Tim Summers on Video Game Music and the Mythic Quality of MOTHER/EarthBound

Bookwarm Games

In conversation with Dr Tim Summers of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Ludomusicology, the video game music research group.

https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/timothy-summers

https://www.ludomusicology.org/

His new book is Pixel Soundtracks: Exploring Video Game Music Through Twenty Games

You'll hear snippets of audio from Buck Rogers; Uematsu's FFVI Opera (and Toby Fox/Undertale's Mettaton riffing on it); Dvorak's Songs My Mother Taught Me; the Prelude of Stravinsky's Firebird; the Wagner Museum theme from The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery; the Title theme from the Follins' NES Silver Surfer; the opening of MOTHER/EarthBound Zero (and cf. Undertale's opening); the Michael Nyman/ St Paul's Cathedral Choir arrangement of Suzuki/Tanaka's Eight Melodies from MOTHER; Kondo's Kakariko Village from Zelda: Ocarina of Time; the Summers Resort theme and a fun sound effect moment that plays after you've OK'd naming all your characters and favorite things in EarthBound. I think that's all of them!

I'm working on a post to help me think through more of the lines of argument, examples, and allusions you'll also hear, especially all of the scholarly work mentioned by Dr Summers in the course of this conversation, so check out https://videogameacademia.org/ for more.

Thanks for listening!