Alrighty, so as you may have gathered by now I’m a pretty big fan of the music in some videogames, and I feel it’s often a vital part of completing the experience. This said, sometimes when you play a game a lot, the stuff in the game just gets so repetitive it’s crazy. Right now I’m playing a ton of Minecraft, working on a stupidly overambitious project, and I’ve been playing Daft Punk pretty much constantly while I do so.
Back when I was a young teen, my mom got me Morrowind and System of a Down – Steal This Album on the same day, so I can’t listen to the latter without thinking of the former. They are inextricably linked for me.
Do you have any particular games and musicians who are linked for you? Any preferred artists for particular games or genres? Tell us in the comments about the music you listen to while gaming!
Usually I listen to the game soundtrack, but as you mentioned, sometimes you’ve heard it all. Back when I was playing WoW, I’d heard pretty much everything a billion times, so I’d turn off the in-game music, pull up my playlist, dump every track I owned into it, and hit shuffle. I had a “WoW playlist” a couple of times but… nah, usually it was just my entire collection on shuffle.
Oh wait, Lady Gaga was my official PvP music for a while.
EDIT: I JUST REMEMBERED, there was a period of time where I listened to nothing but Men Without Hats while doing Icecrown dailies, so now I can’t listen to certain Men Without Hats songs without thinking of jousting.
Daft Punk is FANTASTIC. As to other genres of music, I often find that high-energy, bass music (when it’s not urging me to get up an’ dance) really keeps me going on a project or when I’m mindlessly grinding through a game. Another thing I tend to do is sub in soundtracks from other games into mine. Skies of Arcadia and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are both really great, with fantastic musical scores that work in multiple settings.
As to particular associations; I tend to associate musical scores with periods of my life. Tracks like Airwave’s When Things Go Wrong generate monolithic amounts of nostalgia from my early days in WoW when the world was still a forlorn mystery with many corners yet unexplored. I miss those days.
Y’know, thinking about it, there really isn’t an artist that fits MC better than Daft Punk. Our work is never over…
I spent an entire summer playing and replaying FF7 and Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers simultaneously.
They are stamped in my brain together for the rest of my life. Coincidentally, they are also two of my favorite things ever.
Anything with everything, I’ll be playing Vivaldi with HoN and Arctic Monkeys with TF2 or the other way around, so long as I’m listening to some music outside the game.
Exactly, orange! I hit random on itunes and go with it. I’m partial to groups like Almah, Blind Guardian, Aryeon, and a few others of similar vein. I also love me some classical music by Grieg, Vivaldi, Khachaturian, and many others.
Some time ago (actually some years ago – these were late 90’s) I have had an old tape player near my computer and I was hooked on two things:
1. The dream of the Blue Turtles
2. Syndicate Wars
So guess what had been playing in an infinite loop on the tape player and who has flashbacks of many different streets, just not the Bourbon one while hearing the “Moon over Bourbon Street”?
I usually just listen to the game music and, oddly enough, when I do put on different music it’s often other game music! I have seemed to linked (1)White Requiem and (2)Queen of Rose from the BlazBlue soundtrack to Karazhan for example lol
Every time I hear Time 2 Duel from the old Yu-Gi-Oh! Music to Duel By CD I get flashes of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. Back in the day I seriously set up my X-Box so that it would play that song as soon as I entered a race xD
I also tend to link various random other things together, like Hershey bars/2-manning dungeons in WoW, or Terrydactyland (Banjo-Tooie)/Jimmy Neutron. We used to have one of those TVs where you could split it in half and have two things going on at once and now whenever certain episodes of Fairly Oddparents come on I want to play Blinx! Oh how I love the human mind…
Diablo II and Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory
No way can I think of one without the other. “In The End” while killing Diablo was amazing.
Usually just the game music, but I’ve experimented with listening to stuff while playing WoW, mostly techno.
Daft Punk is AMAZING. The Tron soundtrack is so cool! And Paul Oakenfold does good trance/house music. Juno Reactor, the guys who did the Matrix theme music, can have some cool songs; they incorporated a lot of esoteric vocals, almost like John Crosby.
Also I’ve been listening to Glitch Mob lately, they crank out some good electronic music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WImWuxHbQCw&NR=1
I had a mix of Daft Punk, Rammstein, White Zombie/Rob Zombie, Lords of Acid and a few other spot songs setup for XP grinding in WoW. Back when I played EQ it was a LOT of Tool, Metallica, Anthrax and Pantera….
Then there have been the few times while playing TF2 that I locked a couple of different J-Pop/J-Rock songs in a loop… Yeah… dancing a grenade launcher ballet got to be real funny then…
I started playing Oblivion just as I got a bunch of music loaded onto my 360. However the album Minutes to Midnight – Linkin Park is the one I most associate with Oblivion now. I cannot hear one of those songs without thinking of my daring escape from a sewer and then some.
I was a late bloomer in the WoW community. I came in during the latter days of BC and coincidentally, it was also when I picked up Light Grenades by Incubus. Not a song goes by on the album that I don’t think of fishing in Stonetalon mountains, running away screaming from Artorius, or two-manning Ony (ah, the good old days lol).