The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers.

Abstract

Video games are perhaps the primary pop cultural differentiator between myself and my parents’ generation. In the early 1960s, my grandad would order his 9-year-old son to turn off the unfamiliar noise produced by four long-haired louts from Liverpool emanating from a tiny monochrome TV set. Thirty years later, the pattern repeated itself and it was my mother’s turn to beg me and my brother to turn off Pokémon on our Gameboys or Ocarina of Time on a newly acquired N64. We had been brought up alongside such technology as it developed, with memories of Doom and Fun School on cumbersome desktop computers, London’s SegaWorld, and the aesthetics of digital imperfection. There were exceptions, of course. My maternal grandfather rather liked the Beatles, and owned records by The Rolling Stones, The Who, Santana, Eric Clapton, and George Benson. Similarly, my parents remember playing the iconic Atari game Pong in pubs and arcades during the early 1970s. But what tends to unify each generation as it falls in love with the definitive icons of its own era is the sense that it is privy to something entirely new and bemusing to outsiders. For Baby Boomers, it was the sound of the British Invasion; for Millennials, it was video games.