is an example of gamification—the application of concepts
drawn from games to other activities. The increasing prevalence of
computer technology has allowed gamification to profoundly affect almost
every aspect of our daily lives, from personal fitness, to education, to how
we choose to purchase products. In her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games
Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal
argues that gamification (or “alternate realities,” as she prefers) can exert a
powerful, and positive, influence on humanity.1 “The great challenge for us
today, and for the remainder of the century,” McGonigal suggests with
some urgency, “is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives,
and to embrace them as a platform for collaboration on our most important
planetary efforts.”2 The general process of gamification is fairly simple.
Developers take the things players like about games—earning points,
leveling up, getting rewards, and so on—and use those elements of positive
reinforcement to encourage people to do things they might otherwise find
tedious or challenging.
The idea of applying aspects of games to other activities has a long
history, not least in music. Eighteenth-century Viennese musicians, for
example, sometimes composed new music using dice-based games, and
nineteenth-century students could choose from several different board
games to improve their music theory skills.3 And as several recent studies
have explored, there are obvious and subtle connections between playing
video games and musical performance. Both require manual dexterity and a
sense of rhythm, for instance. On a deeper level, like games, for the most
part music operates by adhering to sets of rules. Composers and performers
are often successful based on their ability to be creative within given
structures and frameworks. As a result of their shared emphasis on
playfulness, video games have drawn on music as a design element from
their earliest days. 4 Consider, as one example, the musical memory—based
SIMON (1978), an electronic game created in part by Ralph Baer, the man
often described as “the father of video games.”5
In the same vein, the entire popular genre of music-based games is
predicated on gamifying music, from the rock-based Guitar Hero series to a
diverse range of lesser-known titles, like PaRappa the Rapper (1996),
Space Channel 5 (1999), and Samba de Amigo (1999).
The majority of music games focus on popular music of one style or
another. A surprising number, however, explore classical styles, such as
Boom Boom Rocket (2007) and Frederic: Resurrection of Music (2011),
both of which were explored in previous chapters. Other notable examples
would include the narrative-driven iOS game Symponica (2012), which tells
the story of a young conductor in a world where nearly everything revolves
around classical music. Each of these classical music games focuses on
combining the fun parts of classical music and video games to create an
entertaining experience.
A core concept of gamification is that it leads to betterment—
encouragement toward self-improvement. All music games fall into that
category in one way or another. Anahid Kassabian and Freya Jarman, for
example, have argued that all music-based games are educational, because

they “teach” or “improve” some kind of skill, be it memory, hand-eye-

ear coordination, the liberty to shape and create patterns of sound, or
 an entry into (a) musical culture(s). That is not to say that the didactic
function is a primary, or even necessarily intended, outcome of
gameplay, but rather that the player necessarily learns something or
acquires or improves a skill.6

I fully agree with this understanding of music games, and with the potential
of these games to improve music education. In this chapter, however, I’m
interested in instances where that “didactic function” assumes a different
role, enhancing players’ cultural education as much as or more than their
technical skills. In contrast to the overwhelming dominance of popular
music styles in music-based games, these types of edutainment products
often focus on classical music—which is itself frequently associated with
self-improvement. The musicologist Mark Katz, for example, has traced
how the widespread availability of recorded music in the early twentieth-
century United States led to a push for education in so-called good music, a
civilizing force many believed would lead to massive improvements in
American culture.7
Hopes for gamified classical music remain somewhat less lofty at
present. Nevertheless, the underlying—though usually unspoken—
assumption is that developing an appreciation for classical music is
inherently beneficial. In the two examples that follow—both mobile-based
apps from the 2010s—a classical work is transformed from being a piece of
concert music into being an interactive experience. In the first instance, the
iOS app Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten
(2013), we find gamelike elements applied to a classical work as a form of
music appreciation. In the second, Steve Reich’s Clapping Music—Improve
Your Rhythm (2015), performing a classical work becomes in itself a tool
for self-improvement.

Music App-reciation
Initially composed for the documentary film Instruments of the Orchestra
(1946), Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1945)
has become much better known as a stand-alone concert piece for children.
Like many other classical works for youth audiences, the Young Person’s
Guide is explicitly educational.8 Through a set of variations on a theme by
the seventeenth-century composer Henry Purcell, it introduces listeners to
instrument groups (woodwinds, strings, and so on) and to musical forms,
such as the fugue. Britten’s piece is a guide in two senses. It’s a manual for
understanding the orchestra, similar to a guidebook to a foreign country that
contains helpful hints for new travelers. But it’s also a guide to the
orchestra, directing new audiences to the concert hall just as a guide dog
might lead its owner. By educating children about the orchestra, in other
words, the piece aims to create a new generation of people who not only
understand classical music but also actually want to hear it.
Britten’s Young Person’s Guide emerged at a time when the so-called
music appreciation movement was well underway in the United Kingdom,
the United States, and elsewhere, creating lasting effects that reverberate in
the educational system even today.9 After World War I, governments,
broadcasters, arts organizations, and publishers made concerted efforts to
drive audiences to classical music through the edification of the masses.
That effort was particularly concentrated on children. Secure in the belief
that classical music had a positive impact on the mind and character of its
devotees, they sought to develop children’s ears in ways that would ensure a
new generation of eager audience members. As the musicologist Kate
Guthrie points out, “The music appreciation movement was founded on the
belief that the ‘normal listener’ would appreciate ‘good’ music (that is,
Western art music) more if they approached it with a knowledge of the
rudiments of music theory and interpretation.”10
Britten’s music aimed to educate young people about classical music in
ways that were both meaningful and measurable. And, intentionally or not,
this mission reinforced distinctions between serious classical music, which
required education and study, and other implicitly lesser forms of music,
which did not. To again quote Guthrie:

Being able to name the instruments of the orchestra or describe a piece

of music’s form were comparably quantifiable measures of serious
engagement. The notion that listening to such music was an acquired
skill reinforced the high art canon’s elite status. Thus, Instruments of
the Orchestra sought to defend art music against a denigrating
association with mass culture, even as it promoted this repertoire to a
broad audience.11
In other words, one goal of music appreciation programs was to convince
large swaths of the population to accept the propositions that (1) classical
music exerts a positive influence on the listener, and (2) an understanding of
classical masterworks indicates a person of sophisticated taste.
Emergent media technologies have played an enormous role in the
success of music appreciation programs. The widespread availability of
classical recordings in the early twentieth century led to hopes for a massive
surge in the popularity of “good music.” Radio programs enabled huge
segments of the population to tune in to regular broadcasts—at one time
NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour allegedly had eleven million listeners
(seven million students and four million adults).12 Televisual media were
equally important. Instruments of the Orchestra illustrates the early impact
of film, as did other efforts, like Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and a spate of
composer biopics. On television, the impact of programs like the American
composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts
—broadcast on CBS and syndicated around the world from 1958 to 1972—
was enormous. More recent examples would include the Keeping Score
series of PBS documentaries sponsored by the San Francisco Symphony,
each of which provides historical and musical background on a major work
of Western classical music. Each of these media products aims to
disseminate classical music to a wide audience in the hopes of building
audiences through education.
In the digital era, these media are joined by apps. The iOS app version of
The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (which I’ll refer to as YPG for
simplicity’s sake) works much like many of the older media products I just
named. Sponsored by the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester,
UK) and the Britten-Pears Foundation, YPG is a well-designed, engaging
program with a clear mission: introducing children to the Young Person’s
Guide and, more generally, to the symphony orchestra. From the app’s
home screen, users can choose a number of options (Figure 10.1). Tapping
the large arrow in the center takes users to a performance of Britten’s work
accompanied by an annotated score that highlights important musical
moments and provides commentary. By touching “The Orchestra,” users
can uncover details about the history of the instruments and how they’re
grouped into families, as well as listen to examples. And the “B.B.” logo
takes users to a wealth of information about the Young Person’s Guide and
its composer, including samples of other Britten works. For all intents and
purposes, the app is a young person’s guide to The Young Person’s Guide.

FIGURE 10.1 The home screen of the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra app (2013).

Many of YPG’s features aren’t really games, or even gamified. The

recording and score, for example, might best be described as interactive
musical experiences. YPG is not unique in that respect—in fact, there are
quite a few apps that provide such experiences. The developer Amphio
(previously known as Touchpress), for instance, has produced several iPad
apps that focus on interactive classical music, such as Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons (2014) and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (2014). Along with
historical background, these apps typically provide multiple recordings of
classical works, which can be viewed with video-recorded performances,
musical scores, and other forms of music visualization. Outside classical
music, there are also some parallels with the Icelandic composer and
performer Björk’s “app album” Biophilia (2011), which allowed listeners to
interact with some aspects of the music.13 Despite their inclusion of
elements that allow users to “play” with the music in some respects, each of
these apps studiously avoids using game-related terminology. There is a
sense, perhaps, that while adopting some interactive elements helps broaden
the music’s appeal to digital natives, too much gamification runs the risk of
cheapening the experience, trivializing serious musical works.
In contrast, and likely because it’s aimed at children, there are four
activities in YPG that we can clearly identify as gamified: two “games” and
two “quizzes.” The quizzes are fairly straightforward. The simpler of the
two is the Personality Quiz, an experience seemingly influenced by the
unending flow of social media personality quizzes (“Which Star Wars
character are you?”). Users answer a few questions about themselves
—“The school bell rings! Are you in your seat ready for class or do you
arrive just at the last minute?”—and the app suggests orchestral instruments
that supposedly fit that personality type. Much more complex, however, is
the Aural Quiz, which presents players with a short musical excerpt and
asks them to choose which instrument they think they heard. Although it
starts off simple, eventually the challenge ramps up considerably. The
satisfaction of getting a perfect score encourages players to hone their
listening abilities and to develop an understanding of how the various
instrumental timbres work together in an orchestra. This is a straightforward
example of gamification: encouraging a desirable behavior by establishing
win/loss conditions and awarding points based on good player performance.
Ironically, the two components of YPG that are explicitly labeled games
are much less overt in their gamification. Both are sandbox games, in the
sense that there is no right or wrong way to play; they simply let players
experiment with music while learning about musical forms. The Variation
Game offers players the chance to compose a short piece by rearranging and
embellishing a simple melody (Figure 10.2). The game begins with four
measures of music, presented as pictures roughly graphing out the shape of
the melody (although players can choose to view sheet music instead). The
four measures may be dragged into any order, and a plus or minus button in
the corner of each measure swaps between a simple and an ornamented
version. Players can also select which of three instruments will play the
piece, as well as how they would like the melody to sound in terms of
articulation: staccato, normal, or legato. This variety of choice leads to a
large number of possibilities for the final piece, even if in practice most end
results will sound fairly similar. The Fugue Game works in much the same
way. In a fugue—one of the more complex forms in classical music—
musical lines enter one at a time, each playing a shared musical theme,
before combining into independent melodies. Here again the player has a
range of choices. Four animated animals represent the four lines; each
animal can play any of four different instruments. As in the Variation Game,
the voices can be dragged into any order, meaning that the instruments can
enter in whatever order the player wishes. Impressively, all possible
iterations work musically, which encourages experimentation. Because
there are no wrong answers, evaluating the result is purely a matter of
musical taste.

FIGURE 10.2 The “Variation Game” in the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra app.

