Kamp, Summers & Sweeney/Ludomusicology, 6. “It’s a me, Mario!” – Playing With Video Game Music

Since its earliest incarnations, video gaming can be seen as a form of ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins, 1992). Besides exploring what can be done within the game itself, players also started to experiment with the soft- and hardware components, the artwork, or the narratives of games in order to create something themselves. The prompt emergence of practices like demos, remixes, chiptunes, or – of course – the creation of self-made levels or entire games is a vivid demonstration of the desire not just to play the games, but also to play with them. The same holds true for video game music. Typing, for example, “Super Mario Bros theme” into the YouTube search will deliver a huge number of videos, in which people have played this tune or recreated it in every way imaginable (see Collins 2013). Furthermore, people also use the sound and/or visual style of the Mario video games in order to create tributes, crossover music videos or their own songs. With the “Automatic Mario” series, for example, a distinct subgenr