Trigger Happy
25
The music industry, too, is slowly waking up to the
commercial possibilities of placing an artist’s song in a
videogame. British rock band Ash is rumored to have
earned nearly $1,000,000 in royalties by licensing just
one song to the hit driving game Gran Turismo.
Gremlin’s Actua Ice Hockey 2 has a soundtrack
entirely by cult post-rockers Mogwai, whose faces have
also been digitized and slapped onto the team members’
heads. Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial-techno
outfit Nine Inch Nails, composed the soundtrack for
Quake. CDs of specially written videogame music now
regularly enter the pop charts in Japan, and videogame
scores are now eligible for three categories of
soundtrack music in the annual Grammy Awards.
Videogames now have such a potent influence on
other forms of entertainment that they raise a clutch of
questions about what they really have in common with
the older forms. For example, David Bowie, well
known as a man with an eye for the next big thing,
wrote and performed (with guitarist Reeves Gabrels) an
entire concept album for the soundtrack to the 1999
videogame Omikron: The Nomad Soul. At the Los
Angeles press conference to announce this
collaboration, Bowie said he approached the project as
