In Defense of Listening To Video Game Music While Not Playing Video Games

This is not going to be a blog exclusively devoted to music, but a conversation I had with the co-writer of this blog earlier tonight inspired this post...

About two months before I started college, I received a Facebook message/friend request from someone that said, “Sup? I guess we’re roommates.” He’d apparently received his letter a day or two before me. Intrigued, I accepted and scoped out his profile like a good little high school kid headed to a college 300 miles away from home should.

Several aspects of his profile stood out. First was the white “pimp” suit he wore in one of his prom photos. The next was the motorcycle he rode in several other pictures. The third was his list of “likes and interests:” video games (awesome), anime (an obsession I’d fallen out of love with a year or two prior), hip-hop (an obsession I’d fallen out of pretty much upon my conception between the whitest pair of parents in mankind’s history) and trance music.

Admittedly, I had no clue what trance music was. At all. I imagined a tripped-out alternative to techno, a genre I loved around the age of 11, when I believed every single electronica song sounded like the stuff on ESPN Jock Jams. In short, 18-year old Matt considered trance music to be frightening and stayed away from it.

My roommate and I got along very well, though, and thoroughly enjoyed freshman year (perhaps a little too much). Sometime afterwards, after learning about my fondness for so-called old-school games such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Shining Force, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter, Sonic the Hedgehog and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog, he pointed me to OCRemix.org, a site for those who worship at the twin alters of music composition and classic gaming to both produce and download remixes of video game music, ranging from the most well-known games of all time to "they only made a dozen copies of this game and six of them are sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean" levels of obscurity.

It started innocently enough. A few techno Sonic remixes here, a heavy metal Mega Man tune there, and my fix would be satisfied. But soon after I graduated college, for whatever reason, I became insatiable. Instead of cranking my usual selection of dude rock, my mornings of cleaning/running errands would be backed by a soundtrack of Metroid and Legend of Legaia (a game that I have still not played to this day – but the background music from the Village of Jeremi is so good!). I’d stagger to work some days after downloading .zip files of menu music until the wee hours of the morning. 

Rock remixes, pulsating trance remixes, piano ballad rewrites; it didn’t matter. It even turned me onto electronica and trance music as a whole - I downloaded a ton of free trance music online and threw it on the video game mix because it sounded similar, and I played the bridge from Enter Shikari's "Gap in the Fence" on repeat enough to drive the average human insane, simply because it reminded me of a racing game I used to play.

I’d purchased licensed music I’d heard on video games before (my first “real” CD was Andrew W.K.’s “I Get Wet,” which I’d heard first on a Madden game), but this was a whole ‘nother animal. I wasn’t proud of what I was turning into. I’d try to hide my obsession – nay, addiction – from my friends and family. Occasionally, my roommate (not the one above, but my roommate after college) would come home and ask, “Is that Legend of Zelda music playing on your laptop?” to which I’d respond, “NO NOT AT ALL LOOK AT HOW CLEAN THESE DISHES ARE THAT I’VE WASHED AND NOT MY COMPUTER.”

It was too difficult for me to stop. You know how it is. Sometimes, you’re at a party with a few friends, you’re enjoying a few drinks when someone takes you up to the coat room upstairs where everyone’s…you know…listening to video game music.

"That f***ing horse is gonna come NOW." (pic from this site)

Now, while I have a number of idiosyncrasies like anyone else, I consider myself to be a relatively normal guy. I enjoy watching/playing sports, cracking open a cold beer, sinking my teeth into well-made burger, good-looking women, and hanging out with friends. Why, then, am I drawn to the bleeps and bloops of OCRemix and other sites like Greek ships to the sirens? (HISTORY)

Two reasons:

•  They give you space to think. Because most of the remixes are derived from what essentially amounts to background music, seldom do they include singing that goes beyond choral overtones or “sha ba doo wops,” and even more infrequently are there lyrics (because when video game nerds try to write original lyrics, they often turn into stuff like this and this). I love turning on my video game playlist when I’m working or have a lot on my mind because it provides…well, background music; but souped-up, super geeky background music. It doesn't encourage me to sing along like most of my favorite songs, so I can relax, and even if the remix is experimental or alternative in nature, the melody itself is familiar and doesn’t knock your train of thought off the rails.
• Speaking of familiarity, that brings me to my next reason: nostalgia. My mother hated the idea of video games in the house, but once a year when I was young (around 5-8 years old), my brother and I were allowed to rent a video game system and a couple games for a week to play at home. It was like teasing us with one single M&M, but then never sniffing another one for months. So when my uncle gave us his Sega Genesis as a gift after he’d purchased a magical mind-melting machine called a “PlayStation,” it was like backing a Brinks truck of M&M’s up the driveway of Chez Kasznel. We played and played until we burned ourselves out on video games. It wasn’t that we were unhealthily addicted to the games – we still did the usual kid stuff like play basketball and let wild animals in the house – but we couldn’t believe we finally had video games for ourselves! (A few years later, I earned us a Nintendo 64 as a Christmas gift by teaching my brother to read a book. INCENTIVES)

The video game remixes remind me of days when my brother and I would both have off from school, but pouring rain kept us inside. We’d take all the blankets from our bedrooms and take them downstairs, pour ourselves a bowl of Cap’n Crunch or two, and alternate between playing derivatives of “Fort” (rules: throw stuffed animals at each other from across the room to wreck the other’s “fort.” No one ever wins and no one ever stops playing because why in the world would you want to???) and advancing as far as we could in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Power Rangers game, or Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Video game music doesn’t just remind me of strictly video games, though. It reminds me of the den at Township Line Road, the house I lived in for nearly 16 years, where we’d play those games, or have sleepovers and watch home movies. It reminds me of a trip I took to Ocean City, MD with my friend and his family, where I brought a CD with some songs from a computer game I enjoyed to listen to. (My friend countered with his new Limp Bizkit CD, but hey, we all make mistakes). It reminds me of afternoons at an old friend’s house when I was around 10, where we’d spend the whole day in his pool, dry off, and watch movies and play Nintendo 64 on his (at the time) enormous television.

That combination of mind-emptying comfort and wistfulness gets me to flip the radio off from time to time and listen to remixes on car rides to work, while writing/reading or simply mulling over a tough problem or an emotional moment. Some folks are comforted by a meal Mom used to make, a record they danced to at their senior prom, or simply a drive through their old neighborhood. For me, a couple Sonic the Hedgehog tracks by way of artists I know only by names such as GaMeBoX or The Cynic Project will do the trick. And for those of you who put items like this on your wish list, it might work for you, too.