The purpose of these embedded games is to provide children with

knowledge about basic musical concepts, which they can then apply
through consuming classical works. Initially, that consumption might take
the form of listening to the Young Person’s Guide in the YPG app. But that’s
just the first step. The ultimate goal—instilling an abiding appreciation for
classical music—hasn’t changed since Benjamin Britten’s time. Like earlier
examples of music appreciation in media, there’s an undertone of
betterment running through this app and others like it. In fact, I initially
discovered YPG by googling “music apps to make children smarter”—a
search that turns up countless lists of apps designed to turn children into the
geniuses of tomorrow. Classical music apps frequently appear in these kinds
of searches, a consequence of long-lived (if erroneous) beliefs that classical
music does somehow make children smarter.14 The YPG app succeeds by
appealing to consumers’ lingering sense that developing an appreciation for
“good music” in children is a socially responsible thing for parents and
teachers to do.
While these goals seem laudable, they also raise some serious concerns.
There’s nothing inherently bad about an app designed to foster an
appreciation for classical works, but doing so also runs the risk of
perpetuating elitist narratives of artistic superiority. Apps like YPG imply
by their very existence that this music, unlike other genres, requires careful
study. Moreover, the involvement of governments, leading universities, and
arts organizations suggests that it should be studied, just as television
broadcasts like Bernstein’s concerts or educational films like Instruments of
the Orchestra did for previous generations. This approach, while arguably
somewhat successful in building audiences for classical music, also
disproportionately celebrates the contributions of a few so-called
“masters”—typically white men—while minimizing the important
contributions of others, including women, minorities, and diverse
socioeconomic classes. Tellingly, I can find no similar apps that guide
young people to even such historically significant artworks as, say, Miles
Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads (1940),
or Carole King’s Tapestry (1971), to name only three.15
These issues are neither new nor limited to apps. The American
composer-critic Virgil Thomson, for instance—a contemporary of Britten—
lamented as early as the 1930s the rising authority of what he called the
“music appreciation racket.” What others perceived as the savior of high
culture, Thomson derided as a “fake-ecstatic, holier-than thou” collusion of
publishers, conductors, and educators, designed to indoctrinate listeners
(especially children) in the superiority of co-called classical orchestral
masterworks.16 “A certain limited repertory of pieces,” Thomson writes,

ninety percent of them a hundred years old, is assumed to contain most

that the world has to offer of musical beauty and authority. . . . It is
further assumed . . . that continued auditive subjection to this repertory
harmonizes the mind and sweetens the character, and that the
conscious paying of attention during the auditive process intensifies
the favorable reaction. Every one of these assumptions is false, or at
least highly disputable.17

Thomson, who wrote several major symphonic works himself, wasn’t

opposed to classical orchestral works. But he was deeply troubled by any
approach that, in his words, “pretends that a small section of music is either
all of music or at least the heart of it.”18 Fortunately, things have changed
somewhat since Thomson’s time. The university music appreciation course,
for instance, which was long a bastion of this type of thinking, has in recent
years gradually stepped back a bit from reinforcing myths of classical
music’s superiority.19
I invoke Thomson’s writings because they were similar in both period
and content to Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide—and yet
diametrically opposed in viewpoint. Both men agreed on the purpose of
music appreciation—guiding listeners to the canon of classical masterworks
—but they disagreed strongly on the merits of those goals. Some might
reasonably argue that apps like YPG, despite the newness of their medium
and their innovative presentation, simply reinforce this older mentality, not
least by encouraging the development of listening skills rather than
musicianship. Users can interactively learn about topics such as musical
form or instrumental timbres, yet in the end they are only passive observers
to Britten’s music. To return to Thomson’s colorful invective, music
appreciation works by convincing listeners to “feel that musical non-
consumption is sinful,” compelling them to purchase concert tickets,
recordings, or preferably both. Those results aren’t in themselves musical.
Rather, “They are at best therapeutic actions destined to correct the
customer’s musical defects without putting him through the labors of
musical exercise.”20 Yet the draw of video games, and of gamification more
generally, is interactivity. Nearly three quarters of a century after Britten
and Thomson, can gamification bridge the gap between teaching music
appreciation and teaching music performance? My second case study is an
app targeted at that very goal.

Tapping Music
In a brief article from 2015, one of Business Insider’s executive editors,
Matt Rosoff, called attention to a new smartphone app: “Last Friday, a
fellow music-nut friend of mine sent me a link to an iPhone app based on
composer Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. I’ve become totally obsessed with
beating it.”21 That may not seem like a particularly noteworthy attitude
toward a mobile game. Many of us, after all, have fallen prey to the
addictive charms of, say, Candy Crush (2012) or Flappy Bird (2013). What
makes Rosoff’s statement unusual is that, in this case, “beating the game”
essentially translates to “correctly performing twentieth-century avant-
garde classical music.” Another collaboration between game developers,
arts organizations, and higher education—in this case the London
Sinfonietta, Queen Mary University of London, and the developer
Touchpress (now Amphio)—Steve Reich’s Clapping Music aims to create
just the kind of obsession-inducing experience that Rosoff describes. And it
does. The New York Times critic Michael Cooper, for instance, found the
app “maddeningly addictive.”22 I have been a music educator in various
forms for most of my adult life, from teaching beginning piano to advising
doctoral students, and I feel comfortable asserting that I have never heard
anyone describe the often tedious process of learning a complex musical
work as “maddeningly addictive.” So how is this response possible?
Part of the answer lies with the nature of Reich’s piece. Clapping Music
(1972) is a deceptively simple minimalist work, requiring only two
performers, both of whom produce sound by clapping their hands. The end
result creates a rich and musically rewarding experience from a very small
amount of musical material, a feat it accomplishes through a process not
entirely unlike a video game. It starts with a basic premise and a simple set
of rules that players follow to create the piece. In this case, one performer
repeats the same pattern for the entire piece, while the other performer
slowly changes the pattern, displacing it by one beat every few repetitions.
Other aspects of Clapping Music also help make it uniquely suited to
gamification. Like a game, Reich’s piece begins with a tutorial—both
performers clapping the same rhythm—before ramping up the difficulty.
Because it consists only of clapping, Clapping Music is reduced to one
musical element, rhythm, which is the one aspect of music that video games
are best equipped to handle. The vast majority of music games are based
entirely on rhythm, from older titles such as PaRappa the Rapper (1996) to
Guitar Hero Live (2015)—you just push the right button at the right time.23
These types of games have also made their way to the iPad, as in Groove
Coaster (2011) and Tone Sphere (2012), adapting the popular genre to
touch-based controls.24 Yet while many rhythm games give players the
sense of performing more musical elements than they actually are, in Steve
Reich’s Clapping Music (hereafter SRCM) the player actually performs
every musical element of the work.25
Upon opening SRCM, an eye-catching Tap to Play graphic greets players,
with somewhat less enticing options underneath: About the Music, About
the App, and Research Project. After starting a game, players see a string of
dots that represent the rhythmic pattern, with filled-in dots representing
claps, and empty dots indicating rests (Figure 10.3). Each horizontal line is
one iteration of the pattern, and upon its completion the bottom line drops
off the screen, the other lines drop down one space, and the pattern
continues. Although this system differs from traditional music notation,
players are given all the information necessary for a complete performance
of the work—only the clapping sound is fake, generated each time the
player taps the screen (a necessary conceit, since tapping is nearly silent).
One of the advertisements for SRCM includes a brief interview with the
composer about both his work and the app. The voice-over in full:

Hi, I’m Steve Reich. In 1972 I composed a piece called Clapping

Music, and all it needs is your two hands. It’s a simple piece. There’s
just one rhythmic pattern; one person plays it over and over again, and
the second person gradually changes their part one note at a time. This
app is very helpful in teaching you the piece, and it will prepare you to
play it live. The goal is to follow the dots, play the patterns exactly as
presented, but if you miss—game’s over for a minute, and then you
can try again. And when you’re all done, just in case you’re interested,
you might check out a few other pieces I’ve written that you might
enjoy. Do give the Clapping Music app a try. It’s a bit of a challenge,
but it’s an interesting one, and you can download it for nothing.26
Although there’s quite a bit to unpack in this short statement, it is
noteworthy that the composer clearly views SRCM not only as an enjoyable
(and “interesting”) experience but also as a gateway to live performance of
this piece. Upon completing the game on a high difficulty setting—which is
quite a challenge—players are ready to perform Clapping Music. And all
without ever intending to develop their musical skills.
FIGURE 10.3 Screenshot of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (2015).

Despite its conceptual simplicity, Clapping Music is not easy to perform.

As one of its original performers recently noted, the piece “demands a
different kind of virtuosity from its performers. It showcases their
concentration, endurance, rhythmic precision, consistency, phrasing within
repetition, and comfort with metrical and perceptual ambiguity.”27 The app
cleverly facilitates the development of exactly these skills. Musical
elements like rhythmic accuracy are easy to assess and quantify as a
numerical score, and indeed, being able to trace improvement in these skills
over time is partly why the app was created in the first place. Users who
explore the Research Project option from the main menu are sent to a
website (accessible outside the app) detailing a set of goals. Aside from
creating an enjoyable experience for players, the app was designed to
answer two questions:

1. How are musical performance skills acquired through a digital game

interface?
2. Can audience engagement with a new music genre be increased by a
game based smartphone app?28

This second question is a new-music variation on the old music

appreciation approach we saw with the YPG app. Other aspects of the app
also reflect the same mentality. The About the Music section on the main
menu contains program notes from Reich, for instance, as well as an
interview with Reich about the work and a live performance. Users can also
delve into Reich’s other works, several of which are featured in the app,
with video examples and links to purchase the music on iTunes. Still other
links contain information about the app’s sponsors—the London Sinfonietta
and Queen Mary University of London—presumably with the aim of
encouraging players who have enjoyed the app to attend concerts and
events, or to financially support these institutions through donations. SRCM
differs significantly from most music appreciation apps, however, in its
focus on the development of not only listening skills but also practical
musical abilities. The chance to “improve your rhythm” is even highlighted
in the title of the app as it appears on Apple’s App Store (though not in the
app itself).
SRCM’s focus on teaching music skills isn’t unique. A number of studies
have addressed music games’ potential impact on the development of
musical skills, such as music theory or sight-reading.29 Yet SRCM is
something different, in degree if not necessarily in kind—the line between
developing musical skills and actually performing a musical work becomes
blurred into unrecognizability. At some point, for both players and listeners,
playing a game becomes indistinguishable from a musical performance.
And because playing SRCM is effectively a performance of Clapping
Music, the app also avoids some of the critical hurdles that music games
often face. Kiri Miller, for example, has detailed the scorn many Guitar
Hero players endured from naysayers who found the instrument-based
controllers to be unconvincing simulacra of traditional musical
instruments.30 Despite SRCM’s playful, gamified approach, however, its
players create the work almost as it was originally conceived. Even the
most classically minded of players—some of whom might otherwise have
deemed the exercise pointless, frivolous, or even disrespectful—could rest
at ease that the work was being taken seriously. Tapping music, after all, is
hardly less inherently musical than Clapping Music.

Steve Reich’s Clapping Music—Improve Your Rhythm and the Young

Person’s Guide to the Orchestra app gamify classical music with the same
fundamental goal: bettering their users by incentivizing positive behaviors.
Yet the differences between these two gamified visions of betterment are
profound, raising fundamental questions regarding the performance and
consumption of classical music in the digital era. What role, if any, should
emergent digital technologies play in reinforcing arguably outdated notions
of classical music consumption? How gamified can classical music become
before it ceases to be classical (or even music!) at all? These questions are
also the focus of the next chapter, although they are transformed in
significant ways, as well. As video game music becomes a staple of concert
halls across the world, it creates meaningful dialogues regarding the
interaction between the classical music sphere and gaming culture. Thus I
shift from studying how apps gamify classical music to an investigation of
equally enthusiastic efforts to classify game music.

