Source Coda with Ryan Thompson airs Mondays at 7 p.m. ET on 90.5 and streaming online from WKAR.
Assistant Professor Ryan Thompson is the host of a new radio show exploring the rich tapestry of music in video games. From instrumental works honoring the music of early video games to the rich orchestration and nuance of contemporary titles, Source Coda listeners can expect a thoughtfully curated audio experience from ComArtSci’s own resident musicologist.
On the show, Thompson has so far shared music from games like Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Skyrim, Halo: Combat Evolved, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Helldivers 2, Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Cross, Journey, Tchia, Baldur’s Gate 3, Bioshock Infinite, The Talos Principle, The Last of Us, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Castlevania, Timespinner, Ghost of Tsushima, The Witcher, Diablo, and more … and we’re only five episodes deep.
So, we sat down with our expert in video game music to get the full scoop.
Q&A with Ryan Thompson
How do you choose which tracks to feature? Do any episodes follow a theme?
Each episode has a theme, which I usually announce at the top of the hour. The first episode was “Introductions and Overtures,” including my own introduction to WKAR. For the week of Valentine’s Day, I had a bunch of love songs and anthems.
As for how I choose each piece, I rely on my own experience teaching game music history and my familiarity with various portions of the wider fan community of both professional and amateur arrangers. I play a mix of pieces written for games (both well-known and relatively obscure) and arrangements of those pieces. The most obscure game the show has covered is likely Ambition: A Minuet in Power, and there have been a few pieces from OverClocked ReMix that won’t be well-known outside that specific community.
What sorts of themes are you excited to explore in future episodes?
I’m sure I’ll eventually start to repeat episode themes, but in the future, I’d like to have an episode dedicated to exploring, one about vehicles and travel, one about fighting and conflict (lots of choral music there), and as the weather warms, an episode about sunrises and sunsets. I’m sure I’ll have more topics come to mind as I continue to program the show.
Episode three (aired January 20, 2025), was dedicated to the game Ghost of Tsushima. Are you planning more episodes focused on a single game title, soundtrack, composer or ensemble in the future?
The Ghost of Tsushima episode came about because I thought that the orchestral suite adjacent to the game’s creation was particularly interesting. I know there have been a few arranged symphonic suites of other titles, and at some point, I would like to find an excuse to play the London Symphony Orchestra’s recording of “Born With the Gift of Magic,” a symphonic poem including themes from Final Fantasy VI.
Attendees of the 2024 North American Conference on Video Game Music were treated to a special performance by your friend, Laura Intravia. Are you planning any fun guest appearances on Source Code?
Laura actually did me yet another favor recently, and the fourth episode of the show was a conversation with DiscoCactus, the band she’s part of alongside Ben Wallace, Sam and Pete Bobinski, Doug Perry, and Michigan’s own Matheus Souza (a music professor at Western Michigan University). I have one more “interview” style episode already recorded, a third planned, and it’s my hope to get around to five or six of them in the 26-episode season I have planned with WKAR.
In what way(s) have game developers and composers approached the sound of video games differently over the decades?
Technology has shifted, of course – the 8-bit NES of my own childhood outputs electronic music in five channels, and today we have high quality recordings. Usually on the show I avoid the very early days of game audio and play arrangements of most tunes written before 1998 or so for this reason. However, the more interesting answer is that composers have started to think beyond a linear score in recent generations of games, moving to dynamic audio and live combinations of multiple instrumental layers that trigger independently based on player input; in practice, this means that a modern game soundtrack is often only one possible rendition of thousands.
What about across geographical regions, or across genres?
You can trace various influences to regions somewhat, but this gets dicey fast. I will note that there is a generation of Japanese video game composers absolutely influenced by a specific form of jazz – if you’ve ever heard Casiopea’s “Mint Jams” album, you can trace some influence there. Similarly, there are a few European composers in the early days of gaming that trend towards an understanding of hardware not as “capable of outputting X number of channels representing various instrument parts,” but as one cohesive electronic instrument capable of doing things human performers and physical instruments could never accomplish. Tim Follin’s title screen music for Solstice (NES, 1990) comes to mind.
Today, regional influence is a little more difficult to pin down, as the modern Internet has made our world much smaller than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
The radio show is biased towards certain genres as a result of being part of WKAR Classical radio – Source Coda isn’t likely to be featuring house music anytime soon, though it shows up in games (and sometimes even with mid-Michigan connections!)
Is there a standard process to the way music is incorporated in a game’s design?
Nope! What’s called “implementation” (putting the music into the game) is done with a variety of techniques and approaches. There are a few common pieces of middleware software that often get used for it, but I think most players would be hard-pressed to hear a game soundtrack and have a strong guess as to whether Wwise, FMOD, or other tools were used to do that implementation.
We generally assume the gameplay comes first, but do you know of a time when a game was inspired by music, rather than the other way around?
Ghost of Tsushima is the one AAA (large production team, well-known publisher, “flagship”) title that commissioned music for inspiration very early on in the production process, which is a large part of why I chose to feature that music with its own episode. It’s far more common for music to receive consideration only after other production is well underway.
In your opinion, what makes for truly great video game music? / What’s the mark of a team that really knows what they’re doing?
I am always advocating for teams to consider audio sooner in the collaborative process. More time for composers to work as part of the entire team makes for a much better product at every scale and scope of game, from small teams (Tchia) to the largest productions (Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth).
What types of courses would you recommend to someone wanting to pursue the music-side of game design?
On the game development side of campus, come take MI 235 – Introduction to Video Game Audio — with yours truly! Every other year (it’ll roll around in Spring of 2026) I also teach a course on how to take finished music (and sound effect) assets and implement them into video games, which is an essential skill for audio professionals wanting to find work in the industry.
I’d also highly encourage anyone wanting to pursue music-making to inquire over at the College of Music about taking a semester of composition lessons, which they offer for non-majors. Dr. Dave Biedenbender is the chair of composition over there, and their whole team is great.
What’s an example of a game you recommend your students play for the sound design?
For music and sound as immersive elements tied to gameplay, I can’t recommend Astro Bot on the PS5 enough – there's a good reason why it won Game of the Year for 2024. For sound design specifically, I’d ask students to get their hands underneath a fighting game or two, like Tekken or Street Fighter – so much of that gameplay is tied to subtle audio cues that have to land just right.
As for music, more than any one game (see the below, though) I would invite students to listen to things outside their comfort zones and continuously strive to broaden their musical horizons. If students know orchestral repertoire, listen to some fusion jazz, some country, or some hip-hop; and for students who come in without much formal training, European concert music has persevered for centuries in part because it has a lot to offer.
We must ask: what are your favorite video game soundtracks of all time?
From my childhood: Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. For modern soundtracks, I’ve fallen in love with the extensive scores to each campaign of Final Fantasy XIV, and Darren Korb’s half-steampunk, half-Western, all-awesome score to Bastion is a constant album for me.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Just that it remains an enormous privilege to have a job that builds bridges across so many divides – teaching in game development while occasionally working with College of Music students; starting conversations between scholars and practitioners of game music; and making visible the incredible amounts of un-credentialed musical talent that exist in “amateur” (that is, unpaid) fan communities surrounding video game audio today.