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Rave in a Box: the songs we play to

The songs that stick are the ones that landed while we were doing something joyful. Video games have spent thirty years building that moment, and now Rockstar is commissioning it.

In 1993, a young game designer named Nick Burcombe sat at home playing Super Mario Kart. He turned the game's sound down, put on dance records from the rave scene, and raced to those instead (Mixmag; Edge Hill University study).

Pay attention to the verb. He didn't listen while he raced. He played to the music. He took a corner as the bassline dropped. He hit a boost as the kick came back in. The track and the game were no longer two things happening in one room. They were one thing, and he was inside it.

That small, private moment is the subject of this piece. It explains a thirty-year pattern in popular music that the industry still doesn't fully understand, which is why the songs from certain games, and certain nights, are the ones we never lose.

I. The double hit

Think of the last time you hit a perfect move in a game and the music landed on exactly the same instant. The jump on the snare. The goal on the drop. The final lap on the key change. You felt it in your chest before you thought anything.

I'd argue that moment is a double hit of the same feeling. The game gives you a small win. The music gives you its own reward at the same instant. Neither is as strong alone. Together they fuse into a single sensation, and the song becomes tied to the thing you were doing when it arrived.

I should be careful here, because nobody has run exactly that experiment, and the argument is mine rather than a finding. But the pieces are well supported.

  • Music rewards the brain in its own right. In a 2011 study in Nature Neuroscience, Valorie Salimpoor and colleagues found that listening to music can trigger dopamine release in the striatum, a reward region, at moments of peak emotional response. Another part of that region lit up in the build-up to the peak, which is the thing every DJ already knows. Anticipation is half the drug (BRAMS).
  • That reward helps memory. A 2021 study in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences gave 29 adults unfamiliar music and later tested what they recalled. Among people highly sensitive to musical reward, the more they enjoyed a piece, the better they remembered it, and that link disappeared when dopamine signalling was disrupted (Ferreri et al., UCSF Sound Health).
  • Moving together binds us. In a 2015 study in Biology Letters, 264 young people in Brazil danced in groups, some in sync and some not, at high or low effort. Synchrony and effort each raised pain tolerance, which the researchers used as an indirect marker of endorphins, and each increased feelings of closeness. The combination was strongest (Tarr et al., via Wadham College, Oxford).

Put them side by side and an everyday experience becomes easier to explain. Music brings its own reward. A reward tends to be remembered. Moving to a beat, alone or with other people, adds a second layer, and doing it with friends adds a third. My guess is that the best memories of music are the ones where all of that stacked. A song, a win, a body in motion, someone laughing next to you. Anyone who has hugged a friend while the right song hit knows the feeling. The science hasn't caught up with the hug yet.

That is why a game is so well placed to do it. Games are machines for producing small wins on a loop, and for putting a rhythm underneath them.

II. The rave in the box

Burcombe's insight was that the machine and the music were made for each other. Two years after that evening with Mario Kart, he shipped the proof. It was called Wipeout.

He and his publisher, Psygnosis, treated the game as a piece of club culture. The packaging, menus and team logos went to The Designers Republic, the Sheffield studio best known for its work with Warp Records, and the brief was blunt. Change the way computer games look forever (BFI). The game was designed to look like a record sleeve.

Then Sony took it to where the audience was. PlayStation's UK marketing lead, Geoff Glendenning, had an agency build a database of more than 500 nightclubs and worked with 52 of them to install PlayStation "chillout" rooms (VICE). In 1995 you could play a console in a back room with the bass still coming through the wall.

The soundtrack mixed licensed tracks from Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital with original music by a young Welsh composer, Tim Wright, working as CoLD SToRAGE (Wikipedia). Wright has said labels were sceptical at first about handing dance music to a games console (Rolling Stone Italia). That scepticism lasted exactly as long as it took the sequel to ship.

Wipeout 2097 (1996, Wipeout XL in North America) was a who's-who of British electronic music, with The Future Sound of London, Fluke, Photek, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, and an instrumental cut of The Prodigy's "Firestarter" (MusicBrainz). Red Bull sponsored a seven-city UK club tour for the game, with DJ sets from The Chemical Brothers and Judge Jules (VICE).

