Today I was listening to Cinemix at work. For those of you who don’t know, Cinemix is an online radio station that plays soundtracks from movies and some series. All-day. You can get a premium account to get rid of the advertising but it doesn’t have a lot of advertising in any event.
Anyway, sometimes I have it in the background.
Often it happens that, before I notice, I have an enormous feeling of nostalgia. A sense of yearning for the days when I used to play Dark Sun or any other AD&D game with my friends some 25 years ago. I am overflowed with memories of me in my bedroom, setting my Amiga computer to render a complex 3D image created in Lightwave, reading or writing an adventure, memorising the monster manual or using a very rustic drawing tablet (God it was expensive!) to create vector clipart from the illustrations in the monster manual.
Those were some of the happiest moments of my early 20s.
And I am thinking about how much I used to enjoy going to the cinema and how much I used to enjoy soundtracks. If I liked the score, I would probably go to the cinema once more just to listen to it and, then, shoot to the record shop like a rocket and buy the CD. It would happen also when I played a game on my computer, a wonderful Amiga machine. The music would always stand out.
The funny thing is that even though I am aware of my love for music and I use sound and music a lot when I run my games – DnD or any other – I had never really associated music with the happy memories I have from that time of my life.
Music meant as much to me as RPGs but in a parallel way. They didn’t seem to mix or even complement each other.
And yet, today I am not sure I would be able to remember happy memories from my RPG years without also bringing happy memories of sounds to my head.
And I am OK with that.