A Guide to Video Game Music

From bleeps and bloops to orchestral epics, video game music has evolved into a popular genre in its own right. Here’s our guide to the iconic scores, surprising genre blends, and the composers pushing gaming’s sonic and technical boundaries.

Imagine running riot in Grand Theft Auto, adrenaline pumping, desperate to survive. Now imagine playing this or any video game in monastic silence. The gaming universe would implode without the emotional superpower supplied by soundtrack scores, the music that shifts from background to foreground in a heartbeat to set players’ pulses racing. Arcade video games and home video consoles, launched in the early 1970s, included primitive audio. Programmable sound generators (PSGs) arrived towards the decade’s end. They enabled Space Invaders (1978) to own the first continuous background track, four descending notes repeated in a loop, and supported “chiptune” soundtracks for other hits from the golden age of arcade games, Pac-Man (1980) and Donkey Kong (1981) included. Consumer demand for game consoles in the 1980s led to rapid advances in digital sound technology and to soundtracks more suited to the intimacy of the home than to noisy arcades. Composers worked wonders with limited data capacity to draw enriched timbres from a new generation of sound chips. Koji Kondo, a titan of game music, raised the bar in 1985 with his syncopated Super Mario Bros. theme. His lead was followed by Koichi Sugiyama’s Dragon Quest soundtrack (1986), with its classical music tropes, Nobuo Uematsu’s catchy compositions for Final Fantasy (1987), and the thundering electronic basslines of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994), featuring uncredited compositions by Michael Jackson. Yasunori Mitsuda’s score for Chrono Trigger (1995) is considered to be among the very finest of the chiptune scores. The addition of CD-ROM drives to game consoles in the late 1980s delivered greater musical expression, its technology used to great advantage by the original soundtrack (OST) for Dark Wizard (1993), widely thought to have been the first to employ a full symphony orchestra—in this case, the Tokyo Sonic Orchestra. The emotional impact of game music intensified in the mid-1990s thanks to consoles with CD audio technology. Nathan McCree’s Tomb Raider OST (1996), a haunting blend of choral and orchestral music, and Tappi Iwase’s iconic main theme to Metal Gear Solid (1998) flexed the medium’s new musical muscles. Already a rising star in Hollywood, Harry Gregson-Williams stepped up to co-write the music for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001), while Hans Zimmer channeled his movie experience into the main theme to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009). Studio Ghibli stalwart Joe Hisaishi has co-created epic symphonic scores for video games. His soundtrack to Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2010) ranks with the best orchestral gaming OSTs, up there with Jeremy Soule’s gripping The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim music (2011) and the tuneful lyricism of the Genshin Impact score that Yu-Peng Chen composed in 2020 during his time with the music studio HOYO-MiX. “Genshin Impact used classical orchestration,” Chen told Apple Music Classical in 2025. “This was actually intended to help the game spread throughout the world. The game’s design concepts fused various elements from all over the world.” When it comes to enhancing emotional engagement, Jesper Kyd’s stygian score for Assassin’s Creed II (2009), the monumental symphonic sounds of Grant Kirkhope’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (2012) score, Sarah Schachner’s dark-hued music to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), and Petri Alanko’s Alan Wake II OST (2023) show how far gaming music has traveled since Pac-Man’s heyday.

Each advance in gaming technology has triggered giant strides in creativity. The overwhelming cinematic experience of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (2008), for instance, was matched by Neal Acree and Jason Hayes’ epic score. And there’s atmosphere aplenty in Marcin Przybyłowicz’s hugely popular soundtracks for The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 series. But there are countless other ways to bring a game to life. The use of simple songs, perfectly placed within the arc of a game, can prove just as memorable as a blockbuster score. José González’s “Far Away,” for example, captures the existential loneliness of John Marston, the main protagonist in Red Dead Redemption (2010), as he enters Mexico’s barren landscape. Jessica Curry’s folksong-inspired soundtrack to the 2015 game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, as heard best in the song “The Mourning Tree,” succeeds in combining the unsettling eeriness and familiar homeliness of a remote English village. The use of existing songs, licensed from their rights holders, stretches back to the chiptune versions of tracks by rock band Journey used in Journey Escape (1982). Licensed music has supplied the compelling mix for in-car radio stations unleashed by Grand Theft Auto III (2001), while on a gentler level, Untitled Goose Game (2019), a mischievous mix of stealth puzzles and avian anarchy, casts its musical spell with clips from French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy’s Préludes, reworked by Australian composer Dan Golding. And then there are the pop and rock icons who have taken part in high-profile game collaborations. Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (1990), comprising synthesized versions of Bad and Thriller hits, set the precedent for other big-hitters to follow. None were bigger than David Bowie, who co-created 10 original songs for Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999), or Paul McCartney, who wrote “Hope for the Future” for Destiny (2014).

