Game Music & Performance

At 2 a.m., Spencer Nilsen, David Young, and the singers of Pastiche were sitting in a circle on the studio floor, working out lyrics and harmonies for “Sonic Boom.” Nobody was complaining about the hour. Good ideas stayed, weaker ones went, and the song that would greet North American Sonic CD players was coming together between jokes. Nilsen arrived at Sega with years of recording experience and very little experience playing games.… Read more

Robert Holmes was in line for the Monorail at Disneyland with his daughter when he heard the Gabriel Knight theme as someone’s ringtone. Music written for a Sierra adventure had turned up in somebody else’s day, well outside the game. He still sounds a little surprised that people remember it at all. Before Sierra, Holmes had worked in studios, live music, and postproduction in Los Angeles. A lunch with Mark Seibert brought… Read more

Tony Dickinson remembers leaving Sonic standing at the end of a boss fight so he could keep listening. The animal capsule could wait. Later, he recorded Sonic Adventure’s “Open Your Heart” onto a cassette and carried it around on a Walkman. Command & Conquer soundtracks went onto burned CDs for middle school listening. Eventually, he sent Frank Klepacki an arrangement of “Hell March.” That arrangement grew into something considerably bigger than a… Read more

Dave Warhol needed thirty seconds of music for ice-skating penguins. Two voices. George Sanger got out his guitar and four-track recorder, tried bass lines until one sounded like penguins, then worked on a melody that sounded like skating. He wrote the result out by hand and passed it to Warhol to put into Thin Ice. That was 1983. Sanger, known to game-music fans as The Fat Man, would go on to work… Read more

The Moon theme from DuckTales already sounds as though it has somewhere wonderful to take you. David Ortiz heard a trumpet carrying that melody, violins chasing the runs, and guitars and bass filling out the rhythm underneath. In 2015, he called in some friends to read the arrangement. That first experiment became Mariachi Entertainment System. The San Antonio ensemble brings familiar game music to a full mariachi lineup: trumpets, violins, flute, guitars… Read more

Interview by David, Retro Replay A boss theme can follow you long after the battle is over. For Console: The VGM Band, those melodies became a reason to pick up instruments, find other musicians, and discover what happens when music written for a game has an audience standing in front of it. A familiar tune is the starting point; the groove, the arrangement, and the energy of a live band are where… Read more

When it comes to video game bands, The OneUps have been doing this longer than most. Their official site says they have been performing since their first show in 2002, and over the years they have played events like PAX, MAGFest, and GDC while building one of the most recognizable sounds in live VGM. Their catalog on Bandcamp stretches from Volume 1 all the way to later releases like Volume 4, Arkadia… Read more

The Arkadian was born in 2015 as the brainchild of Jon O’Neal, a musician with a passion for both heavy rock and the timeless soundtracks of video games. Influenced by artists like Stemage, Viking Guitar, Mega Beardo, and Master Sword, he began crafting arrangements that fused 70s and 80s-inspired metal with the melodies gamers grew up with. What started as solo experiments in a basement studio quickly grew into something bigger... a… Read more

When it comes to fusing heavy metal with the 8-bit sounds of classic gaming, few names resonate louder than VomitroN. The project is the brainchild a Massachusetts-based musician, producer, and lifelong gamer whose work has turned the nostalgic bleeps of the Nintendo Entertainment System into sprawling metal epics. What started as an experiment in the late nineties while playing Contra in a college dorm became a full-blown passion project, and by the… Read more

There are guitarists who cover video game music and then there is FamilyJules. For more than fifteen years Jules Conroy has taken the melodies that defined childhoods and pushed them through soaring leads, relentless rhythms, and full scale metal productions that feel as big as any arena show. His journey started in western Massachusetts where he first picked up a guitar after years of dabbling in piano and drums. What began as… Read more