1
Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the
World (New York: Penguin, 2011); see also McGonigal’s follow-up, SuperBetter: The Power of
Living Gamefully (New York: Penguin, 2015). The latter book even pairs with an accompanying
app aimed at putting the author’s strategies for self-improvement through gamification into
practice.
2
McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 354.
3
See, for example, Stephen A. Hedges, “Dice Music in the Eighteenth Century,” Music and Letters
59 (1978): 180–187; and Carmel Raz, “Anne Young’s ‘Musical Games’ (1801): Music Theory,
Gender, and Game Design” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Musicological Society, Vancouver, British Columbia, November 3–6, 2016).
4
Notable explorations of the shared notion of playfulness between music and games include Ian
Bogost, How to Do Things with Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), chap. 4; Anahid Kassabian and Freya Jarman, “Game and Play in Music Video Games,” in
Ludomusicology, ed. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney (Sheffield, UK: Equinox,
2016), 116–132; and, most significantly, Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium
from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). For a general
introduction and helpful summary, see also Michael Austin, “Introduction—Taking Note of
Music Games,” in Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play, ed. Michael Austin
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1–22. Many of the essays in this edited volume, in fact, deal in
one way or another with issues of play in music and games.
5
On SIMON as the forerunner of the current music game genre, see William Knoblauch, “SIMON:
The Prelude to Modern Music Video Games,” in Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and
Play, ed. Michael Austin (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 25–42.
6
Kassabian and Jarman, “Game and Play in Music Video Games,” 123.
7
See Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), chap. 2.
8
Another example of a similarly didactic orchestral work would be Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and
the Wolf (1936), with which Britten’s Young Person’s Guide is frequently paired, both in
recordings and in live performance.
9
On the impact of print and broadcast music appreciation efforts, see, for example, Joseph
Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005),
chap. 5.
10
Kate Guthrie, “Democratizing Art: Music Education in Postwar Britain,” Musical Quarterly 97
(2014): 595–596.
11
Guthrie, “Democratizing Art,” 603.
12
Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 404.
13
On the “gamelike” nature of Björk’s album, see Samantha Blickhan, “‘Listening’ through Digital
Interaction in Björk’s Biophilia,” in Ludomusicology, ed. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and
Mark Sweeney (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2016), 133–151.
14
See, for example, the discussion of postmillennial classical music programming targeted at
children in Mina Yang, Planet Beethoven: Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 29–38.
15
The closest parallels might be the BBC’s 100 Jazz Legends (2012), which features background
history and photography of major figures in jazz.
16
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music and Other Writings, ed. Tim Page (New York: Library of
America, 2016), 87. The State of Music, from which my quotations emerge, was originally
written in 1939 and was reprinted in 1961.
17
Thomson, The State of Music, 85.
18
Thomson, The State of Music, 88.
19
Even that change, however, has been much to the chagrin of some traditionally minded music
appreciation instructors (and students), many of whom remain resolute in their beliefs that
classical music is more worthy of academic study than popular (or even non-Western) genres. In
outlining a more inclusive approach, Steven Cornelius and Mary Natvig, for example, have
suggested regarding the traditional classical-only model of music education that “too strong a
focus on Western art music does a disservice by ignoring most of the world’s music while
simultaneously devaluing students’ own musical experiences. Such an approach makes little
sense in a society as culturally pluralistic as ours.” Steven Cornelius and Mary Natvig, “Teaching
Music History: A Cultural Approach,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 4 (2013): 141.
20
Thomson, The State of Music, 85.
21
Matt Rosoff, “I’m Obsessed with This Fiendishly Difficult App That Separates Real Musicians
from Wannabes,” Business Insider (July 16, 2015), available online at
[Link] (accessed November 11,
2016).
22
Michael Cooper, “Steve Reich, Game Designer,” New York Times (July 9, 2015), available online
at [Link] (accessed November
11, 2016).
23
I also find some meaningful parallels between SRCM and the Rhythm Heaven series of games
from Nintendo. Both involve the interaction of two musical parts and focus on the development
of the player’s rhythmic skills, for instance. See Peter Shultz, “Rhythm Sense: Modality and
Enactive Perception in Rhythm Heaven,” in Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and
Play, ed. Michael Austin (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 251–273.
24
On tablet-based rhythm games, as well as other approaches to mobile music games, see Nathan
Fleshner, “Pitching the Rhythm: Music Games for the iPad,” in Music Video Games:
Performance, Politics, and Play, ed. Michael Austin (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 275–296.
25
Because Clapping Music’s unique structure and instrumentation make the piece so suited for this
type of gamification, we might question how many other works could be usefully gamified in this
way. Although SRCM is certainly the most gamified, it is worth noting that there are several other
apps dedicated to performing, or at least exploring, contemporary classical works. The most
notable of these include the 4'33"—John Cage app, produced by the John Cage Trust and his
publisher (C. F. Peters), which allows listeners to “perform” Cage’s famous work by recording
the ambient sounds around them, which can then be uploaded for the enjoyment of others. There
are also several apps from the ensemble Third Coast Percussion, allowing players to explore and
to some extent (re)compose works by Cage and Reich, as well as Augusta Read Thomas’s work
Resounding Earth (2012). Though not strictly a game, we may also think of the John Cage Piano
app (2012), which provides samples of the timbres of Cage’s experimental music for prepared
piano.
26
This video is available on the London Sinfonietta’s YouTube channel. LondonSinfonietta, “Steve
Reich’s Clapping Music,” published July 9, 2015, available online at
[Link] (accessed November 15, 2016).
27
Russell Hartenberger, “Clapping Music: A Performer’s Perspective,” in The Routledge Research
Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap
Siôn (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 379.
28
“Research,” Steve Reich’s Clapping Music website. available online at
[Link] (accessed November 11,
2016). Though the app designers have yet to provide definitive answers to these questions, some
preliminary results are available in a research study available at [Link]
[Link]/papers/Steve_Reichs_Clapping_Music_App_RandD_report_QM.pdf
(accessed November 12, 2016).
29
See, for example, Fleshner, “Pitching the Rhythm.” The early 2010s saw a spate of articles on the
topic in music education publications, presumably as a result of the boom in popularity of Guitar
Hero, Rock Band, and similar games. See in particular Lily Gower and Janet McDowall,
“Interactive Music Video Games and Children’s Musical Development,” British Journal of Music
Education 29 (2012): 91–105; Patrick Richardson and Youngmoo E. Kim, “Beyond Fun and
Games: A Framework for Quantifying Music Skills Developments from Video Game Play,”
Journal of New Music Research 40 (2011): 277–291; and Evan S. Tobias, “Let’s Play! Learning
Music through Video Games and Virtual Worlds,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Education,
vol. 2, ed. Gary McPherson and Graham Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 531–
548.
30
Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), chap. 3.
11 Classifying Game Music

I BEGAN THIS book with the suggestion that classical music and video games
are, by definition, fundamentally incompatible. The former is a nebulous
cultural construct that lumps together disparate musical styles on the basis
of shared artistic status; the latter are popular-culture products that exist to
provide entertainment to the masses. As I hope the previous chapters have
illustrated, the reality is substantially more complex. The frequent contact
between these two cultural forces reveals cracks in the conceptual facades,
exposing the art in the game, and the game in the art. Many of the examples
in earlier chapters have traced the ways in which classical music in games
subverts expectations of highbrow and lowbrow arts. This final chapter
considers whether that distinction has collapsed altogether. What if, as
many listeners are coming to believe, some video game music is classical?
Concert performances of works by game music composers like Koji Kondo,
Nobuo Uematsu, and Jeremy Soule reflect a fundamental shift in how some
audiences understand classical music. That change offers a fascinating
glimpse into how music becomes classical in the digital age and raises
substantial questions about musical legitimacy and authenticity. Although
concerts of video game music have taken a variety of forms—running the
gamut from marching band halftime shows, to solo piano concerts, to
chamber music—I’m particularly interested here in live symphonic
concerts. These not only are among the best attended of game music
concerts but also interact in complex ways with the symphony orchestra’s
traditional role as bastion of high art.
It’s no secret that many professional orchestras have struggled financially
in recent years. Dwindling audiences, insufficient charitable giving, and a
myriad of other complex issues have resulted in labor disputes and even
bankruptcies. Over the past decade or so, video game concerts have proved
popular with orchestras eager for new audiences and artistic identities.
Although the first orchestral game music concerts took place in Japan in the
1990s, in the decades since they have become equally prominent in Europe
and North America.1 Germany’s long-running Symphonic Game Music
Concerts (Symphonische Spielmusikkonzerte) series began in 2003, for
example, and since relocating to Cologne in 2008 has regularly resulted in
recordings and live concerts using the WDR Radio Orchestra.2 The
popularity of this series inspired similar programs, including both one-off
national tours such as Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy (North
America, 2004) and long-running and constantly updated programs like
Play! A Video Game Symphony (North America, 2006–2010) and Distant
Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy (worldwide, 2007–present).
Once dismissed as fringe events—gimmicks, really—orchestral game
music concerts have quickly become a staple of ensembles ranging from
local community orchestras to elite professional ensembles. In terms of
press coverage and critical awareness, the year 2015 seems to have been a
watershed. One widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal, for
example, noted that game music is inspiring “a new generation of
symphony patron that is invigorating the bottom-line performance of
concert halls across the U.S.”3 The author, Sarah Needleman, offers
examples from orchestras and performance venues from across the country,
noting that tickets for game music concerts often sell for double the amount
as normal pops concerts, and audience members also purchase substantially
more merchandise. Aside from yielding this short-term burst of much-
needed income, however, the strategy seems to be using game music to lure
younger and more culturally diverse audiences—some of whom,
theoretically, go on to become regular patrons. As a classical-trained
musician suggested of game concerts in a different article from 2015, “It’s
impressive and intimidating for gamers to step into this [classical music]
world. But will they come back for a Beethoven or Mozart? That’s our goal.
We need to blur the lines a little more to expose the gamer to
Tchaikovsky.”4 Thomas Böcker, a German musician and impresario of
game music concerts, expressed much the same hope, albeit in more
tempered language:

Not everybody who comes to video game concerts will listen to

Beethoven—of course not, that’s not our goal. I know of a few
examples of many, many people who have become interested in
 orchestral music in general and they are now getting into listening to
[film composers] John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Then they might
find their way and think: “Oh wow, Prokofiev also sounds really
interesting.”5

It’s still too early to know if such a strategy will ultimately be successful,
but the immediate benefits to orchestras and audiences alike are obvious.
Two personal anecdotes: I’ve attended a number of game music concerts
over the past decade, and I’m always struck both by the demographic
differences from traditional classical concerts and by the level of audience
engagement. For instance, at my first video game concert—a 2009 outdoor
concert of Play! A Video Game Symphony in Cary, North Carolina—I
vividly recall watching a large audience of mostly teenagers and
twentysomethings stand enraptured in the pouring rain listening to the
North Carolina Symphony perform Martin O’Donnell’s music from Halo.
More recently, in the past few years I’ve had the delightful opportunity to
act as onstage emcee with the professional symphonic band the Dallas
Winds during two game concerts. In contrast with the relatively staid
responses from audience members when I give talks at traditional
symphony concerts, after the Dallas Winds event I was virtually mobbed by
enthusiastic audience members who had lingering questions or simply
wanted to talk about their favorite music. Statistics tend to bear out my
personal experiences. If the aim of these events is simply to attract and
engage younger and more diverse (paying) audiences, then game concerts
are a rousing success.
Yet not all musicians and concertgoers appreciate the incursion of video
games into the sacred concert hall space. Needleman’s article includes one
such naysayer, whose clearly stated position helpfully summarizes the
opposing view:

