Unexpected Musician x Video Games Collaborations

Bladee, Aphex Twin, Burial, DMX, and more

Written by Sik Frydas

Video games and music have always been tangled up. Before streaming algorithms sorted sound for us, music discovery often happened with a controller in hand, on a loading screen or mid-level. Many of the most important sounds of the last three decades were first heard this way.

Video games are not only a discovery channel, but a source of inspiration for artists, and a suite of tools for them to use. Grime pioneers produced their earliest melodies on Music 2000, a humble PlayStation music-making game, while producers like Burial have spent careers chasing the feeling of the games they grew up with.

Over time, more and more of those kids who came of age playing video games grew into prominent artists. As a result, the crossover of the music and video game worlds became more deliberate and inventive. Musicians increasingly shape how games sound from the inside, whether they are scoring whole worlds, or premiering exclusive tracks. It’s a bit like our generation’s version of a movie soundtrack.

What has emerged is a rich cultural intersection, where music and video games meet to form a single artistic object. Many of the greatest artists of the past fifty years have lent their talents to video games, or been immortalized in them, and the outcomes have often been remarkable. Here are some of our favorites.

This is part one of a two-part series.

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Bladee & James Ferraro made Sanctuary

Last year, Drain Gang’s Bladee and experimental producer James Ferraro joined forces on Sanctuary, an interactive digital poem. The pair created and designed the game together, with Bladee also, naturally, helping score it. The result was a haunting sonic landscape, with distant whirring and whistling layered with Bladee’s distorted voice.

Powered by Microsoft’s Azure AI, it was a text-based adventure in which players navigated a post-apocalyptic labyrinth, conversing with NPCs built on generative AI, each exchange unrepeatable and slightly uncanny. Fittingly for a work about decay, Microsoft eventually killed the project for being too expensive to run.

Machine Girl did the whole Neon White soundtrack

When Ben Esposito, lead designer of breakneck indie platformer Neon White, heard Machine Girl’s 2020 EP RePorpoised Phantasies, he sought out the American electronic duo to compose his game’s entire original soundtrack. It was an inspired match. Neon White is a game about speed, precision, and repetition, where levels are replayed dozens of times in pursuit of a faster finish time, and Machine Girl’s frantic, breakbeat-driven maximalism turned every restart into a rush.

The result was two distinct albums totalling 41 tracks, steeped in turn-of-the-millennium electronica and the crunchy, optimistic futurism of early-2000s console games. For many players, the soundtrack outlived the game itself, which is reflected in its streaming numbers.

Def Jam rappers appearing Def Jam Vendetta

A groundbreaking entry in the crossover hall of fame, Def Jam Vendetta took real-life artists from the Def Jam roster, such as DMX, Ludacris, Method Man, and Redman, and turned them into playable street fighters. With over 40 characters and a soundtrack stacked with classics like ‘Party Up’ and ‘Bring the Pain,’ it treated rappers the way games treat superheroes. No crossover since has matched its swagger.

GTA V’s Radio Dial

GTA V, the second best-selling videogame of all time, bottled the counter-culture of a generation, and its radio dial was a huge part of that. Rockstar understood something simple: listening happens while driving, and if players were going to spend hundreds of hours behind a virtual wheel, the radio had to be well-curated.

Most famously, Frank Ocean hosted his own station, blonded RADIO, alongside producers Vegyn, Roof Access, and Federico Aliprandi, weaving his own ‘Provider’ and ‘Ivy’ together with Aphex Twin’s ‘Flim’ and Jme’s ‘Man Don’t Care.’ Elsewhere on the dial, Flying Lotus ran FlyLo FM, spinning Tyler, The Creator, Outkast, Thundercat, and more.

The tradition looks set to continue: controversial UK media figure Alhan Gencay is rumoured to have a station in the upcoming GTA 6, which would make him perhaps the first podcast-era personality to graduate into open-world radio.

Aphex Twin Everywhere

Richard D. James might be electronic music’s great recluse, but his music gets around plenty in the video game world, appearing across racing, action, and open-world games. ‘Windowlicker’ featured on FlyLo FM, ‘Z Twig’ turned up in GTA IV, ‘CIRKLON3’ landed on the Watch Dogs 2 soundtrack, and a couple of his tracks found a natural home in the WipEout series.

Burial sampled Metal Gear Solid 2

In this case, traffic flowed the other way. Burial, dance music’s celebrated phantom, famously lifted the musical intro from Metal Gear Solid 2 for his era-defining ‘Archangel,’ transforming a stealth game’s menu ambience into one of the most emotionally grasping openings in modern electronic music.

