The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music

Introduction

Tim Summers, in his book Understanding Video Game Music, says that it’s traditional for music books to begin with a quote, so let’s start with one from him:¹

Ever since the inception of the video game, the medium has looked to other moving-image media for inspiration—games based upon Star Trek have been documented from the late 1960s and Atari produced a game based on Jaws … in the same year as the film’s release.²

While Summers focuses on live-action films here, the connection between video games and animation is equally strong.³ This makes a lot of sense. After all, in most genres of video games, the player is literally animating their avatar: making them go from place to place; moving their arms to swing a sword, or shoot a ...