Admittedly it feels a little weird, but I’ve found myself listening to a lot of video game music these days.
What’s probably even weirder is the concept that it’s technically they’re music without the actual games. Maybe a little elaboration would help at this point…
When I was growing up, the first “music” that I listened to was actually video game music, to the extent that when we would go on car trips, I would actually bring along a cassette tape of loops from my favorite games that I had recorded with my cheap, Fisher-Price cassette player. The soundtracks to Mega Man 2 and Star Tropics appealed to me long before anything with actual people singing in it, but for some reason (probably because I was eight) it just never occurred to me that there was somebody performing those “songs” … they just used a keyboard or a synthesizer instead of regular musical instruments.
I started revisiting this genre earlier this year when the Penny Arcade TV show debuted and featured 8-bit songs in the episodes … it was then that I discovered that an actual genre even existed here, or even more so an entire subculture of artists dedicated to creating songs that you would expect to find after saving a princess or gunning down an alien starship! I only got about three episodes into the show before I blindly ordered a copy of Alex Mauer’s latest album in search of a clip that particularly appealed to me in the show and low and behold, the disc actually had 42 different tracks on it of new music to explore.
(I later realized that his website actually has a number of older albums available for free download and that you can actually find just about every song of his that appears on PATV in one of them…)
It’s interesting to me that 22 years ago, this concept of listening to digitized music appealed to me on a very basic level – hey, if I could’ve brought the entire Nintendo along with me in the car, I probably would’ve (and now kids can do that, too!) – and yet here I am now over two decades later, discovering new little 90 second clips of bleeps and blorps that can get me just as excited as cranking up a good rock song when it comes on the radio. Certain ones make me feel more creative when I listen to them, and I think that’s part of the fun because nostalgia is great, but building on that and thus learning to embrace something in an entirely new way is really the difference between just reminiscing in old memories and actually creating new ones.