Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music, by William Gibbons

Unlimited Replays occupies a significant place in game music scholarship. It is the first book devoted to ever-intriguing instances of classical music in video games, and through addressing that topic, it seeks to build a bridge from ludomusicology toward more longstanding fields of enquiry. The author, William Gibbons, is concerned not only with what classical music does in games but also with broader questions of cultural value and meaning. The book's narrative thus privileges cases in which the combination of classical music and video games engages (knowingly or not) with common understandings of those forms as, respectively, “art” and “entertainment.” Within this remit, the range of examples covered is admirably broad, from uses of classical music in video games on conventional systems (new and old, familiar and unfamiliar) to mobile apps that “gamify” classical works. Consideration is also given to the journey of original game music onto classical concert-hall stages...