VideoGameMusicNerd turns one!

It's hard to believe that I began this blog a year ago today.  The journey has been amazing; it's been reading, watching, listening, learning, writing, reflecting, growing.   I've encountered so many new ideas.  I've met people and interacted with game music lovers, creators, and scholars both on the blog and outside of it.  In a few weeks, I start teaching a class on Video Game Music, a long time dream of mine.  I've already proposed other levels of game music courses I'd like to create in the future.  After having learned so much this year, it's amazing to me that there's not an opportunity to study this music and business inside music schools.  Composers could benefit from it, sound designers, engineers....  This is a major way for musicians to make a living and it's only going to get more common in the future.  Maybe I can help open the doors for game music and academia to embrace a bit more.  I think I'm already helping!

I made this video in celebration of my blog turning one!  It's purely for fun, and completely embarrassing.  Yes, that is my (much thicker in childhood) southern accent saying "zoom in on the screen!"  Seriously though, I made this video because I sometimes feel people think my interest is random... for me, it's not!  There's a continuity and love of the music from a young age...

If you're new to the blog, or revisiting after a hiatus, I've recently changed the layout.  Now there's a search feature at the right (put in composers, game titles, musical topics, or anything you can think of!).  Below the search is a list of the most popular labels I use.  Here are some explanations of the most common threads:

Analysis:  Entries where I present indepth musical analysis of a certain game audio.  Often these entries are comparisons across games or systems.
Musings:  Can be quite long and rambling or very short.  Whatever is currently on my mind with game audio goes here.
My Gaming Audio History:  I'm progressing through the chronology of all the games I played growing up from a kid to today.  Re-listening and watching to gameplay, or in some cases, replaying them.  Thinking greatly about the music I heard that motivated me to want to get more involved in this field.
Playing Games: I find a game I've never played before.  I play it for a while and give my immediate reaction to the audio.
Surveying Literature:  If I've read it about game audio, I've made some notes about it here.  Read my reactions or peruse the titles and think of them as a bibliography on game audio.

Thanks to all who've visited, read, and commented over the last year!  I appreciate you!