Wednesday, May 28, 2025

This is the forty-eighth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

I took a vacation from work to have family over, but it seems like I have more to do than ever. Probably because I started a relatively major project that requires me to still post only three times a week, and hopefully after it’s finished, the good times of five posts will be possible again. Or not! We’ll see.

A long, long time ago in the wild years of the early 2000’s, I worked at a pizza restaurant. It was a very hip, cool place, and they had a stereo system where they played obscure, hip music. The employees with appropriately hip musical tastes usually picked the playlists, but one day they asked me what kind of music I listened to. I said music from video games, and the response was “what, like Mario?” So I took the opportunity to share music they had never heard before either by playing my Castlevania: Symphony of the Night soundtrack for a restaurant full of people that evening. They never asked me to pick the music again. True story.

Since then, my musical tastes have expanded a bit, and I now name ska, zydeco, mariachi, and polka among “kinds of music I listen to.” But the other point is that if you were to ask nearly anyone today what their favorite video game soundtrack was, they could probably tell you.

Amplitude was a PS2 rhythm game that included music from popular artists in 2003 like David Bowie, Run-DMC and Weezer. They re-made the game 13 years later and included the popular artists yet again, like Darren Korb with a track from Transistor, Danny Baranowsky with a song from Crypt of the Necrodancer, a new piece from the composer of the Minecraft soundtrack, and the score to a music video from the creators of Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, and other series, reminiscing about the 20th anniversary of their company.

As you can see, what’s considered popular has changed a little bit. Yacht Club Games recently held a concert to showcase the music of the Shovel Knight series, while the creator of Stardew Valley is putting on their second world-wide concert tour with a 35-piece orchestra. “Video game music” isn’t obscure or weird anymore, it’s a big deal. You don’t have to order CD’s from Japan anymore or keep the game on all day to get it, either. You can download soundtracks from nearly anywhere. It’s become as much a part of our culture as the games themselves.