Sounds of the Past: Creating Immersion in Video Games Through Diegetic, Pre-Existing Music

The modern state of gaming has seen a variety of interactive narratives play out in a variety of worlds. A major category of setting in video games is ‘the past’, whether that be a form of realistic fiction, an alternate history, or something which draws inspiration from some aspect of the real past to create an entirely imagined location. Despite the differences in their likenesses to our own world, many games referencing the past share a commonality in their musical soundtracks: the use of pre-existing music. Songs like “Drunken Sailor” or “La Cucaracha” are prolific, but there exists an ever-growing variety with less well-known examples. An interesting pattern which emerges in the temporal space of these games is the diegetic use of pre-existing music. Using pre-existing music comes with the risk of not aligning with a player’s expectations for a given piece, and using diegetic music creates a risk of misalignment between the action the player sees and the audio they hear. Combining these two modalities could initially seem to be not worth the collective risks, but games like Pentiment (2022), Assassin’s Creed: Unity (2014), and Life Is Strange: True Colors (2021) all successfully integrate their pre-existing audio with game narratives. What purpose does pre-existing, diegetic music serve to warrant its widespread inclusion in such games? An analysis of the three games and their respective examples will demonstrate the importance of integrating player expectations and experiences with the physical space established in the game to produce a more immersive experience.