Notice who this reached. Dance music in the mid-nineties happened at night, in a club, to people old enough to get in. Wipeout delivered a version of it, melody and menace included, to a fourteen-year-old with a PlayStation and a Saturday afternoon. One academic paper calls it a mediated extension of the rave venue (Edge Hill). And the kid wasn't just hearing it. They were steering to it, lap after lap, with the beat as the pulse of the race. Many of those kids grew up to book, produce and play house and techno today.

Not every racing franchise took the club route. Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally series spent its first five instalments (1998 to 2005) on an original score by Jonathan Colling rather than licensed dance records (VGMdb). Licensed music arrived later, and Colin McRae DiRT 2 (2009) carried rock and indie from Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and Biffy Clyro, plus The Prodigy's "Warrior's Dance" (DiRT wiki). The dance door was Wipeout's.

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III. The songs we played to

Once you see the double hit, you see it everywhere.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater arrived in September 1999. Goldfinger's "Superman" became its unofficial theme, and bands that were struggling to reach an audience through the usual channels found one inside a game about landing tricks (Thumbsticks). Decades on, the singer Bryce Vine would liken the soundtrack to a secret mixtape for the musicians of his generation.

FIFA gave Blur's "Song 2" to the world through FIFA Road to World Cup 98, and the song escaped the screen to become a stadium staple (Boardroom). A goal, a song, a crowd. More recently, Spotify's own team has said streams for some featured artists jump by more than 500 percent in the weeks after a FIFA soundtrack lands (Spotify Newsroom), and Glass Animals' "Heat Waves" passed two billion plays after its run on one (Shots).

In 2012 a small, ultra-violent top-down shooter called Hotline Miami paired every room with a track of neon electronic music, and a genre that had been circulating among a few thousand people found a mass audience. It is widely credited as the game that introduced the gaming world to synthwave (Laced Records). The producer Perturbator, James Kent, even released an EP to thank its developers (Wikipedia).

And then there is the other half of the equation, other people. In April 2020, 12.3 million players were inside Fortnite at once for Travis Scott's "Astronomical", a ten-minute show no stadium could have held (Tubefilter; VGC). Fourteen months earlier, Marshmello had drawn 10.7 million. That is the Brazilian dance study scaled to a planet, everyone moving to the same beat in the same moment.

Researchers have started to take game music memories seriously in their own right. A 2025 paper in Entertainment Computing analysed 183 written recollections of game music and found people describing them with strong feeling, tied to their sense of self (Tuuri et al., JYX). Ask anyone you know for the song from a level they can't forget. They will hum it, and then tell you who they were playing with.

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IV. The curator

For most of the 2000s, the company best at building this moment was Rockstar Games, founded in 1998 (GTA Wiki). What set Grand Theft Auto apart wasn't only the open world. It was the radio. In Vice City (2002), a player stealing a car in a pastel 1986 Miami could flick between V-Rock, Wave 103, Flash FM, Fever 105 and Emotion 98.3, each with its own DJs, ads and personality (GTA Wiki). The radio wasn't a feature. It was the pulse under every chase, and Epic Records released a seven-disc box set, one CD per station, in October 2002 (GTA Wiki; NME).

In May 2021, with clubs shut by the pandemic, Rockstar took the next step. CircoLoco, the Ibiza party that grew from a free late-nineties after-party into one of the biggest names in house and techno, had lost a year and a half of events. Its founder, Antonio Carbonaro, did what a promoter does when the room is closed and started a record label, with Rockstar as partner (Beatportal). "Music is fundamental to Rockstar Games," said Sam Houser at the launch (Music Business Worldwide).

CircoLoco Records opened with the colour-coded Monday Dreamin' EPs and a 20-track compilation, and a Seth Troxler reworking of it debuted as a launch-party mix inside GTA Online. In June 2026 the Leeds duo Prospa released Free Your Mind, the label's first full-length album (Prism News). By mid-May its lead singles "Baby" and "Free Your Mind" held #1 and #2 on Beatport's Top 100 (Beatportal). Later in the year Prospa launched their own imprint, Prophecy (Beatportal).

A game studio helps launch a label. The label breaks an act. The act starts a label. That is a flywheel, and nobody planned Wipeout to become one.

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V. The flower

Which brings us to now.

Grand Theft Auto VI is due on 19 November 2026 after more than a decade of waiting (Official Charts). Its marketing has behaved less like a game launch than the rollout of a pop album. On 15 September, artists including Travis Scott, Future, Morgan Wallen and Keith Richards began hinting at a soundtrack, and Spotify-sponsored billboards appeared in Miami, Los Angeles and New York (Esquire India). Two days later Rockstar and Atlantic Records announced Grand Theft Auto VI, The Album, 34 original tracks with six released that day (DJ Mag). The roster includes Travis Scott on a track produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Fred again.., PinkPantheress and Étienne de Crécy, Cardi B and Keith Richards (Gizbot; NME).

