Video game music has tipped, it’s now so popular that it no longer needs video games to itself exist, see the scores of chiptune and synthwave artists on Bandcamp, see the Classic FM shows, see this 35 page list of artists who’ve sampled songs from the Super Mario series. Nobuo Uematsu just had the LSO doing ‘Still More Fighting’ at The Barbican Centre. Over there, it’s Brave Wave Productions, a music label founded ‘to explore the links between video games, music and nostalgia’. Look, there’s iam8bit instantly selling out vinyl runs of lavishly packaged soundtracks to your favourite independent games. Most of the people who like it are his friends and geeks, he says: “I guess it is somewhat of an acquired taste.Everyone’s at it. Those at Zerply who have gravitated toward his playlists, he’s found, already have some connection to gaming. For Karltorp, whose video-game obsession started in seventh grade with StarCraft, Age of Empires, and Quake 2, nostalgia is part of the appeal. Maybe because I don’t have a strong connection to video games, I lost interest and got distracted by other shiny Internet things within a few hours. (I could listen to that Fez soundtrack clip above on repeat for awhile.) I enjoyed working to it, least for a little bit. The Internet radio station spits out endless tunes.Īlthough I didn’t know a lot of the video games, let alone the music, it all sounded familiar and upbeat, even the tunes that started off in children’s sing-a-long territory, like the Kirby’s Playland theme. You can do that over at, but that involves downloading and curation. I couldn’t choose jams from games I had played as a kid, such as Mario Kart or Goldeneye, as Karltorp had recommended. I’m always searching for new work music to replace whatever album I’m currently getting sick of on Spotify, so I headed over to this website that streams video game remixes to try it out while writing this article.
Most music composed for games, similar to something from an ambient pioneer like Brian Eno, doesn’t force itself to the center stage your brain but instead thrums in the background.Īll of that, plus Karltorp’s endorsement, makes this genre sound pretty appealing as a workday soundtrack. Ambient music at a moderate volume improves creativity, according to the Journal of Consumer Research. Gaming music fits all the metrics for optimum work sounds. “I listen to it so much, it puts external pressure on me to finish up before the album comes to an end.” For example, if he has a lot of emails to answer, Karltorp puts on the Street Fighter II soundtrack.
He has even figured out which tracks work best for certain tasks. Unlike electronic music, Karltorp hasn’t gotten sick of the video game music. “It doesn’t get too intrusive, it keeps you going, and usually stays on a positive tone, too, which I found is important.” “It’s there in the background,” said Karltorp. At the same time, it’s not too disruptive to your concentration. Because the music is designed to foster achievement and help players get to the next level, it activates a similar “in it to win it” mentality while working, argues Karltorp. Karltorp has found that music from games he used to play as a kid, such as StarCraft, Street Fighter, and Final Fantasy, work best. “I started diving in and realizing that there is this whole world of people remixing video game music and that there’s this community out there that has discovered the same thing that I have,” he said. He started with recordings from StarCraft, of which he played “insane” amounts of as a teenager. “If you listen to it over and over again, it never gets boring, it continues to pulse,” Karltorp explained. “After awhile, it took me down, rather than kept me up.”Ībout four years ago, Karltorp landed on something that worked: Video game soundtracks. “I could only take so much dubstep and things like that,” Karltorp, the CEO of Zerply, told Fast Company. He tried the electronic music route, but that didn’t have the intended effect. His job involves a lot of coding, and he craved something with a continuous beat that could keep him going. Once he graduated and started Zerply, a sort of LinkedIn for creative talent, he found the ethereal sounds of Bach almost too soothing.
Sonatas don’t have distracting lyrics, and seemed to activate the right parts of his brain. Christofer Karltorp used to listen to classical music in college while studying, and for awhile, it worked.