“From a business-strategy perspective, it completely devalues the

brand,” said Roderick Branch, a 39-year-old lawyer in Chicago who
attends symphony-orchestra performances about once a week. The
very idea, he said, is “akin to Mouton Rothschild using its wine to
make and sell sangria.”6
This perspective deserves some consideration at length. Branch presents
two related points: one regarding the business side of the orchestra’s brand
(though one wonders if it’s the classical music brand at stake more than any
particular orchestra) and the subsequent simile regarding wine. The former
statement suggests that performing video game music not only devalues the
individual concert on which it is performed but also tarnishes the image of
the orchestra itself. How can serious concertgoers trust any ensemble that
would demean itself by stooping so low?
Branch’s final analogy is particularly revealing. The Bordeaux produced
by Château Mouton Rothschild, an estate founded in the nineteenth century,
is one of the world’s most celebrated—and expensive—wines. Often selling
for hundreds of dollars per bottle, the wine is a symbol of both quality and
exclusivity, a distinctly old-world European luxury, limited to a select few.
Sangria, on the other hand, is a much less exalted drink. Originating in
Spain via the Caribbean, this popular (and delicious) beverage is typically
made by adding fruit and brandy to less expensive red wines, sweetening
them to make them more palatable. Sangria made its way to the United
States largely through the immigration of Hispanic peoples, leading many
to associate the drink with Mexico and its cuisine. Thus, when Branch
suggests that game music concerts are “akin to Mouton Rothschild using its
wine to make and sell sangria,” he protests the use of an elite European
product like the orchestra to produce a less expensive product designed for
mass appeal and consumption. Branch is hardly alone in these feelings. A
scathing 2013 New Republic article on the problems of contemporary
orchestral programming by the critic Philip Kennicott, for example,
identifies “video-game nights” in a list of “special events” concerts that
distract orchestras from their true mission.7 Rather than focusing on
developing diverse audiences, orchestras should instead focus on
performing great classical music. If they do that, he implies, the audience
will follow. Furthermore, Kennicott believes events such as video game
concerts are of no interest to “serious listeners” and actually exert a
negative effect by “curtailing the number of nights the orchestra presents
classical music.”
It’s not hard to understand why some conservative audience members
and critics might share that perspective on game music. Often the ways
game music is presented live differ dramatically from traditional classical
concerts. Consider, for example, Video Games Live (VGL). Since its debut
in 2005, VGL has remained among the most popular touring orchestral
programs of game music. Largely the brainchild of the eccentric composer
and impresario Tommy Tallarico, VGL concerts pair local orchestras with a
traveling multimedia show featuring celebrity game musicians, including
composers, musicians, and conductors. Amid spectacular light shows and
fog machines more typically associated with rock concerts, orchestras play
arrangements of game music from classics to new releases, while videos
from the games are projected in the background. As an article in the Deseret
News (Utah) dryly noted regarding a 2008 appearance: “With strobe lights,
a big video screen, mirror balls and an electric guitar, it was clear that
‘Video Games Live!’ is not a typical symphony concert.”8 Tallarico’s
methods don’t suit everyone’s tastes, even within the game concert
community. Jason Michael Paul, for instance, a game-concert producer
whose Play! concerts competed with Video Games Live for several years,
was exasperated by Tallarico’s approach. Although the Play! concerts did
involve multimedia, they were considerably less rock influenced.
Lamenting the growing popularity of VGL in a 2006 interview with the
Washington Post, for instance, Paul responded that his “whole goal is to
keep the arts alive in a way that is classy.”9
Games aren’t alone in sparking these kinds of fiery debates. There exists
similar resistance from some corners of the classical music community to
film music, or orchestral collaborations with popular musicians. What I find
particularly interesting about game music concerts, however, is how
fervently many of its advocates contend that it has crossed some
philosophical or artistic line and become classical music. Perhaps
surprisingly, Tallarico is one of the most ardent advocates for such a
perspective. Despite his lack of classical training, game music’s relationship
to classical composers is a recurring motif in Tallarico’s interviews; one of
his most frequent and provocative claims is that Beethoven would have
been a game music composer had he been born in our time.10 Even more
directly, in defending game music against detractors, he claims that
symphonic game music is “modern day classical music. The only thing
that’s different is that all of the composers are still alive. The truth is, we’re
just as relevant as Beethoven and Mozart and we’re just as good.”11
Tallarico’s viewpoint has a number of supporters. A growing number of
musicians and listeners believe that symphonic game music either already
is, or can be readily transformed into, classical music. I turn now to a few
examples of how this process has worked, beginning with how some fans
advocate for “classical” status for game music, and then exploring how
some orchestral arrangements encourage that view.

Gaming the Vote

The UK-based radio station Classic FM boldly promises its listeners “The
World’s Greatest Music.” Since its creation in the 1990s, the station—also
available via streaming—has based its identity on the quality of the
masterworks that it broadcasts. Yet its programming veers heavily toward
lighter classical—the kind of familiar works seen in many examples
throughout this book. The musicologist James Parakilas has suggested, “On
the whole, the message of the classics is a message of comfort. . . . Classical
music is approved music; it is politically and socially safe.”12 Classic FM
plays into this notion of a safe, comfortable classical music, designed to put
listeners at ease. Still, as Parakilas notes, “The politics of comfort make
many listeners uncomfortable. These listeners include not only some who
do not like classical music anyway, but also some of those most deeply
involved with it.”13 In the latter category we might place the musicologist
Julian Johnson, whose understanding of classical music was explored in
some detail in chapter 1. In his book Who Needs Classical Music?, Johnson
expresses some strong feelings about Classic FM’s programming, which he
feels “is tied up with classical music functioning as popular music.” “Most
striking,” he continues, “is what is not played on Classic FM: anything that
risks being less than popular.”14 In Johnson’s view, Classic FM is so
concerned with catering to the musical comforts of its listeners—rather than
challenging and bettering listeners through contemplation or serious study
—that it ceases to be classical at all. If, on the other hand, Parakilas is
correct that classical music gives comfort to listeners who regard it as art,
then perhaps Classic FM is simply a democratization of the concept.
Each year since 1996, Classic FM has given its British audience—more
than six million listeners—the opportunity to vote for their favorite classical
works. From the results, the station compiles its annual Hall of Fame: the
three hundred works receiving the most nominations. In 2016, more than
170,000 aficionados cast their votes, and as usual the resulting list offers a
unique perspective on classical music and its masterworks. Although the list
for the most part contains popular works by Beethoven, Mozart,
Rachmaninov, and so on, many unsuspected readers might be shocked by
number 17: Nobuo Uematsu’s music from the Final Fantasy series.
Although still impressive, seventeenth place is actually a drop for Uematsu
—in 2013, Final Fantasy reached number 3. That same year, Jeremy
Soule’s music for The Elder Scrolls series joined Uematsu in the Top Ten.
Both of these works were rated higher than anything by Beethoven or
Mozart. The newfound prominence of game music in the Hall of Fame has
not gone unnoticed. In fact, the “FAQs” section on Classic FM’s website
answers the question “How has the chart changed in recent years?” with
“Three words: video game music.”15 (See Table 11.1 for a full list of game
soundtracks in the Hall of Fame.)
TABLE 11.1 Video game soundtracks in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, 2013–
2016

Game Title Composer 2013 2014 2015 2016

Banjo-Kazooie Grant – #50 #13 #98
Kirkhope
Blue Dragon Nobuo – – #118 #126
Uematsu
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Jessica Curry – – – #268
Final Fantasy (series) Nobuo #3 #7 #9 #17
Uematsu
Halo (series) Martin – – #244 –
O’Donnell
Journey Austin – #289 – #221
Wintory
Kingdom Hearts Yoko – #177 #30 #31
Shimomura
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Grant – #75 #59 –
Kirkhope
Shenmue Various – – – #144
StarCraft II Glen Stafford – – #163 –
The Elder Scrolls (series) Jeremy Soule #5 #17 #11 #120
The Last of Us Gustavo – – #193 –
Santalallo
The Legend of Zelda (series) Koji Kondo – – #84 #135
Viva Piñata Grant #17 #54 #41 #272
Kirkhope
World of Warcraft Various – #52 #53 #269
Game Title Composer 2013 2014 2015 2016
Total number of game/series 3 7 12 11
soundtracks by year

Game music’s rapid ascent in the Classic FM Hall of Fame during the
2010s represents a confluence of several factors. For one thing, there’s
simply a great deal more orchestral game music than has existed before—
ever-increasing game budgets and a frequent emphasis on emulating
cinematic models often encourage game composers to make use of
orchestral textures. Furthermore, game soundtracks are now available
through a dizzying variety of media. In the course of writing this book, I
have looked up literally hundreds of game soundtracks on YouTube, for
instance, ranging from major recent releases to obscure games of the 1980s.
There are excellent podcasts devoted to video game music, documentary
films on the topic, and a surprising number of playlists on streaming
services such as Spotify. Even so, it appears that game music didn’t make it
to the apex of Classic FM’s Hall of Fame without a little help from some
devoted fans with a clear agenda.
For several years there has been a concerted effort by game music fans to
inundate the online polls with as many votes as possible. As I write, for
example, there’s a Facebook group with about twenty-five hundred
followers called Keep Video Games Music in the Classical FM Hall of
Fame. Alongside regular updates on game music concerts, this group issues
regular reminders to vote in the Hall of Fame polls, and reports the results.
The “About” section for the group identifies it as “an ongoing campaign for
the recognition of video game scores as classical music. Fantastic music by
incredible composers that deserve to be praised!”16 Since 2015 the group
has had a related Twitter account (@WeLoveGameMusic), the biographical
statement of which notes, “We campaign for the recognition of orchestral
VGM [video game music].”17 Run by two UK-based advocates, the account
routinely tweets messages concerning upcoming game music concerts and
recordings, serving as a communication hub for fans. Similarly, for several
months in early 2016, supporters of the ambitious cult favorite Shenmue
series of games organized a grass-roots campaign on fan websites and
across social media to get the soundtracks into the Hall of Fame, including
detailing how to vote (and how to get around international restrictions on
voting). As one poster in a forum on the website [Link] put it,
“Let’s make this the year that Shenmue’s majestic score takes its rightful
place in the Hall of Fame!”18 The game ultimately made it to number 144
on the list—a much-celebrated triumph.
These groups’ central tenet, and that of others like them, is not simply the
promotion of video game music. Instead, the groups champion an
understanding of orchestral game music as classical, and therefore worthy
of serious artistic consideration.19 Such an idea is at once subversive and
traditionalist. On the one hand, it undermines the exclusivity of classical
music by arguing for the inclusion of popular-culture products under its
umbrella. On the other hand, however, it reinforces 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 their preferred music makes the cut. The barbarians at the gate aren’t
tearing down the walls; they just want to come in for tea. Having game
music declared classical is thus a moral victory, a validation and vindication
of the tastes of its long-suffering (and oft-derided) fans. Even more,
understanding game music as art goes a long way toward arguing that the
games themselves must also be artworks. As a 2015 article in the tech
magazine Wired noted regarding game music’s “strongest showing ever” in
the Classic FM Hall of Fame, “For ‘new media’ such as games to get such
representation is a huge accomplishment, and shows the widespread and
growing impact of gaming as an art form.”20 But for whom, precisely, is
this change a “huge accomplishment”? Fans of game music? Composers?
The industry as a whole? Such an attitude encourages the perspective that
attaining classical status is an achievement to be unlocked, a necessary step
on the path toward legitimization.

Orchestrating Change
Dedicated fans aren’t the only ones encouraging listeners to perceive game
music as classical—that idea is deeply embedded in many of the orchestral
concert programs. Game music had been increasingly common in concert
halls for nearly a decade before it ever entered Classic FM’s Hall of Fame.
Yet while the elaborate pyrotechnics and audience interactivity of programs
like VGL remain popular, they’ve been joined in recent years by the
increasing prominence of more overtly classical video game concerts. In
2013, for example—the same year Final Fantasy hit number 3 on the
Classic FM Hall of Fame—the London Symphony Orchestra performed the
Final Symphony concert at the Barbican Centre. It was the first game
concert from that venerable orchestra, and the event led one games writer to
declare, “Video game music has pretty officially ‘made it.’ ”21 Removing
game music from its original context and positing it in such an illustrious
and classical venue has a profound impact on audience perceptions. To
quote James Parakilas again, “When classical music is performed at Avery
Fisher Hall [in New York’s Lincoln Center] or the Met [i.e., the
Metropolitan Opera] there is no more reason to label it ‘classical’ than there
is to label music at the Shubert Theatre ‘Broadway’ or music at a square
dance ‘folk.’ The place places it.”22 In other words, if a classical orchestra
is playing game music in a traditionally classical venue, then the music is
necessarily functioning as classical music. There’s some degree of truth to
that idea, but it’s not the end of the story. I would also suggest that game
music programs like Final Symphony are conceived, arranged, and
marketed in such a way as to emphasize their most classical aspects.
Final Symphony is the product of Thomas Böcker’s Merregnon Studios,
which produces the long-running, Germany-based Spielekonzerte (Game
Concerts) series. Since at least 2003, when Böcker produced the first
concert of game music outside Japan, the studio has emphasized its
classical-ness, contrasting its programming, venues, and imagery from
those of competitors like VGL. Its programs and albums have foregrounded
the orchestral aspects of the music, featuring titles like Symphonic Shades,
Symphonic Fantasies, Symphonic Legends, and Symphonic Odysseys. The
group’s marketing reinforces this connection. From its website: “For the
very first time, DECCA, a leading label for classical music, released a live
concert recording of video game music. And with this, again for the first
time, video game music reached the Top 15 in the German classical music
charts.”23 By noting these successes alongside images of formalwear-clad
musicians in lavish concert halls, the website reinforces the idea that this
music is an extension of the European classical tradition. This is
particularly the case with Final Symphony, the company’s most
internationally renowned venture do date. Quoting again from the website:
 Another landmark first was set in 2013 as the celebrated London
Symphony orchestra performed its first game concert with Final
Symphony. A triumphant concert . . . , Final Symphony marks the tenth
and most successful production for Thomas Böcker to date. No other
concert has been performed as many times, with sell-out shows in
Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the
Netherlands and the USA.24

