Desert Island Diskettes: A Journey through Video Game Sound History

Karen Collins's "Desert Island Diskettes: A Journey through Video Game Sound History" is a personal, curated retrospective of video game audio, published in Issue 06 of Critical Notes in 2017. Rather than presenting a canonical "best of" ranking, the piece argues that the selected games matter because of their personal resonance with the author, drawing on the BBC's "Desert Island Discs" format in which guests choose recordings that hold individual meaning. Collins explicitly resists building a scholarly canon, expressing concern that the field already concentrates attention on a narrow set of titles and genres.

The essay profiles fifteen games spanning roughly 1972 to 2014, from the Pong clone and early PC beeper sounds through the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, NES, Sega Genesis, and PlayStation eras, to modern titles such as BioShock and Peggle 2. Each entry links the music to hardware constraints and technical developments, including the Atari TIA's atonal tuning, the C64's module-based composition, the shift from FM synthesis to digital audio on the Genesis, LucasArts' iMUSE interactive engine, and the move from interactive music to linear CD-ROM tracks in Tomb Raider. The piece also documents how sound design influenced later composers and listeners.

The discussion draws on interviews gathered for Collins's Beep documentary project, which comprised over 80 interviews with composers, sound designers, and voice actors across the UK, Canada, the US, Japan, and several European countries, recorded mostly between 2014 and 2015. The essay is anecdotal and reflective rather than systematic, and it contains no quantitative data.