Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Video-game music remixers turn bleeps and bloops into everything from Swedish death metal to hillbilly pickin'.
Mar 18, 2002 | One night in February, Dale North, 25, and Sean "Ailsean" Stone, 24, were playing Scrabble on Games.com, when suddenly they were recognized by their fans.
A chat message flashed across Stone's monitor. Wow! Are you the real Ailsean?
Stone was flattered, although surprised. "Yeah," he responded. "Why on earth would someone impersonate a little-known musician whose SMALL amount of fame comes from remixing video game music?"
Stone and North are microstars in an only-on-the-Net subculture: video-game music remixing. Remixers take the original tune, melody, chord progression or rhythm of a video-game song and reinvent it.
North produces lush orchestral and symphonic arrangements inspired by tunes from the likes of MegaMan 3. He lives in Bentonville, Ark., where he works at Walmart corporate headquarters handling merchandise samples. Stone, aka Ailsean, hailed as "the Metallica of game remixing" by one admiring peer, is known for his heavy-metal riffs inspired by the music of the Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. Stone teaches guitar in Alton, Ill.
Remixers take the video-game music drilled into their brains by countless hours of obsessive gaming and reorganize it for their own purposes. Those familiar bleeps and blips reemerge in elaborate orchestral numbers, jazz, techno, ska, funk, hip-hop, even Swedish death metal. It's one way to get those haunting tunes out of your head -- recast them in your homegrown musical score.
Remixers upload their musical styling to sites like OverClocked ReMix and VGMix, where fans review their songs. Remixers also hold contests in which they compete to do the best arrangement of a specific video-game tune. A forthcoming CD will collect arrangements paying tribute to the music of the Final Fantasy video-game series.
Remixers tend to be young guys, in their teens or early 20s, who are lifelong gamers. "We grew up with this stuff," says Jake Kaufman, 20, of Seattle, one of the creators of the VGMix site. "When you play games as much as we do, a lot of the exposure to music that you get is from these video games."
But video-game music fandom isn't merely a geeky subculture. Some name brand musicians have composed for game soundtracks -- Nine Inch Nails' theme for Quake I may be the most famous. And in at least one country, Japan, video-game music is taken quite seriously. There, it's sold in CD soundtracks, which hit the pop charts, just like blockbuster movie soundtracks. That's not yet true in the United States, but as video gaming continues to increase its cultural and financial clout, video-game music will only become more important. Someday soon, the theme from Grand Theft Auto 3 is going to hit the Top 40 in the United States, and a hot salsa remix will no doubt be on the Net soon after.
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