A 2015 recording of Final Symphony (also featuring the London

Symphony) met with equal success. As the recording’s website proudly
notes, it reached the top of the iTunes Classical Charts “in more than ten
countries” and appeared in “the Classical Album Top 5 of both the
Billboard Charts and the Official UK Charts.”25
These official descriptions stress both the program’s international success
and its appeal as a specifically classical work. This careful positioning is
equally evident in the arrangements themselves. In place of the
straightforward transcriptions and medleys featured on many game
concerts, Final Symphony more thoroughly reimagines the original source
material. Unlike the kinds of remixes seen in previous chapters, however,
here the arrangers—Jonne Valtonen, Robert Wanamo, and Masashi
Hamauzu—adapted the music not to fit popular music models but to
conform to the forms and styles of classical orchestral works.26 Final
Symphony begins with an original work by Valtonen, a Finnish composer
who supervises the arrangements for Merregnon Studios. Although not a
Final Fantasy arrangement, his Fantasy Overture—Circle within a Circle
within a Circle sets the tone for the concert. It suggests a bombastic opening
fanfare, the generic title “overture” evoking opera, ballet, or perhaps epic
films of the 1930s. The “fantasy” part of the title is, perhaps intentionally, a
bit unclear. In addition to its reference to the Final Fantasy games, a fantasy
is also a form of classical music, indicating a kind of free-form structure.
(Beethoven’s famous “Moonlight” piano sonata of 1801 is subtitled “sonata
in the style of a fantasy,” for example.) But the linguistic confusion
continues: Is Valtonon’s work the overture to a fantasy, is it a fantasy-
overture (the term Tchaikovsky preferred for his orchestral work Romeo
and Juliet)—or is it both?
This classical formal borrowing endures through the following works.
Each piece on the program is identified in three ways: by the Final Fantasy
game from which it emerges, by a generic title, and by an additional
programmatic title or titles (Table 11.2). For example, following Valtonen’s
Fantasy Overture, we hear Final Fantasy VI—Symphonic Poem (Born with
the Gift of Magic). Here again the connection with classical traditions is
obvious. Symphonic poems, or tone poems, were a genre favored by
composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and still
occasionally today, although composers seldom use the term “symphonic
poem” anymore. These are typically one-movement orchestral works with
some type of narrative. Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1896–
1897), featured in Disney’s Fantasia and its related video games, is one
well-known symphonic poem. So is Richard Strauss’s Also sprach
Zarathustra (1896), which appeared prominently in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001
and in several video game references to that film. In both cases, the title
gives the listener a sense of the musical work’s narrative content—in
essence, the story it tells. To those familiar with the game’s plot, Born with
the Gift of Magic indicates its dramatic trajectory in the same way.
Table 11.2Final Symphony program and titles

Game Generic Title Programmatic Titles

– Fantasy Overture Circle within a Circle within
a Circle
Final Fantasy Symphonic Poem Born with the Gift of Magic
VI
Final Fantasy X Piano Concerto I. Zanarkand
II. Inori
III. Kessen
Final Fantasy X Encore Suteki da ne
Final Fantasy Symphony in Three I. Nibelheim Incident
VII Movements II. Words Drowned by
Fireworks
III. The Planet’s Crisis
Final Fantasy Encore Continue?
VII
Final Fantasy Encore Fight, Fight, Fight!
Series

Even more intriguing, however, is the largest work on the program: Final
Fantasy VII—Symphony in Three Movements. Once again, several aspects
of this work strongly reinforce its classical aspirations—more, indeed, than
might initially be apparent. Calling a work a “symphony” is in itself a grand
claim. As scholars like the musicologist Mark Evan Bonds have pointed
out, by the early nineteenth century the symphony had acquired a cultural
cachet as “the most prestigious of all instrumental genres,” as well as the
“most serious.”27 Writing a symphony was a way of demonstrating to
listeners and critics that a composer could handle the complexities of a
lengthy work for a diverse musical ensemble. “It was not,” Bonds notes, “a
genre composers could take up lightly.”28 Nor is that the case now; if
anything, the intervening centuries have reinforced our assessment of the
symphony as the apex of classical music culture. Invoking the term raises
the specters of a musical pantheon: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler,
and so on. Arranging video game music into a symphony is thus a bold
statement—the compositional equivalent of Tommy Tallarico’s claim that
game composers are “just as relevant as Beethoven and Mozart and . . . just
as good.”29 Here, however, I think the comparison is more to another,
though hardly less revered, composer: Igor Stravinsky.
Classical symphonies most often have four movements, although by the
early nineteenth century other numbers of movements were becoming more
frequent, as in, for example, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (1808) or
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830). Specifically identifying
the work as a symphony in three movements, however, strikes me as a
reference to Stravinsky’s 1945 work of the same name. Stylistically the
Final Fantasy VII Symphony borrows from the modernist musical style of
much of Stravinsky’s music—as well as his Russian contemporary Sergei
Prokofiev’s—and so the title may be a kind of homage. The often dissonant
musical language of the Final Fantasy Symphony in Three Movements
may challenge listeners more accustomed to more straightforward
arrangements. Referencing Stravinsky’s music could both establish the
music’s historical pedigree and provide listeners with a musical framework
for understanding the work. Another more oblique connection: the second
movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements originated as
part of a score for a 1943 film adaptation of the novel The Song of
Bernadette (although the music was not ultimately used in the film).
Perhaps in invoking Stravinsky’s work, the arrangers of Final Symphony
sought a connection with another classical work that originated as a
multimedia underscore—proof that such a transition to art was possible.
The transformation of game music into art is a cornerstone of the Final
Symphony project. One of the promotional videos for the recording features
a revealing interview with composer Nobuo Uematsu, worth quoting at
some length:

The quality of [video game] music has definitely improved along with
the development of the game systems, but I think the bigger factor is
that, for the past 20 years or so, many kids who played games have
grown up wanting to create game music. And they’ve gone on to study
music properly, graduating from music schools to become game music
composers. Although there are many game music concerts nowadays,
they tend to be quite loyal to the game music style. It doesn’t deviate
 too far, so it feels like game music, and it’s often arranged to be easy to
listen to. What makes Final Symphony so different is that it’s
interpreted more freely, in an artistic manner. There are even aspects
that are closer to contemporary classical music. I find it very
interesting that in Final Symphony, entertainment music is shifting
more toward contemporary music. And I think that’s very new.30

The musical values embedded in this passage are hard to miss. Despite his
own background in rock, Uematsu seems to privilege classical training—or,
as he calls it, studying music “properly” in a university setting. And he
separates music in a “game music style” from that composed “in an artistic
manner,” suggesting that there’s a fundamental incompatibility between
those concepts. That artistic manner, Uematsu implies, results from the
arrangements being closer to “contemporary classical music”—which I
interpret to mean music composed after about 1900 rather than specifically
music being composed today. Finally, to make things absolutely clear,
Uematsu points out that this incorporation of classical elements shifts the
music away from being entertainment, and presumably toward being art.
Certainly, Uematsu’s interview is a form of advertisement, and, self-
deprecation aside, Final Symphony’s success translates into his own cultural
and financial profit. Yet his tone reinforces the distinction between game
music and art music, even as he lauds the arrangers of Final Symphony for
transforming his music from the former to the latter. Repeatedly throughout
the interview, Uematsu emphasizes the superiority of classical training and
musical styles over earlier game styles—including, it seems, his own.
In every aspect of its design, Final Symphony is crafted to present game
music in a form that is appealing to devotees of both game music and
classical music. While I have focused here on this particularly fascinating
example, Final Symphony is hardly alone in that effort.31 Another of the
most popular touring game concerts, for instance, is The Legend of Zelda:
Symphony of the Goddesses, an ongoing concert program premiered in
2012, featuring a four-movement symphony of the same name.32 It’s
difficult to speculate what, if any, long-term effects these more classically
inspired adaptations of game music will have on the orchestral repertoire—
or whether they will come to be regarded as classical works, as many fans,
producers, and critics passionately maintain. In the meantime, however,
these programs—alongside efforts like the campaigns for game music in the
Classic FM Hall of Fame—raise complex questions about what classical
music means for twenty-first-century audiences. The coming years will
teach us all whether classical music can embrace this new type of music,
and the diverse new audience that comes along with it.

1
The Tokyo-based series “Orchestral Game Music Concerts” took place between 1991 and 1996
and set the tone of mixing the music of “classic” games with new releases. Concert programs for
these influential performances are available at
[Link]
2
“History,” Game Concerts, n.d., available online at
[Link] (accessed December 4, 2016).
3
Sarah E. Needleman, “How Videogames Are Saving the Symphony Orchestra,” Wall Street
Journal (October 12, 2015), available online at [Link]
are-saving-the-symphony-orchestra-1444696737 (accessed November 12, 2016).
4
Jeffrey Fleishman, “Video Game Music Comes to the Orchestra Concert Hall,” Los Angeles
Times (June 12, 2015), available online at [Link]
[Link] (accessed December 2, 2016).
5
Matthew Jarvis, “Play On: How Video Game Music Is Rocking the Classical World,” MCV
(September 28, 2015), available online at [Link]
video-game-music-is-rocking-the-classical-world (accessed November 18, 2017).
6
Needleman, “How Videogames Are Saving the Symphony Orchestra.”
7
Philip Kennicott, “America’s Orchestras Are in Crisis,” New Republic (August 25, 2013),
available online at [Link]
them (accessed November 13, 2016).
8
Scott Iwaskai, “Concert Review: Symphony Help Breathe Life into Video Games,” Deseret News
(March 29, 2008), available online at [Link]
[Link] (accessed December 2, 2016).
9
Mike Musgrove, “Mario’s New World: Symphonies,” Washington Post (August 3, 2006),
available online at [Link]
dyn/content/article/2006/08/02/AR2006080201889_pf.xhtml (accessed November 20, 2016).
10
On the Beethoven claim, see, for example, the profiles of Tallarico in Fleishman, “Video Game
Music Comes to the Concert Hall”; Sarah Thomas, “From Beethoven to Bleeps and Bloops: The
Symphony of Video Game Soundtracks,” Sydney Morning Herald (July 27, 2015), available
online at [Link]
[Link] (accessed December 2, 2016); or
Mark MacNamara, “The S.F. Symphony Gets Its Game On,” San Francisco Classical Voice (July
18, 2013), available online at [Link]
on (accessed December 3, 2016).
11
MacNamara, “The S.F. Symphony Gets Its Game On.”
12
James Parakilas, “Classical Music as Popular Music,” Journal of Musicology 3 (1984): 10–11.
13
Parakilas, “Classical Music as Popular Music,” 11.
14
Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 75.
15
“The Hall of Fame—The Best Classical Music of All Time,” [Link], n.d. available
online at [Link] (accessed December 1, 2016). The long-
standing prominence of Scottish composer Grant Kirkhope on the list, particularly for games that
are less well known, may also be partially attributable to Classic FM’s UK bias.
16
“Keep Video Games Music in the Classical FM Hall of Fame,” Facebook page, available online
at [Link] (accessed December 3, 2016).
17
WeLoveGameMusic, Twitter bio, available online at [Link]
(accessed December 3, 2016).
18
Sonoshee, “Vote Shenmue Music into the ClassicFM Hall of Fame,” [Link] (January
16, 2016), available online at [Link]
(accessed December 6, 2016).
19
There are some clear parallels between the recent critical reception of film and game music. See,
for instance, the opposing perspectives on film music concerts in the United Kingdom presented
in Tristan Jakob-Hoff, “Can Film Music Ever Be Classical?,” The Guardian (April 7, 2008),
available online at
[Link]
(accessed December 3, 2016); and Hannah Furness, “Film Score Composers Should Be Treated
as ‘Seriously’ as Mozart and Tchaikovsky, Royal Albert Hall Director Says,” Telegraph (July 3,
2014), available online at
[Link]
[Link]
(accessed December 3, 2016).
20
Matt Kamen, “Video Games Storm Classic FM’s 2015 ‘Hall of Fame,’” Wired (April 7, 2015),
available online at [Link] (accessed December 5,
2016).
21
Connor Sheridan, “Final Fantasy Performance by London Symphony Orchestra in May,” Games
Radar (February 7, 2013) available online at [Link]
performance-london-symphony-orchestra-may/ (accessed December 3, 2016).
22
Parakilas, “Classical Music as Popular Music,” 1.
23
“History,” Game Concerts.
24
“History,” Game Concerts.
25
“Final Symphony,” Game Concerts, available online at
[Link] (accessed December 6, 2016).
26
My description of the order of works here refers to the 2015 studio recording; live performances
may have differed somewhat.
27
Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1, 2.
28
Bonds, Music as Thought, 2.
29
MacNamara, “The S.F. Symphony Gets Its Game On.”
30
Merregnon Studios, “Final Symphony—Interview with Nobuo Uematsu,” YouTube (March 19,
2015), available online at [Link] (accessed December
8, 2016).
31
To be clear, however, although the novelty of symphonic game music has attracted a significant
amount of critical attention—and large audiences—in recent years, this approach is not limited to
games. The classical and film composer Howard Shore, for example, created The Lord of the
Rings Symphony: Six Movements for Orchestra and Chorus (2011), based on his music for the
popular Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003). Much as we have seen with Final Symphony,
Shore adapted his music into something somehow more “classical” than the original product; as
the composer’s website notes, he “mold[ed] them into a series of tone poems free of the specific
visual linkage with the films and adhering more to the traditions of the programmatic orchestral
works of [Richard] Strauss, [Franz] Liszt, [Bedřich] Smetana and [Jean] Sibelius.” “The Lord of
the Rings Symphony,” [Link], n.d., available online at
[Link] (accessed
December 8, 2016).
32
Subsequent years’ tours have tweaked the formula somewhat but have maintained the core
programming concept.
 Conclusion
THE END IS NIGH