He’s also compared his own music to exploring the misty environments of Silent Hill; rain-slicked, half-abandoned, lit by a dying torch.

Skrillex did the fight intro music for Mortal Kombat X

By 2015, Skrillex was arguably the most recognizable producer in the world, and Mortal Kombat X was a franchise built on maximum impact. Skrillex produced ‘Reptile’s Theme’ for the game, a piece of music engineered for that pivotal moment infighting games: the second before the round starts.

It was also a neat closing of a loop. Skrillex was one the generation of producers that learned about sound design partly through the crunch and snarl of ‘90s arcade games. Here, he gave back to the form.

Brian Eno did the music for Spore

Ambient music’s founding theorist scoring a game about the evolution of life from single cell to interstellar civilization is, on paper, the most Brian Eno thing imaginable. In practice it was even more so. Rather than write fixed cues for Will Wright’s 2008 sim, Eno worked with the game’s audio team on generative systems, so the music assembled itself in response to what the player’s creature was doing.

Eno had spent decades arguing that music could be a system rather than a recording, something that grows and changes on its own terms. With Spore, Eno materialized this.

Everyone x Fortnite

Fortnite has, arguably, become the biggest concert venue on the planet: artists like Marshmello, Travis Scott, and Ariana Grande have each performed in the game.

Musicians such as The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, and EsDeeKid all have wearable skins, with Esdee’s designed by frequent collaborator Kai Ghattaura.

Michael Jackson’s beat-em-up arcade game Moonwalker

In 1990, several videogames based on Michael Jackson’s 1988 film Moonwalker arrived, all gloriously strange. The isometric arcade beat-em-up version had Michael fighting goons with magical energy beams, unleashing screen-clearing dance attacks, and rescuing kidnapped children; the 2D platformer edition sent players searching for children hidden behind doors, inside car boots, and under bushes, and even featured Michael’s pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. The purest artifact of pop-star excess ever committed to a cartridge.

Multiple Artists x WipEout

Few games bridged worlds like WipEout, the anti-gravity racer that brought 90s club culture screaming into British living rooms. Much of the soundtrack was composed by Welsh musician Tim Wright, aka CoLD SToRAGE, but the series became legendary for its licensed music (The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Daft Punk) and its sleek futurist look, courtesy of iconic design group The Designers Republic.

Multiple Artists x Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

For anyone born in the early-to-mid 90s, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater defined not just a generation’s hobbies but their listening habits. Certain tracks are permanently welded to the franchise, none more so than Goldfinger’s “Superman,” the defining anthem of the original game.

Official playlists now place new-era artists like Denzel Curry and Fontaines D.C. alongside A Tribe Called Quest and Motörhead. Few games can claim to have been a generation’s first great mixtape in quite the same way as Pro Skater.

Carlos Rico made a bootleg GTA London

Last summer, Carlos Rico went mega-viral with a mock-up trailer for his imagined GTA London, packed frame-to-frame with references: Ferdi’s “Why you coming fast?”, the Anuvahood traffic warden, and Munya Chawawa’s Unknown P.

Musically, it featured nearly the whole UK scene: Skepta, Jme, D Double E, Central Cee, plus a nod to grime collective Travs Presents. The design details ran just as deep: Virgil Abloh’s Maybach (likely nodding to Skepta’s), the Boy Better Know x Corteiz collab, and Arsenal’s iconic 22/23 green-and-yellow pre-match shirt. For a few days, the most talked-about game in Britain was one nobody would ever be able to play.

Hudson Mohawke made a game for his album

Long before the stadium-sized brass and the Kanye co-signs, Hudson Mohawke marked the release of his 2009 debut Butter with something far sillier: Butterstar Galactica, an official browser pinball game built as a promotional companion to the record. It was lo-fi, the sort of Flash-era curio that arrived, buzzed around the blogs for a fortnight, and vanished.

It also made perfect sense. Butter is an album of sugar-rush synths, chopped R&B and cartoon physics, and a pinball table is arguably its ideal delivery mechanism: bright, chaotic, over in ninety seconds, immediately replayed.

deadmau5 cameo in Goat Simulator

Not every crossover needs to be grand. Coffee Stain’s Goat Simulator, built off physics and bad ideas, tucked deadmau5 into its world as a cameo, complete with the unmistakable mau5head, waiting to be discovered by anyone headbutting their way around the map.