First, for an independent video game produced by a small studio, the music is dynamic and reactive to a high degree. There are three unusual things about Untitled Goose Game’s music. Yet on another level, Untitled Goose Game’s music is, of course, not actually at all a work of cinema, cartoons, or television: though inspired by the music of other media, it is still nonetheless music enabled by the particular constraints and opportunities offered by the medium of the video game. The game’s reviewers and their imaginative comparisons to Chaplin, Looney Tunes, and Benny Hill are both right and wrong: it was indeed music beyond video games that most directly influenced how the music of Untitled Goose Game works, and it was pre-existing, already-written music that was, for the most part, adapted and implemented in the game itself. 4 I am myself also an academic by both training and profession rather than, strictly speaking, a video game composer, which leaves me uniquely placed-and perhaps also awkwardly placed-to write this article as a researcher both singularly close and also possibly far too close to the work in question. Yet these comparisons also make a certain amount of sense, and others have already remarked on the non–video game backgrounds and formal education of the four key members of House House, the studio that made Untitled Goose Game. 1 For Patrick Lum in the Guardian, the music “brings to mind classic Looney Tunes cartoons,” while for Tom Marks in IGN “it lent an air of Benny Hill-style ridiculousness to chases.” 2 Chaplin, Looney Tunes, Benny Hill-this is indeed a wide variety of comparisons (and a variety that would only widen, including Buster Keaton, Pink Panther, George Gershwin, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood 3). “The game’s composer, Dan Golding, recorded the music and then chopped it up to create phrases that react to gameplay, as a live piano player might have done to Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick,” wrote Tacey Rychter in the New York Times. Observing the response to a video game you made music for is a uniquely strange experience, one made even stranger when critics seem to agree that the music in question sounds very little like a video game. Ultimately, this article argues that by looking to approaches beyond more familiar debates about dynamic music for video games, Untitled Goose Game helped shortcut familiar problems that confront developers and composers when working with dynamic and reactive music. The article discusses the varying practices for music for the silent era of cinema, the theoretical frameworks used to conceptualize these many divergent approaches, and how closely we might recognize their legacy at work in Untitled Goose Game’s soundtrack. Accordingly, this article outlines the dynamic music system at work in Untitled Goose Game and the influence drawn on for this system from non–video game approaches to musical accompaniment. Finally, the music for Untitled Goose Game takes the unusual step of adapting pre-existing classical music from the public domain-in this case, six of Claude Debussy’s Préludes for solo piano-rather than creating an original score intended from its conception to be dynamic. Second, the music takes inspiration not from other dynamic music systems in video games but from the varying practices of musical accompaniment for silent cinema and early comedy, aiming to replicate affect rather than process. The game uses pre-recorded, non-generative musical performances and yet will respond to onscreen events within a buffer of only a few seconds at maximum.
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