LIKE A GOOD video game, finishing the writing of this book has been
immensely rewarding and uniquely challenging—often at the same time.
One aspect that undoubtedly falls into both categories is the sheer speed
with which games and their culture are changing. Since I began writing in
2014, there have been remarkable shifts in how contemporary culture
understands and values games and their music. From concert halls to art
museums, including video games in spaces traditionally reserved for high
art has raised substantial questions about the relationship between
entertainment and artistry. The reverse is also true: the subtlety and nuance
with which games have appropriated art forms like classical music have
only increased in recent years. In fact, just as I was putting the finishing
touches on my manuscript, a new release stopped me in my tracks: The End
Is Nigh (2017), a new independent game from the much-lauded developer
of Super Meat Boy (2010) and The Binding of Isaac (2011–2017). The
game’s title seemed like a sign. Rather than going back and rewriting my
previous chapters (again), I decided this conclusion is a fitting place for one
final analysis, taking into account the lessons I’ve learned in writing
Unlimited Replays.
Although The End Is Nigh is a postapocalyptic game, its gaze is focused
squarely on the past. Its protagonist, Ash, sits alone in the ruins of
civilization, kept company only by his old-school 1980s game console.
Only when his favorite game malfunctions does Ash brave the dangers of
his destroyed world in search of human companionship (or at least some
new games). The End Is Nigh is self-consciously “meta.” Ash’s broken
game is also called The End Is Nigh, and the difficult platforming of this
nested minigame—essentially Mario for masochists—mirrors what players
experience. In other words, Ash re-enacts the retro game he’s been
obsessively playing, just as The End Is Nigh nostalgically builds on the
experience of those same types of games. Players can discover cartridges as
they play, opening twisted new versions of classic games: Blaster Massacre
instead of Blaster Master (1988), Dig Dead instead of Dig Dug (1982),
Catastrovania instead of Castlevania (1986), and so on.
The duo Ridiculon’s excellent soundtrack to The End Is Nigh—a
compilation score made up entirely of remixed classical music—echoes this
mélange of old and new. Given the game’s nostalgic tone, it’s not surprising
to find many of the same pieces of music that have cropped up in earlier
chapters. For example, Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”
underscores the subterranean levels, just as it did in Maniac Miner (1983).
The remixes likewise evoke the present and the past. In fact, each classical
work is remixed twice: once in a quasi-popular styles, as in Boom Boom
Rocket (2007) and Catherine (2011), and once in retro, chiptune style,
evoking the remixes of older games like Gyruss (1983) or more recent retro
independent titles like FEZ (2012). The soundtrack, like The End Is Nigh as
a whole, evokes video games’ past as much as their present. Most of all,
though, the game and its music seem to comment on our present obsession
with the past—the nostalgic tendency to value things that are old, even at
the expense of the new. In music, narrative, and gameplay, the classic and
contemporary elements are blended together until it’s impossible to tell
them apart. The past shapes the present, which changes the construction of
the past—on and on, in an endless feedback loop.
Playing The End Is Nigh, I was reminded of the musicologist Susan
McClary’s description of musical postmodernity as “reveling in the
rubble.”1 Just as Ash (like the player) ventures through the crumbling
remnants of Western civilization, postmodern music often explores the
collapsed edifices of classical music and its ideologically driven narratives
of high and low art. Rather than lamenting that loss, however, McClary
paints a more optimistic picture, advocating an understanding of music that
embraces its “history of perpetual bricolage and fusions of hand-me-down
codes and conventions.” The End Is Nigh creates a new and compelling
experience by building on fragments of game history—player experiences
and expectations developed over decades. Its soundtrack does the same,
gluing together bits of popular and classical musics—half remembered from
cartoons, movies, earlier video games, concert experiences, and so on—and
building something new from the pieces. The music collapses historical and
stylistic divides in meaningful and intriguing ways. But much more
important, it works to bridge the cultural gap that separates classical music
and video games.
That’s a gap that already seems to be getting smaller. Games still by and
large lack classical music’s cultural cachet, but perhaps things are changing.
Games are increasingly recognized for their capability to tell meaningful
stories, produce insightful political and cultural commentary, and make
artistic statements. Less obviously—and at a positively glacial pace—the
classical music world is also evolving. In search of financial security and
social relevance, some ensembles have earnestly begun to explore ways to
reach new audiences, including through the allure of video game music. All
these signs point to a future where the artificial distinctions between
highbrow and lowbrow are erased, and where games and other
entertainment forms can stand alongside the art of classical music. But not
just yet. In fact, I remain confident that the interaction of games and
classical music will continue to create sites of friction and juxtaposition for
some time to come.
However problematic or arbitrary they may be, centuries-old conceptions
of art versus entertainment aren’t easy to eradicate—if we want to get rid of
them at all. Much of this book has been about the artistic aspirations of
games and their culture. From Elite (1984) to more recent releases like
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and BioShock Infinite (2013), ambitious games
have explored the medium’s unique possibilities as an expressive form.
Classical music often serves as a point of reference, a way of demonstrating
that quality by inviting comparison with unquestioned artworks. Games
have something to prove. I think the designers of Gyruss remixed Bach’s
Toccata and Fugue to prove that the sound hardware could do it. Eternal
Sonata (2007) and Versailles 1685 (1997) prove that music history can be
entertaining. Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (2015) proves that
contemporary classical music can be accessible. And symphonic programs
like Video Games Live and Final Symphony prove that game music is just as
good as Beethoven. Over and over in this book, games have depended on
players to know that classical music is high art; without that understanding,
the comparison loses its potency. Whether to give them either something to
aspire to, or something to position themselves against, video games often
need classical music to remain on its high-art pedestal.
The situation on the classical music side is remarkably similar. Whatever
lip service is paid to increasing accessibility and diversity, from a certain
perspective those goals are self-defeating. As the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu might say, a taste for classical music is a self-conscious mark of
“distinction.”2 Since at least the nineteenth century, some performers and
audience members have relied on classical music’s aura of high-class
exclusivity as proof of their own intelligence, sophistication, and often
wealth.3 Unconsciously or not, that bias still lingers. As I write this
conclusion, for example, today’s issue of the Washington Post has an
opinion piece from critic Philip Kennicott, the very title of which—“The
Kennedy Center Honors Abandons the Arts for Pop Culture”—seems to
preclude the coexistence of art and popular entertainment like video
games.4 Consequently, efforts to broaden classical music’s appeal through
games—particularly by bringing their music into classical concert spaces—
seem bound to ruffle a few feathers.
The same is true of using classical music in games. Devotees who
ardently believe in the artistic value, or even cultural superiority, of Western
classical music are often dismayed to find it cheapened through association
with less elevated media. As the musicologist Claudia Bullerjahn points out
in a study of music in advertising, “When a television commercial for
ketchup employs a classical symphony as its background music, lovers of
the symphony call it an abomination.”5 Video games may rank higher in
cultural cachet than ketchup commercials, but only barely. Many would still
agree with film critic Roger Ebert’s 2005 assessment that “for most gamers,
video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to
make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”6
My personal experiences as a musicologist have also reinforced my
belief in a persistent and willful divide between high and low art in
scholarship. There is a growing group of scholars researching game music
—many of whose works appear in my bibliography and have profoundly
shaped my own thinking—and many scholars in other fields have been
interested in and supportive of game music research. Yet in some academic
settings there remains a palpable sense that this research is somehow
frivolous, less important than the study of established classical music. I
once had a presentation scheduled for the final session of a long academic
conference because, as one of the organizers cheerfully told me, they
“wanted to end with something fun after people were burned out from the
serious topics.” This was not an isolated incident. A well-meaning
colleague from another university once earnestly told me that my
application for tenure at my current institution was in good shape “because
your legit research balances out the game stuff.” In that case, “legit”
implied the kind of research that involves painstakingly combing through
archives in distant countries in search of data that might eventually make a
contribution to a well-established topic. Playing video games as research
seems too easy, too entertaining, and too popular to fit comfortably into that
model of scholarship.
As long as we struggle to define what art is and what it means, these
debates over cultural values will play out over and over. My reaction to that
conclusion is equal parts chagrin and delight. Chagrin, because the
questions I set out to answer in Unlimited Replays are ultimately
unanswerable. In the digital age, dichotomies like art and entertainment,
and high art and low art mean precisely what they have always meant:
everything, and nothing. And delight, because just like my eight-year-old
self hearing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor in The Battle of Olympus for
the first time, I can’t wait to try puzzling out the next example of classical
music interacting with video games. Asking these questions of ourselves
and others is what ultimately gives meaning to the art of classical music in
video games.
Thanks a million. Push start to replay.