Video game music has delivered classic songs, earworms, and iconic compositions by the truckload. The hypnotic Tetris theme (1984) introduced millions, perhaps billions, to the 19th-century Russian folk song “Korobeiniki,” becoming a global cultural phenomenon. Kondo’s themes for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda (1986), the latter written as a last-minute substitute for Ravel’s Boléro, and Lena Raine’s “Pigstep” from Minecraft: Nether Update (2020) show just how infectious game music can be. And then there are the quirky songs that have gained an independent life: the bittersweet “Still Alive,” from the closing credits to Portal (2007), was subsequently available as a song in several of the Rock Band games, while Toby Fox’s sparky “Megalovania” from the indie Undertale (2015) enjoyed a papal audience in 2022. Caroline Polachek’s “On the Beach,” originally a rejected demo track for her 2019 album Pang, won instant critical and audience approval through its debut in the 2025 game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. The power ballad “Weight of the World” from 2017’s NieR:Automata now forms the heart of the global NieR live orchestral concert series. Meanwhile, sound designers, key players in game development, have helped introduce existing songs to vast audiences. Kate Bush became a video game megastar when her music was used in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The singer-songwriter’s “Wow” surged in popularity following its inclusion on the game’s fictional Emotion 98.3 radio station playlist. And the FIFA football series has elevated several songs to hit status, such as Caesars’ peppy “Jerk It Out,” which featured in FIFA Football 2004, and Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves” from FIFA 21 that became the game franchise’s most streamed track of all time. Classical composers have also acquired new fans thanks to game soundtracks: Christopher Tin, for instance, received international recognition for his “Baba Yetu”—the first piece of video game music to win a Grammy—from Civilization IV (2005) before creating a series of high-profile studio albums. Even global superstars Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lil Nas X, and Travis Scott have found fresh followers courtesy of game exposure, and countless other solo artists and bands have taken center stage in multiple iterations of music video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And since launching in 1999, the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series has introduced new generations to such totemic punk bands as Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and Goldfinger. “All that was what I grew up listening to—that was the sound of the skate park,” Hawk told Apple Music 1’s Young Money Radio in April 2025. “And so, when I got to do a game, I was like, ‘Let’s throw all this music in there.’”

Classical music entered arcade game history with Juventino Rosas’ Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves), the chiptune soundtrack to Carnival (1980). It also crept into Kinuyo Yamashita’s J.S. Bach-inspired music for Castlevania (1986). The genre has provided rich material since, with Mussorgsky’s A Night on the Bare Mountain intensifying Riku’s battle with Chernabog in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (2012) and Mozart’s Requiem stirring deep emotions in BioShock Infinite (2013). Gaming music has gained a foothold in the concert hall, thanks to pioneering classical soloists and ensembles such as the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Shanghai Philharmonic, and Danish National Symphony Orchestras. “You don’t have to be a gamer to love gaming,” violinist Ray Chen told Alexis Ffrench on the pianist and composer’s Apple Music Radio show Classical Connections Radio in 2024. “Of course, people think of console gaming, but it’s reached this point where gaming is also a lifestyle.” Chen’s album Player 1 includes a beguiling arrangement for violin and orchestra of the main theme from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and “Pallet Town” from Pokémon Red. Chen’s fellow fiddler Angèle Dubeau and her string band La Pietà have taken tracks from their Game Music album on tour, while Lang Lang has featured on the OST to Gran Turismo 5 (2010) and plugged classical audiences into virtuoso piano transcriptions of the “Lovers’ Oath” from Genshin Impact and “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X. And in 1986, as the first of the Dragon Quest games was released, its soundtrack composer Sugiyama produced what would prove to be hugely popular fully orchestrated suites from his music.

Cinematic sound quality, complete with Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, or other advanced immersive audio technologies, has become the benchmark measure of home video consoles. Hyperreal spatial soundscapes and soundtracks that change in response to player behavior and emotions have replaced the “bloops and bleeps” of Pong (1972), the addictive hit on the earliest home consoles. Immersive surround sound forms an essential element in Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk 2077, as it does in Olivier Deriviere’s OST for the medieval horror A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022). Sound designers and composers have developed strikingly sophisticated creative processes, their work supported by heavyweight financial investment and a swelling body of academic research. So, what are the big new trends and where are they heading? Adaptive music, which alters the score in real time, originated from the four-note chiptune that sped up as aliens approached in Space Invaders. Orchestrations and sound layers that morph in sync with onscreen events, like those of Dead Space 2 (2011), Doom (2016), and No Man’s Sky: Journeys (2025), signal the adaptive medium’s seemingly unstoppable evolution. Algorithms lie at the heart of procedural audio, master of generating sound effects at exactly the right moment, and increasingly govern its sibling, generative music. The latter can create infinite musical universes, interacting with and deepening the player’s emotional experience, commonly by piecing together musical fragments or “stems” that have been designed to fit together seamlessly. Raine’s music for the 2018 game Celeste not only influenced some of the game’s design, but blends with its gameplay—her soundtrack adopts specific instruments for characters, employs musical motifs to denote states of play, and encourages players to complete levels. Faced with the increasing complexity of video games, composers have used AI to generate a limitless variety of background music and dynamic, unpredictable soundscapes. At the same time, nostalgia’s emotional power has been harnessed to transport mature gamers back to the chiptune era, brilliantly so in Jake Kaufman’s 2014 Shovel Knight soundtrack and Fox’s music for Undertale.