Music must be some of the most viscerally evocative stuff we’ve managed to come up with in 65 million years of otherwise mostly drab and tedious evolution. Music and calendars featuring dachshund puppies. For most people, music is all tangled up in emotions and memories, and frequently both at the same time.

When I’m gaming with friends, for example, I’m in the habit of spontaneously breaking into the theme tune from Jurassic Park. It’s an instantly recognisable bit of music, and its immediate and vivid recollections of prowling raptors, guys dying on toilets, and maths strikes awe and terror into the hearts of everyone else. My game plan’s on the bleeding edge of cheap psychology. So’s running over my own grenades, of course.

Anyway, I’ve been recently playing the Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Special Edition. Now, the Monkey Island tune – and I’m sure every person worth agreeing with will agree – is the greatest video game theme tune ever. Quest for Glory’s was pretty awesome too, the Space Quest series deserves a special mention, and despite not having played one in years, I can still hum the Leisure Suit Larry theme on demand.

You’ll notice, perhaps, that those are all rather old games. So what ever happened to theme tunes? I mean, I suppose Mario consistently trots out reiterations of the same motif, even Unreal Tournament is still using a variation of the original’s, and I’m sure a bunch of Japanese games I’ve never heard of have been stuffing the exact same trashy MIDI track into every franchise title since 1986. But as a sort of gaming institution of the 80s and early 90s, theme tunes are now mostly extinct.

That’s not to say that games these days don’t feature some profoundly moving music and scores of their own– Braid jumps to mind – but there’s something to be said for the reassuring familiarity of repetition, and instantly recognisable theme tunes are no exception. It’s kinda like a subliminal launching message saying, “Oh hey! Remember me? \:D/ You totally loved me in that other game, and you’re totally going to love me in this.” It totally didn’t work in Escape from Monkey Island, though.

Discuss music in games in the forums