Adaptation and Diegesis of Pre-Existing Music in Historically-Based Video Games

The modern state of gaming has seen a variety of interactive narratives play out in a variety of worlds. A major setting of video games is ‘the past’, including historically-set games which are meant to mimic real epochs and places, all with varying degrees of accuracy to their factual counterparts. Interestingly, a pattern emerges within the soundtracks of these games: the use of pre-existing, diegetic music. As observed by scholars such as William Gibbons and Andra Ivǎnescu, such music is frequently chosen to make use of an audience’s prior musical associations within the context of the gameworld (Gibbons 2018, 43; Ivǎnescu 2019, 18-19). However, pre-existing music comes with the risk of misaligning with the player’s expectations for a given piece. Additionally, using diegetic music creates an additional risk of misalignment between the observed action and the heard sound (Neumeyer 2009, 31). Combining these two modalities could initially seem to be not worth the collective risks, but games like the historically-based Pentiment (2022) successfully integrate their audio with game narratives through careful curation of pre-existing musical works. What purpose does pre-existing music serve to warrant its widespread inclusion in historically-based games? A comparison of two works from Pentiment, the non-diegetic “Pierro’s Pride” and the diegetic “Rüdeger’s Rehearsal,” will demonstrate how diegetic music is bound by the depicted action, thereby musically reinforcing it, while non-diegetic music takes more liberties in its historical accuracy.