Goldsmiths

Ghost in the Dreamcast: Ludomusical Hauntology and Pleasures of a 90s Cross-Franchise Specter

This paper examines an unintended cross-franchise presence in Sonic Adventure (1998), the Dreamcast flagship, where a pinball level in the Casinopolis area carries a musical loop borrowed from Sega's NiGHTS into Dreams (1996).

• The paper analyses an unintended cross-franchise intrusion in Sonic Adventure (1998), the Dreamcast flagship, where a Casinopolis pinball level loops a musical fragment borrowed from Sega's NiGHTS into Dreams (1996).
• Using hauntology and autoethnographic method, the author argues that displaced soundtracks generate affective pleasures of misrecognition, ambiguity, and discovery characteristic of late-1990s play.
• The loop's roughly forty-eight-second duration is markedly shorter than conventional game-music recommendations, and combined with the level's incentive to prolong play at the NiGHTS pinball machine, it recurs frequently and sustains an encounter with familiar-yet-out-of-place material.