Legends Who Wrote Our Loading-Screen Lullabies
They shaped your childhood. They shaped your insomnia. One of them needs our clicks. Mount up.
The People Who Scored Your Childhood While You Were Button-Mashing Doritos Dust
There is a specific pitch-shifted jingle lodged somewhere in your brain stem that will outlast your marriage, your mortgage, and probably civilization itself. Maybe it’s the Mario Brothers playful dotodotoo. Maybe it’s the Zelda treasure-open sparkle. Maybe it’s that Halo choir that sounds like God discovered reverb.
You know the one. For me, it’s Frogger’s Adventures: The Rescue.
We all have that one sound cue that teleports us back to sticky controllers, fluorescent basement light, and the moment right before your cousin threw the controller because Rainbow Road has no guardrails and neither does life.
And bestie, someone wrote that. Someone scored your childhood.
You can name Bach. You can name Beyoncé. But can you name a single video game composer? You can hum Mario Kart on command but who made it?
Exactly.
Koji Kondo is why joy sounds like a coin pickup. Nobuo Uematsu is why sorrow feels like a violin in space. Yoko Shimomura is why boss fights still live in your spine. Jesper Kyd scored your stealth era. Grant Kirkhope scored your feral gremlin era. Darren Korb made Hades horny. Austin Wintory made sand emotional. These people built your interior weather and you didn’t even know their names.
🎮 Video Game Music: The Only Reason You Didn’t Quit the Level… Or Life
Why do we play video games?
Not for pixels. Not for plot armor. Not because we have extra time (lol).
We play because games offer something adulthood keeps trying to extract from us:
Immersion. Agency. Awe. Risk-free failure. Progress that actually feels like progress.
Games let us be brave without consequences, curious without judgment, chaotic without cleanup.
They give us worlds where doors open when we walk toward them.
Where effort meets reward.
Where somebody wants us to win.
And the thing that makes those worlds feel alive isn’t just gameplay.
It’s music.
Strip the soundtrack away and the magic collapses. That swell right before the boss fight, the quiet piano in a save room, the triumphant little orchestra when you beat a level at 2:14 AM and whisper “I am unstoppable,” even though you look like a dehydrated raccoon in sweatpants—that’s the real architecture of immersion.
Music tells us when to breathe, when to panic, when to feel awe. It’s emotional scaffolding for worlds built out of code. Without it, Mario isn’t joyful, Elden Ring isn’t mythic, and Animal Crossing feels like a tax-time anxiety dream on a tiny cartoon island.
Imagine a loading screen without strings swelling like destiny.
Imagine a boss fight without drums saying, “This is bigger than you, idiot — run.”
Imagine Skyrim… mute.
You’d uninstall immediately and go outside. Nobody wants that.
This is the part where we pause and acknowledge the truth:
Game composers are not background noise.
They are world-builders.
They architect the tension, the tenderness, the goosebumps, the grief.
They code emotional physics into environments that don’t actually exist.
We talk a big game about culture, imagination, and gremlin-level mischief at The Shit List. So let’s actually stir some shit for someone who deserves it.
Meet Alixander Laffredo-Dietrich. A fellow dream-haver, craft-grinder, and soundtrack-sorcerer trying to break into video game music.
Alixander is the kind of person who didn’t just grow up playing RPGs — he grew up emotionally imprinting on them. The kid who didn’t just hear a soundtrack… he clocked the oboe part and hummed it in math class.
The kind of kid who hears the first three notes of Kingdom Hearts and suddenly needs to sit down and re-evaluate life.
He’s spent 20+ years playing instruments (plural, because some people collect Pokémon, others collect neural pathways). Guitar, bass, vocals, keys — if it makes sound, he figured out how to bend it into emotion.
Then he did the most dangerous thing a musician can do: He became a product manager.
No, seriously, he went corporate (like Capt’n Kramm), learned how to wrangle engineers, navigate Fortune 500 timelines, talk to stakeholders without crying, and ship multimillion-dollar launches on time. If you’ve ever worked in tech, you know that’s character development equivalent to beating a Souls game with no summons.
He didn’t ask us for a “collab.” He didn’t send one of those “hey queen, can I pick your brain for 30–45 minutes?” DMs. He just showed up with real work and an actual dream:
“Help me get 500 likes on my Indie Game Music Contest track so I can break into the industry the old-school way: by doing the work and praying the algorithm doesn’t eat me alive.”
This is what community looks like. Not “networking.” Not “creator economy.” Just people pulling each other up the weird creative mountain. So as fellow chaos agents with internet access, what if we just… did it?
What if we collectively said
“Yeah, we boost artists here. That’s the world we’re building.”
🎧 Need For Speed meets late-90s energy drink commercial meets Biggie in a neon jacket
He’s aiming for 500 likes.
We are the internet.
We can do this before someone finishes losing another round of Mario Kart.
Like it. Comment. Watch to the end if you can. (You’ll feel like a holographic street racer in your own kitchen, which, honestly, we all deserve.)
And if you work in the game industry and have the power to hire composers? Slide into his life like a blue turtle shell. Hire him before some AAA studio turns him into menu music at Dog Beard Studios.
Let’s Be Real — Chaos Is Only Fun If We Use It for Good
Support the dream.
Break the algorithm.
Make a stranger’s LinkedIn humble-brag post inevitable.
Go forth ye, and tap the like button on his track. Not as charity, as a vote for the world we want to live in: where artists get opportunities because they make good shit, not because they figured out how to say “synergy” on a Zoom call without gagging.
Then brag about it in our comments so we can high-five you.
Chaos for good.
This is the Shitshow way.
The Gallery Is Open, Weirdos
We want your art. Your music. Your short films. Your animations, comics, doodles, noise experiments, spooky puppets, cursed ceramics, and whatever else has been living in your Notes app waiting for a home.
We are not asking you to work for free.
We are inviting you into a rotating digital gallery — a once-a-month scroll-through showcase of cool people making cool shit in a world that wants us all to be “brands” instead of artists.
Think First Fridays meets a museum bathroom wall meets a late-night group chat.
If you want your work featured in our Shitshow Gallery drop, send it. If you want to lurk and clap, also welcome. Community is a spectrum.
Submit your work. Bring your friends. Let’s build a creative underground that’s somehow above ground.
Connect with Jem on LinkedIn
Every time I reread this, I can hear the Halo choir and smell the Doritos dust. Here’s to the composers who made our childhoods sound like destiny (and to Alixander for keeping the magic alive).
It’s a modern classic, but if you want music in video games to hit you like a rage-quit-hurled controller? Get you some Expidition 33.