1
Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), chap. 5, “Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition.”
2
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
3
Ralph Locke, for instance, notes that in the later nineteenth-century United States, “the art
experience was . . . carefully stratified and ‘framed’ in ways that intimidated or even effectively
excluded members of the poor and working classes.” Ralph Locke, “Music Lovers, Patrons, and
the ‘Sacralization’ of Culture in America,” 19th Century Music 17 (1993): 149–173.
4
Philip Kennicott, “The Kennedy Center Honors Abandons the Arts for Pop Culture,” Washington
Post (August 3, 2017), available online at [Link]
 kennedy-center-honors-abandon-the-arts-for-pop-culture/2017/08/02/0287e65c-77a0-11e7-8f39-
eeb7d3a2d304_story.xhtml?utm_term=.e50e1ff7917c.
5
Claudia Bullerjahn, “The Effectiveness of Music in Television Commercials: A Comparison of
Theoretical Approaches,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of
Music, ed. Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 233. See also Peter
Kupfer, “Classical Music in Television Commercials: A Social-Psychological Perspective,”
Music and the Moving Image 10 (2017): 23–53.
6
Ebert’s pronouncement came in response to a letter in which a reader made the case for games as
art. Roger Ebert, “Why Did the Chicken Cross the Genders?,” [Link] (November 27,
2005), available online at [Link]
the-genders (accessed August 2, 2017).
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Index

Note: Titles of classical works are listed under the composer’s name, and
individual movements are identified by the larger work. For example, “In
the Hall of the Mountain King” is identified under “Grieg, Edvard, Peer
Gynt.” Games in a series are listed under the general title of that series.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, for instance, can be found under “The
Legend of Zelda (series).”
Adams, John, 30
aestheticization of violence. See violence, aestheticization of
Air Cavalry, 53
Aldred, Jessica, 60
Alexander, Leigh, 119
Amadeus (film), 124
Amphio, 146–147, 151
Anderson, Wes, 73
anime, 103
Apocalypse Now (film), 52–53
Arkham (series). See Batman: Arkham (series) Aronofsky, Darren, 120n13
Assassin’s Creed (series)
Assassin’s Creed II (trilogy), 21, 123n22
Assassin’s Creed III, 19–23, 32, 123–124
Atari (company), 59
Atari 2600, 59, 61
Atari Jaguar. See Jaguar (console) Atari Video Computer System (VCS). See Atari 2600
Atari Video Music System (VMS), 92–94
Auslander, Philip, 117

Baba Yaga (mythological character), 109–111

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 3–4, 8, 30, 34, 55, 62, 86, 90, 95, 105, 117, 118, 174
Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578 (“Little”), 105
Invention in C Major, BWV 772, 55
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, 3–4, 62, 86–87, 95, 174, 176
Two-Part Invention in G Major, BWV 781, 34
Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann, 55
Baker, Lacey, 23
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 98, 107, 108. See also carnival (theoretical concept); grotesque (theoretical
concept) Batman: Arkham (series)
Batman: Arkham Asylum, 83
 Batman: Arkham City, 83
Batman: Arkham Origins, 82–85
The Battle of Olympus, 2–4, 176
Battlefield 4, 53
BBC Micro, 75. See also specific games
The Beach Boys, 36–37. See also “God Only Knows”
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 8, 31, 55, 84, 89, 95, 99, 105, 108, 122, 123–124, 158, 161–162, 163, 167,
168, 174
Piano Sonata No. 14 (“Moonlight”), 55, 95, 99, 168
Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), 105, 108
Symphony No. 5, 89, 95, 99, 100
Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), 169
Symphony No. 9 (“Choral,” incl. “Ode to Joy”), 26, 95, 99
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (app), 147
Bell, Ian, 75
Benjamin, Walter, 118
Berlioz, Hector, 169
Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14, 169
Bernstein, Leonard, 145, 149
Berry, Chuck, 94
Bethesda Studios, 116
The Binding of Isaac, 172
Biophilia, 147
BioShock (series), 119
BioShock, 5, 15, 40, 119–122
BioShock Infinite, 5, 36–49, 119, 174
Bizet, Georges, 26, 95, 99, 105, 106
L’Arlésienne Suite No. 2 (incl. Farandole), 105, 106
Carmen, 26, 95, 99
Bizoni, Piers, 75
Björk, 147
The Black Cat (film), 118
Black Swan (film), 120n13
Blaster Master, 173
Bleszinski, Cliff, 51
Blue Velvet (film), 78
Böcker, Thomas, 159, 166–167
Bogost, Ian, 92–93
Bonds, Mark Evan, 169
Boom Boom Rocket, 92–100, 107, 143, 173
Borodin, Alexander, 105
Prince Igor (incl. “Polovtsian Dances”), 105
Bourdieu, Pierre, 174
Boyz N the Hood (film), 70Braben, David, 75
Brahms, Johannes, 57, 100, 169
Hungarian Dance No. 5, 100
Braid, 15
Bramwell, Tom, 97
Branch, Roderick, 159–160
Britten, Benjamin, 144–151
 Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, 6, 144–151
Brown, Matthew, 89, 112n17
Broyles, Michael, 9, 89, 124
Bullerjahn, Claudia, 175
Bunin, Stanislav, 132

Cage, John, 152n25

Call of Duty, 7
Candy Crush, 151
Captain Comic, 55
carnival (theoretical concept), 98–100. See also grotesque (theoretical concept) Carlos, Wendy, 79
Castlevania (series), 100, 173
Castlevania, 100
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, 16–17
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, 3
Catherine, 5, 101–113, 173
CD-ROM, audio capabilities of, 53, 57
Chang, Vanessa, 90
chant, 30, 108
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film), 72
Cheng, William, 117
Child of Eden, 94
Chopin: Desire for Love (film), 128
Chopin, Frédéric, 6, 56, 57, 91, 99, 105, 119, 126–140
Étude, Op. 10, No. 3, 133
Étude, Op. 10, No. 12 (“Revolutionary”), 105, 129n13, 133, 134, 137
Étude, Op. 25, No. 9 (“Butterfly”), 137
Fantasie-Impromptu, Op. 66, 99, 133
Grand Valse Brillante, Op. 18, 133
Lithuanian Song, Op. 74, No. 16, 137
Mazurka, Op. 7, No. 1, 57
Nocturne, Op. 9, No. 2, 133, 137
Nocturne, Op. 55, No. 1, 137
Piano Sonata No 2., Op. 35 (incl. “Funeral March”), 105, 137
Polonaise, Op. 40, No. 1 (“Military”), 56, 137
Polonaise, Op. 53 (“Heroic”), 131, 133, 137
Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4, 91, 138
Prelude, Op. 28, No. 7, 137
Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15 (“Raindrop”), 133
Waltz in A Minor, Op. post., 137
Chudley, Chris, 94
cinema. See film
cinematics. See cutscenes
Citizen Kane (film), 50, 71
Civilization (series)
Civilization IV, 4, 29–31, 33
Civilization V, 26
ClassicFM, 6, 162–165
A Clockwork Orange (film), 5, 72, 78–85, 89
Code, David, 81n16
Collins, Karen, 89n11, 93
Commodore 64, 55, 75. See also specific games
computer games. See PC games
Conker’s Bad Fur Day, 78–81
Cook, Karen, 30
Cooper, Michael, 151
Coppola, Francis Ford, 53
Coppola, Sofia, 41
Corneilius, Steven, 150n19
Coulthard, Lisa, 120–121
Couperin, François, 27–28
Quatre versets d’un motet composé de l’ordre du roy, 28
Sept versets du motet composé de l’ordre du roy, 28
Crazy Climber, 54
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 41
Crystal Castles, 54
cutscenes, 51, 57, 78, 83, 129, 134

Daft Punk, 94
Dallas Winds, 159
Dance Dance Revolution (series), 92
Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 2, 90
Dante’s Inferno (game), 122
dating simulations, 102–103
Daudet, Alphonse, 106
Davis, Miles, 149
“The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise,” 94
Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy, 158
Debussy, Claude, 89, 107
Golliwog’s Cakewalk, 107
Decca, 166
Délibes, Léo, 95
Lakmé, 95
Devo (band), 94
DeWitt, Bryce, 39
Die Hard (film series), 123
Dig Dug, 173
Dinitto, Rachel, 106
Disasterpiece. See Vreeland, Richard
Disney
Fantasia. See Fantasia (film)
partnership with Atari, 59–60
and video games, 58–59, 64
Disney Infinity, 59
Donnelly, K. J., 33, 52n4
Downton Abbey (TV), 29
Dragon’s Lair, 51
Dukas, Paul, 59, 61, 168
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (L’apprenti sorcier), 59–64, 168
Duncan, Dean, 10
Duolingo, 141
Dust Bowl Ballads, 149
Dvořák, Antonín, 95, 99, 105, 117
Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”), 95, 99, 105
dystopia, 42, 119

early film
relationship to games, 54–58
Eaton, Rebecca M. Doran, 67
Ebert, Roger, 15, 175
edutainment, 139–140
The Elder Scrolls (series), 51
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, 51
The 11thHour, 103n4
Elfman, Danny, 51
Elite, 75–78, 174
Elvira Madigan (film), 52
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, 89
The End is Nigh, 172–174
Ende, Michael, 130
Epic Mickey (series), 59
Eternal Sonata, 6, 126–140, 174
Everett, Yayoi Uno, 108
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” 41
The Exorcist (film), 78
Eyes Wide Shut (film), 78

Fallout (series), 5, 42, 115

Fallout 3, 5, 115–118, 121
Fallout 4, 117n4
FamiCom (console). See Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Fantasia (film), 3, 5, 58–64, 65, 145
Fantasia (game), 59–64
Fantasia: Music Evolved, 59
Far Cry 3, 53
female grotesque, 108–111. See also grotesque (theoretical concept) FEZ, 5, 90–92, 94, 173
Fiddler on the Roof, 55
“A Fifth of Beethoven,” 89
50 Cent: Bulletproof, 122–123
film. See specific films, directors, and composers
artistic value of, 50
biopics, 123–124
relationship to games, 33, 50–85, 106, 165n19, 171n31
Final Fantasy (series), 158, 163, 166–168
Final Fantasy VI, 168
Final Fantasy VII, 168–169
Final Symphony, 166–171, 174
Fish, Phil, 90, 91
Flappy Bird, 151
Flower, 15
“Fortunate Son,” 41
Frasca, Gonzalo, 14
Frederic: Resurrection of Music, 6, 134–140, 143
Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back, 126, 138n23
Fried, Gerald, 33
fugue, 148
Full Metal Jacket (film), 78

Galaga, 89
game music concerts, 157–171. See also specific concerts
gamification, 141–156
Gay, John
The Beggar’s Opera, 19–22
Gears of War 2, 51
Gee, James Paul, 16–17
Genesis (console), 59, 62. See also specific games
Gerstmann, Jeff, 97–98
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” 40–41, 42–44
Gladiator (film), 78
Glass, Philip, 65, 69
Koyaanisqatsi (film score), 65–71
“God Only Knows,” 36–37, 41, 42, 43
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 59, 62
Goldberg, Harold, 15, 121
Goldman, William, 130
Goldmark, Daniel, 58
Goldsmith, Jerry, 159
Gorbman, Claudia, 73
Gradius, 99
Grand Theft Auto (series), 39, 64, 68
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 39, 68, 70
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, 39, 70
Grand Theft Auto IV, 64–71, 174
The Great Gatsby (film), 41
Greek Orthodox chant, 108
Green, Seth, 51
Gregson-Williams, Harry, 51
Gribbin, John, 38
Grieg, Edvard, 32–33, 54, 95, 99, 173
Peer Gynt (incl. “In the Hall of the Mountain King”), 32–33, 54, 61, 95, 99, 173
Groove Coaster, 152
grotesque (theoretical concept), 101, 106–113. See also carnival (theoretical concept) Guitar Hero
(series), 92, 96, 142
Guitar Hero Live, 152
Gunship, 53
Guthrie, Kate, 144–145
Guthrie, Woody, 149
Gyruss, 5, 86–90, 92, 94, 173, 174

Halo (series), 159

Hamill, Mark, 51
Hamuzu, Masashi, 167
Handel, George Frederic, 26, 34, 55, 105
Messiah, HWV 45 (incl. “Hallelujah Chorus”), 105
Water Music Suite no. 1, 34
Hatsushiba, Hiroya, 139
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 8, 118
Heroes: The Sanguine Seven, 55n14
Hillman, Roger, 24n12
Hirsch, Lily E., 12
History of the World, Part I (film), 72
Hollywood. See film
Holst, Gustav, 92, 105, 107
The Planets, Op. 32 (incl. “Jupiter” and “Mars”), 105, 107
House of Cards (TV), 7
House of the Dead 2, 103n4
Hubbs, Joanna, 110

Iggy Pop, 69
Immortal Beloved (film), 124
Impromptu (film), 128
Inoue, Masahiro, 89, 90
Inspector Morse (TV), 118
Instruments of the Orchestra (film), 144–145, 149
Interview with the Vampire (film), 119
iS: Internal Section, 94
iPad, 152
iTunes, 8, 92n17, 167
Ivănescu, Andra, 43n10

Jaguar (console), 92n17

James Bond film series, 123
Jarman, Freya, 143
Jarre, Jean-Michel, 69
Jaws (film), 78
Jessel, Leon, 99
“The Parade of the Tin Soldiers,” 99
Jet Set Willy, 55
Johnson, Julian, 9–10, 17, 162
Jones, Gloria, 41
“The Journey,” in Grand Theft Auto IV, 68–70
Journey Escape, 122
Juul, Jesper, 13, 93
juxtaposition, musical, 43, 81, 101–113, 120–121, 134–138, 174. See also grotesque (theoretical
concept); postmodernity; remixes

