Adaptive music has long played an important role in videogames, as far back as 1978’s Space Invaders, whose four simple but evocative notes increase in speed as your targets approach the bottom of the screen. For all the increased sophistication in musical fidelity since then, Jesper Nordin argues, the way music is created for videogames has remained fundamentally the same. While we expect every other aspect of a game, from lighting to physics, to be calculated and rendered in realtime, the music generally consists of recorded loops that have to be hard-coded into the game. Now
