E-Mail This Article to a Friend Name that tune Music in video games has become a marketer's delight, but is the trend bad for gamers? BY MITCH KRPATA

Admit it: you sometimes find yourself humming the theme music from Super Mario Bros when you're out walking. Or you still tell people that the music from the Hard Man level in Mega Man 3 sounds like the "zestfully clean" jingle. Perhaps, if you're truly hardcore, the jingling chimes from the venerable Final Fantasy prelude bring a tear to your eye. From the earliest MIDI bleeps and bloops to more recent symphonic overtures, video-game music has been as integral a part of the gaming experience as the start button and one-ups. But that seems to be changing.

Since games moved from cartridges to CD-ROMs, publishers have been doing all they can to take advantage of the additional storage space. This has meant everything from crappy FMV cutscenes to crappy voiceovers. Lately, more than anything, it's meant the inclusion of rock and hip-hop songs from established recording artists. And, yes, they are mostly crappy.

Certainly not all are. Activision recently announced the track list for their upcoming Tony Hawk's Underground 2. The game includes cuts by canonical punk bands like Joy Division, X, and The Melvins. I'm certainly not going to fault anyone for cashing checks based on their music – we've all got to eat, even anarchist punks – but one has to wonder if any of these people would actually play THUG 2. Somehow, Ian Curtis doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would have wanted to sit around, drink some beers, and rock the PS2. My instinct is to interpret the inclusion of these songs in a video game as an erosion of the music's impact, but one could easily argue that it amplifies the game's quality.

More to the point is what effect this trend has on the experience of gaming. EA Sports has been including pop songs in Madden for years, and it has always struck me as funny. The songs don't play when your team is on the field, but they pop up during training camp, at the play-selection screen, and at every menu. Hearing Franz Ferdinand or Andrew W.K. in the context of a football video game is even more incongruous than the increasingly bizarre halftime shows at the Super Bowl every year. For a game that painstakingly re-creates the game of football and has play-by-play from Al Michaels and John Madden, I wonder if any of us would demand more than a snippet of the Monday Night Football theme.

Certainly, the record companies get what they want. After an intense Burnout 3 session, I walked away with "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" by My Chemical Romance stuck in my head for a day and a half. They probably don't care that I thought the song was terrible, just that they'd penetrated my lousy music shield. But here's the rub: when I hear My Chemical Romance on the radio or MTV, I don't think about Burnout 3 and how great it was. The game and the song are not inextricably tied in my consciousness. By contrast, I once heard a DJ at a club start mixing the Final Fantasy prelude over a beat and started wondering when FFXII is coming out.

For gamers, the mental connection between games and music only goes one way. That's why the Minibosses are enjoying more success than probably even they predicted. The band is a four-piece that plays instrumental versions of classic video-game tunes. Their rendition of the Contra music is downright transcendent. (Check out their web site for song samples.)

You might ask why I'll endorse a rock band that plays video-game music, but not rock music in video games. The reason for that is simple. I can choose to listen to the Minibosses, or not to. That's the extent of my decision. Whereas when I play Madden, or Burnout, or THUG, I don't really have a choice about whether I want to hear Midtown's "Give It Up." Sure, in most of these titles there's an option to turn the songs off, but then there's no music at all.

Where is the great video-game music? It's still out there. The Final Fantasy series continues to provide epic scores. The Ratchet and Clank games include hilarious, bombastic music. Nevertheless, I fear this is a dying art. When it's quicker and cheaper to license a single from the Von Bondies than to pay a composer to score a game, it's hard to blame publishers for the choice they make. And while I'd argue that games today are better than they've ever been, it's hard not to feel like we're losing something in this cross-pollination with the music industry.

Have you heard any truly memorable game music in the past five years?

Isn't that a little sad?