Music and Memory: The Songs That Attach Themselves to Your Most-Loved Games

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”

That was 19th Century English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He’s considerably more famous for penning the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”, as well as the illustrious opening line “It was a dark and stormy night”, but he was definitely onto something with his take on music. There is something special about it.

It’s that magic that makes you grin like a madman hooning around in 3,500 pounds of American muscle in Driver: San Francisco to the crunching neo soul funk rock of The Heavy’s Big Bad Wolf. The magic that gives you a mild shiver when the haunting guitar of Jose Gonzalez’s Far Away fades in as you enter Mexico for the first time in Red Dead Redemption.