Kallberg, Jeffrey, 128

Kangaroo, 54
Karloff, Boris, 118
Kassabian, Anahid, 143
Katz, Mark, 88, 94, 143
Kayser, Wolfgang, 101
Keeping Score (film series), 145
Kennicott, Philip, 160, 175
Keyboard Mania, 134n20
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (film), 120
Kind of Blue, 149
King, Carole, 149
Kingdom Hearts (series), 59
Konami, 86, 99
Kondo, Koji, 157
Koyaanisqatsi (film), 5, 65–71
Kramer, Lawrence, 17, 115
Kubrick, Stanley, 5, 52n4, 71, 72–85, 89, 168
Kupfer, Peter, 77

Lachmann, Renate, 98
Larsen, Peter, 22
Lauper, Cyndi, 40, 41
The Legend of Zelda (series), 2, 91
The Legend of Zelda, 2
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, 1–3
The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, 171
Lemoyne, Étienne, 27
Pièces de théorbe en sol major, 28
Lerner, Neil, 54
Levine, Ken, 40
Lewis, Juliette, 69
Ligeti, György, 108
Le grand macabre, 108
Liszt, Franz, 99, 127
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, 99
Little King’s Story, 56–57
liveness, 117–118
Livingstone, Ian, 94, 97
Locke, Ralph, 175n3
Lockwood, Lewis, 124
Lolita (film), 72
London Sinfonietta, 151, 155
London Symphony Orchestra, 166
The Lone Ranger (TV), 52
Louis XIV, 27–29
Lowe, Melanie, 52
Luhrmann, Baz, 41
Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 27–28
Dies Irae, LWV 64, 28
Miserere, LWV 25, 28
Plaude Laetare Gallia, LWV 37, 28
Te Deum, LWV 55, 28

The Madness of King George (film), 27

Mahler, Gustav, 169
Maniac Miner, 54–55, 61, 173
Marie Antoinette (film), 41
mashups, 100
Mass Effect (series), 41, 51
The Matrix (film), 78
McClary, Susan, 173
McConnell, Peter, 57
McDowell, Malcolm, 51, 79
McGonigal, Jane, 141–142
McQuiston, Kate, 73
Mega Drive. See Genesis (console) Mega Man (series), 2
Meguro, Shoji, 107
Menace II Society (film), 70
Mendelssohn, Felix, 57
Merregnon Studios, 166–167
metafiction
in Eternal Sonata, 129–134
historiographic, 122–125, 123n22
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, 53
Miami Vice (TV), 70
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, 122–123
Mickey Mouse, 59–63
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. See Punch-Out!! (NES) Miller, Kiri, 68, 93
Miller, Matt, 91
minimalism, 30, 65–71
mobile games, 34, 134–140, 141–156. See also specific games
Morales, Xavier, 120
Morris, Mitchell, 66–67
Moss, Carrie-Anne, 51
The Moth Diaries (film), 119
Mouse, Mickey. See Mickey Mouse
Mozart: Le Dernier secret, 125
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 8, 44–49, 52, 55, 56, 100, 124–125, 158, 162, 163, 169
Don Giovanni, 125
Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 95, 100
Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, 52
Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331/300i (incl. “Rondo alla Turca”), 55
Requiem, 44–49, 56
MS-DOS. See PC games
Murphy, Walter, 89
music appreciation, 144–151
Music Appreciation Hour (radio program), 145
music games, 92–98, 134–140, 141–144, 151–156
Mussorgsky, Modest, 105, 109–111
Pictures at an Exhibition (incl. “Baba Yaga”), 105, 109–111
Myst, 27

Natvig, Mary, 150n17

Navas, Eduardo, 87–88
Needleman, Sarah, 158, 159
The Neverending Story (film), 130
The Neverending Story (novel), 130
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72
Nintendo 64, 78, 80. See also specific games
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), 2, 23–25, 34, 55, 76–77, 90. See also specific games
Nintendo Power, 80
Nintendo Wii. See Wii
Noire, L. A., 51
North Carolina Symphony, 159
La note bleue (film), 128

O’Donnell, Martin, 159

O’Neal, Shaquille, 122
orchestra, 157–171. See also symphony (genre) organ, 118

Pachelbel, Johann, 94
Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo (“Canon in D”), 94, 95
Paganini, Niccolò, 57
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 31
Parakilas, James, 18, 162, 166
PaRappa the Rapper, 143, 152
Parodius (series), 5, 99–100, 107
Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth, 5, 99
Sexy Parodius, 100
Paul, Jason Michael, 161
PC games, 27–33, 55n14, 76, 103n4, [Link] also specific games
Pekacz, Jolanta, 129
Perry, Douglass C., 96–97
Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys), 36. See also “God Only Knows”
Phantasmagoria (series)
Phantasmagoria, 103n4
Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, 103n4
The Pianist (film), 114–115
piano, 127, 132
Pirates!, 34
Pirates of the Caribbean (film series), 118
Play! A Video Game Symphony, 158, 159, 161
PlayStation, 13, 53. See also specific games
PlayStation 3, [Link] also specific games
Polanski, Roman, 114
popular music, in BioShock Infinite, 36–44
postmodernity, 114, 138, 173. See also juxtaposition, musical; remixes
The Princess Bride (novel), 130
Prokoviev, Sergei, 26, 159, 169
Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, 26
Pulp Fiction (film), 41
Punch-Out!! (NES), 23–24, 26
Punch-Out!! (Wii), 26
Purcell, Henry, 26, 79–81, 144
 Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, 79–81

quantum mechanics, in BioShock Infinite, 38–49

Queen Mary University of London, 151, 155
Quest for Glory (series), 31–33
Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness, 31–33
Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero, 31
Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, 31
Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, 31
Quest for Glory IV. See Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness

Rachmaninov, Sergei, 163

radio. See ClassicFM
in Fallout 3, 115–118
in-game, 39, 68–70, 114, 115–118
in Grand Theft Auto IV, 68–70
and music appreciation, 145
ragtime, 107, 108
Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 78
Rapée, Ernö, 23
Rare Entertainment, 78
Red Dead Redemption, 51
Reggio, Godfrey, 65, 70
Reich, Steve, 151
Clapping Music, 6, 151–156
R.E.M. (band), 41
remixes. See juxtaposition, musical
of classical music, 86–100, 134–140, 173
definitions and types of, 87–88
Renaissance (band), 89
Reservoir Dogs (film), 121
Restoration, 26
Return Fire, 53
Rez, 94
rhythm games. See music games
Ridiculon, 173
Riley, Terry, 69
A Rainbow in Curved Air, 69
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 55, 94, 95, 99
The Tale of Tsar Saltan (incl. “The Flight of the Bumblebee”), 55, 94, 95, 99
Roach, Steve, 69
“Robot Rock,” 94
Rock Band (series), 93
Beatles Rock Band, 122
Rock Band, 96
Rock Band 3, 134n20
Rodman, Ron, 33
Le roi danse, 29
“Roll Over Beethoven,” 94
Rosoff, Matt, 151
Rossini, Gioachino, 52, 82–85, 95, 105, 107
La Gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), 82–85
Guillaume Tell, 52, 95, 97, 105, 107
Russo, Mary, 111–112

Saint’s Row (series), 72

Saint’s Row: The Third, 72–73
Sakuraba, Motoi, 132, 134
Samba de Amigo, 143
Samson, Jim, 126–128
Sand, George, 127, 131
Sarasate, Pablo de, 105, 106
Ziegunerweisen, Op. 20, 105, 106
Saule, Béatrix, 27
Scarface (film), 70
Schloss, Joseph, 94–95
Schrödinger, Erwin, 38–39
Schyman, Gary, 37
Sega (company), 59, 62, 103n4
Sega Genesis. See Genesis (console) Seijun, Suzuki, 106
Sempé, Skip, 29
Senici, Emanuele, 118
The 7thGuest, 103n4
Shaq Fu, 122–123
Sharp, John, 16
Sheen, Martin, 51
Shenmue (series), 164–165
The Shining (film), 72
“Shiny Happy People,” 41
silent film. See early film
SIMON, 142
Sleeping Beauty (film), 59
Snow White (film), 59
Soft Cell, 41
The Song of Bernadette (film), 169
A Song to Remember (film), 128
Sony PlayStation. See PlayStation
Sorcerer’s Apprentice (game), 59–64
Soule, Jeremy, 157, 163
Space Channel 5, 143
Stacking, 57–58
Stagecoach (film), 41
Star Trek (TV), 33
Star Wars (films), 52, 72
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (app), 6, 151–156, 174
Stewart, Patrick, 51
Strauss, Johann, Jr., 55, 85
Blue Danube Waltz, Op. 314, 55, 74–78, 85
Strauss, Richard, 72, 168
Also sprach Zarathustra, 72, 168
Stravinsky, Igor, 169
Symphony in Three Movements, 169
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, 135
Suellentrop, Chris, 90
Super Mario Bros., 2, 91
Super Meat Boy, 172
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), 53, 62. See also specific games
Süssmayr, Franz Xaver, 49
Switched-On Bach, 79
Symphonic Game Music Concerts (series), 158, 166–171. See also Final Symphony
symphonic poems, 168
Symphonica, 143
Symphonische Spielmusikkonzerte. See Symphonic Game Music Concerts (series) symphony (genre),
166–171. See also orchestra

“Tainted Love,” 41
Tallarico, Tommy, 161–162, 169
Tapestry, 149
Tarantino, Quentin, 41, 73, 90, 91, 120–121
Taruskin, Richard, 9n3
Tavinor, Grant, 13–17
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 4, 23, 24–25, 57, 95, 99, 120, 159, 168
1812 Overture, 95, 97
The Nutcracker, 23, 24–25, 95, 120–121
Piano Concerto No. 1, 99
Romeo and Juliet, 168
Swan Lake, 99
Tears for Fears, 41
Tetris, 4, 24–25, 32, 90
Thomas, Augusta Read, 152n25
Resounding Earth, 152n25
Thomson, Philip, 102
Thomson, Virgil, 149–151
3DO, 53
tone poems. See symphonic poems
Tone Sphere, 152
Touchpress. See Amphio
Tous les matins du monde, 29
Twitter, 164
2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 5, 55, 72, 74–78, 168
The Typing of the Dead (series)
The Typing of the Dead, 103n4
The Typing of the Dead: Overkill, 103n4
The Typing of the Dead 2, 103n4

Uematsu, Nobuo, 157, 163, 170

Valtonen, Jonne, 167

Verdi, Giuseppe, 56
La Traviata, 56
Versailles 1685, 27–31, 32, 34, 56, 174
Versailles II: Testament of the King, 27–31, 34
VGL. See Video Games Live
Video Games Live, 161–162, 174
violence
aestheticization of, 82–85, 120–121
in games, 116–117
violin, 115–118, 121
Vivaldi, Antonio, 7
The Four Seasons (incl. “Summer”), 7
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (app), 147
Von Glahn, Denise, 9
Vreeland, Richard (“Disasterpiece”), 91

Wagner, Richard, 24, 43, 44, 52–53, 95, 99, 107–108

Die Walküre (incl. “Ride of the Valkyries”), 24, 52–53, 95, 97, 99
Lohengrin (incl. “Bridal Chorus”), 43
racism and relationship to Nazi Germany, 44, 108
Tristan und Isolde, 107
WALL-E (film), 72
Walton, Whitney, 126
Wanamo, Robert, 167
Watchmen (film), 67–68, 70
Waugh, Patricia, 130
Welles, Orson, 50
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (film), 78
Wii, 26, 56. See also specific games
Wii U, [Link] also specific games
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” 40
Williams, John, 159
Windows Media Player, 92n17
Wing Commander (series), 51, 52
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, 51
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, 51

Xbox, 7, 90. See also specific games

Xbox 360, 82n18, 92. See also specific games

Young People’s Concerts (TV), 145

Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (2013 app), 6, 144–151

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. See The Legend of Zelda (series) Zigeunerweisen (film), 106
Zimmer, Hans, 51
ZX Spectrum, 54–55. See also specific games