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| Game music often lingers long after the console is turned off. |
By Jon Scarr
Games don’t last forever. Consoles age out. Stores shut down. Digital libraries disappear or become inaccessible. Even games you loved can quietly slip out of reach as hardware and platforms move on.
But the music often sticks. A single theme can pull you back into a world you haven’t visited in years. You remember where you were, how the game felt, even what your life looked like at the time. Long after the controller is gone, the soundtrack still knows the way.
That idea came up recently in a conversation with Winifred Phillips, a composer whose work spans franchises like God of War, Assassin’s Creed, LittleBigPlanet, and Wizardry. She put it simply. Games may disappear, but music has the potential to live on. And that feels true the longer you think about it.
Games Are Temporary, Music Isn’t
Video games are tied to platforms in a way few other art forms are. When a console fades out or a storefront shuts down, entire libraries can become difficult or impossible to access legally. Even physical copies rely on aging hardware that won’t last forever.
Music doesn’t face that same problem. A soundtrack can be streamed, performed live, replayed in your head, or rediscovered years later without needing the original system. It becomes portable in a way the game itself never quite can.
That’s one reason why remasters and remakes matter so much right now. They aren’t just about visuals or performance. They’re about saving experiences that would otherwise drift away. In some cases, the music becomes the most durable piece of that effort.
Why Game Music Hits Differently
Game music isn’t just something you listen to. It reacts to what you do. Unlike film or TV, game scores are built around player choice. Music changes based on movement, tension, exploration, and combat. It swells when you succeed and pulls back when you pause. Over time, it becomes linked to your decisions, not just the story on screen.
That personal connection is powerful. You don’t remember a track because it was technically impressive. You remember it because it played during a boss fight you barely survived, or during a quiet moment when you stopped moving just to take everything in.
The music becomes stitched to the experience you had, not the one someone else had.
Wizardry and the Value of Respectful Revival
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a great example of how music can help bridge generations. The original 1981 game didn’t even have a soundtrack. Just a simple sound when you hit a wall.
The modern version added a full orchestral score that leaned into tabletop fantasy roots without rewriting the game’s identity. It didn’t try to modernize Wizardry into something unrecognizable. It respected what it was, while giving modern players something emotionally rich to hold onto.
That balance matters. Preservation doesn’t always mean freezing something in time. Sometimes it means carefully adding what was never possible before, without losing the original soul.
The Soundtrack as a Time Machine
You don’t need the console to remember how a game made you feel. Hearing a familiar theme can instantly bring back a room, a moment, or even a stage of your life. Late nights. Summer breaks. That one save file you never wanted to delete.
It’s the kind of thing most gamers recognize. You hear a theme and you can almost feel where you left off. Maybe you had just reached a tough area and decided to stop there, or saved right before trying something risky. The screen isn’t in front of you, but the music brings the whole moment back anyway.
In that way, game music becomes a kind of archive. Not of code or assets, but of memory. It preserves how games felt to play, not just how they looked. Even if the game itself is gone, the sound of that adventure can still find you.
What Lasts After the Game
As gaming keeps moving forward, more games will inevitably be left behind. That’s just how technology works. But the music has a better chance of surviving the shift.
If nothing else, it reminds you that the experiences mattered. That they happened. And that even if the game itself fades, the feeling doesn’t have to. Sometimes, the soundtrack is what keeps the door open.
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