Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become a cliché to emphasize the economic power of the video games industry. The phrase ‘Video games are big business’, or some variation thereof, has been a staple of writing on the topic for decades, with early iterations lauding the commercial successes of arcades,1 later iterations citing it as motivation for the academic study of games2 and more recent versions citing the staggering billions in income they have generated, which has formed the basis of several transnational empires.3

Ludomusicologists generally agree that cinema and television represent the nearest siblings to video games, and so therefore adopt many methodologies familiar to film music scholarship in their work. For example, the influential concepts of diegetic and non-diegetic, which respectively describe sounds that exist either within or outside a narrative frame,1 feature prominently in many accounts of game audio, and represent one axis of Karen Collins’s model for the uses of game audio, the other being dynamic and non-dynamic, where dynamic audio can be further subcategorized as adaptive or interactive.2 Ludomusicologists generally also agree that the interactive nature of video games marks its primary distinction from other forms of multimedia, and so a fundamental point of entry into studying game audio is to examine how composers and sound designers create scores and soundtracks that can adapt to indeterminate player actions.

From the invocation to Aphrodite in fr. 1, the gods are a constant force in the world evoked in Sappho’s poetry. Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines cultic and religious presences from a literary point of view.

The desire to situate Catullus and his poems at the tumultuous midpoint of first-century bc Rome is both hard to resist and hard to satisfy. The basic problem can be glimpsed through a confrontation of two scholarly positions represented in a collection of influential papers on Catullus.

Chapter 28 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the Anglophone receptions of Sappho’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining figures such as Harriette Andreadis, Margaret Goldsmith, Lawrence Durrell, Peter Green, Denys Page, Erica Jong, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, H.D., Mary Barnard,Jeannette Winterson, Judy Grahn, Anne Carson, Josephine Balmer, and Diane Rayor.

Catullus features heavily in Chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, but he is by no means the only Roman literary figure to have found in Sappho an important predecessor. Ovid, Horace, and others give powerful evidence of her influence in Latin literature.

The influence of games, and their music, extends well beyond the boundaries of the game texts. Outside of Jesper Juul’s ‘magic circle’, the imagined space in which the rules of the game apply and play occurs, are worlds of meaning, consumption and community that reflect and serve to transmit our own lived experience with the medium.1 This chapter investigates game music removed from context of the video games that contain it, instead focusing on the role of game music in the context of wider culture. As part of that exploration, this chapter marks how the availability of communication and audio production tools from the year 2000 to the present affords fan communities surrounding game audio an ever-increasing potential for discussing, transmitting, remixing and otherwise exploring the music of the games we play. I say ‘we’ in the inclusive sense intentionally, as an insider of a number of fan groups engaging with game audio. Though this essay attempts to remain relatively detached throughout, I follow scholar Henry Jenkins in describing myself as a fan, and in pointing out that even when writing on subjects that ‘are not explicitly personal, [I] deal with forms of culture that have captured my imagination and sparked my passion’.2

Quot editores, tot Propertii, ‘as many Propertiuses as editors’: Phillimore’s quip aptly describes the current situation in the textual criticism of Propertius, where a conservative editor such as Fedeli and a radical one such as Heyworth present strongly different texts, and arguably different authors with distinct styles. The principal manuscripts of Catullus are far more corrupt, and yet his modern editors have not produced a similar variety of reconstructions. Apart from a few outliers, editions of Catullus from the same period tend to differ only in the treatment of individual textual problems, but the style of the text they present tends to be the same. The editorial vulgate of his poems has evolved markedly during the five centuries since they were first printed, but its development has been linear, although it can be broken down into several fairly distinct phases.

Modern editions of Catullus probably derive, at one or two removes, from a single (now lost) manuscript called the codex Veronensis (V), which returned to or resurfaced in Verona around ad 1300. This text, which marks poem divisions somewhat haphazardly and often wrongly (especially in the elegiacs), was subsequently divided (as conventionally numbered) into c.116 poems. As extant it is a collection of unparalleled diversity: poems range from 2 to 408 lines in length written in a wide variety of metres – lyric, iambic (including choliambics or scazons), phalaecian hendecasyllables, hexameters, galliambics, and elegiacs – and dealing with subjects that include the intensely personal, the quotidian and the exotically mythical, tender expressions of love, jocular amicability and viciously obscene invective in language that reflects as appropriate the gutter, the elevated dignity of epic or the refinement of the self-consciously learned urban elite.

Chapter 5 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the relationship between Sappho and her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus, examining the literary and visual evidence and the different ways that scholars have interpreted it.

Chapter 26 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, England, and the United States, examining figures such as Cicely Hamilton, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney,Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Samuel-Auguste André David Tissot, Sapphism, Honoré Daumier, Pierre Lou?s, Henry Thornton Wharton, and Emily Dickinson.

Chapter 10 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho describes the distinctive features of Sappho’s poetic dialect, highlighting especially significant points and noting particular difficulties.

Video game music is often sonically similar to film music, particularly when games use musical styles that draw on precedent in cinema. Yet there are distinct factors in play that are specific to creating and producing music for games. These factors include:Apart from books and manuals that teach readers how to use particular game technologies (such as, for example, Ciarán Robinson’s Game Audio with FMOD and Unity),1 some composers and audio directors have written about their processes in more general terms. Rob Bridgett,2 Winifred Phillips,3 George Sanger,4 Michael Sweet,5 Chance Thomas,6 and Gina Zdanowicz and Spencer Bambrick7 amongst others have written instructive guides that help to convey their approaches and philosophies to music in games. Each of these volumes has a slightly different approach and focus. Yet all discussions of creating and producing game music deal with the three interlinked factors named above.