On 15 October, the launch trailer arrived, and with it a name, Justice. Rockstar confirmed that the French duo had composed the game's original score, and the trailer's one song was "Flower in a Hurricane", credited to Justice featuring Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (Rolling Stone; Spotify).

It is a strange and rather wonderful object. On paper it looks like a supergroup assembled by committee. In practice, Stereogum heard an eighties-style synth-rock anthem whose opening riff recalls Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" (Stereogum), with Kevin Parker and SZA singing in harmony over swirling, driving synths (Consequence). Justice and Parker have history. They won Tame Impala's first Grammy together for "Neverender" (JamBase).

Now hold it up against 1995. In Wipeout's day, a game borrowed music from the culture around it and hoped the two would meet in a player's hands. Here, a game commissions the song, and writes it for the moment. The trailer is the video. The launch is the album release. The score is the A&R. Rockstar isn't leaving the double hit to chance. It is designing for it, with a hundred hours of play in mind and a song that will be waiting when the player makes their first perfect escape through a Florida storm.

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VI. Who gets to design the joy

It would be easy to end on the celebration. Kids heard Orbital before they could buy a club ticket. Punk bands found fans through a skateboarding game. A Leeds duo now run their own label.

But if the double hit is how music sticks, then whoever designs it holds an unusual kind of power. Music discovery used to be spread across thousands of small gatekeepers. DJs, magazines, record shops, a friend with good taste. The biggest games now resemble one extremely powerful curator, with a budget no radio station could match, choosing what tens of millions of people will associate with their happiest moments. That isn't necessarily bad, and Rockstar's curation has been, by most accounts, unusually good. But it is new. And for the artists there's a quieter question. In the old model, a game licensed your song and you kept your identity. In the new one, the song is built for the game.

I don't think there's an answer yet. What I'm sure of is the instinct that started all this. The best moment in any of these stories isn't the licence, the trailer or the chart position. It's the second when a player, in the middle of something that matters to them, stops reaching for the mute button and starts playing to the music.

For thirty years, games have been learning how to make that second last. On 19 November, a lot of people will find out how well they've learned.

Notes

  • Music and dopamine. Salimpoor et al., Nature Neuroscience (2011), dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional moments of music, with different regions active in anticipation and at the peak. BRAMS summary
  • Reward and music memory. Ferreri et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2021), 29 adults. The link between enjoying music and remembering it depended on dopamine and on how sensitive people were to musical reward. UCSF Sound Health
  • Dancing, endorphins and bonding. Tarr, Launay, Cohen and Dunbar, Biology Letters (2015), 264 young people in Brazil. Synchrony and effort each raised pain threshold (an indirect endorphin marker) and closeness. Wadham College summary
  • Game music memories. Tuuri et al., Entertainment Computing (2025), 183 written game music memories. JYX
  • What isn't established. None of these studies tests a game action and a musical peak landing together. That combination, and the hug, are my argument, not a finding.

Further reading

You might like to try

There is a feeling at the centre of everything above, and it is small. You hit a target and, in the same instant, the beat lands. The two clicks merge into one, and for a moment you aren't playing along to the music. You are making it. Every story in the piece, from Wipeout to Tony Hawk to a trailer with SZA in it, is a version of that second.

I build small music-and-code experiments in my spare time because I want to make that moment easier to create. They live at labs.mattalcock.com.

  • Chop is a library that analyses a track's tempo, beats, bars, sections, drops and key, so code can follow the music.
  • Jump is a game library where gameplay and music share one clock, so the player responds instantly while the world syncs to the beat.
  • Asterodrop is the demo. Drop in a track and it generates a level, with rocks timed to the kick drums and the song's drop shown as a ring.

If games are now where music gets made, the tooling for how the two talk to each other is still wide open.

More from me

A small aside. I'm proud to have been part of NaturalMotion, whose Euphoria technology Rockstar has used to make characters in games like GTA and Red Dead Redemption stumble, grab and fall as if they were alive (Rockstar on evolving it for RDR2). Music makes a world sound alive; physics makes it move that way. Rockstar has spent years on both.

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