Game Over

But the biggest psychological trick of all comes when you see the Game Over screen. “Death music is really fascinating,” says ludomusicologist Tim Summers. “It draws on established signifiers of sadness and death - descending lines, a slow or slowing tempo. A lot of it mimics that classic cartoon ‘wah wah wah’ of sadness and failure. “But death music has to walk a very fine line. It has to make the character’s death and loss significant, but at the same time, it has to encourage you to get back up and press the button to start again.” “You don’t want to make it too grim,” agrees Grant Kirkhope, whose recent work includes Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and Ghostbusters. “We always try and make it a little bit comedic, or not too nasty.”

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

(Nintendo)

Back in Shoreditch, The Flight are recording the finale of their Assassin’s Creed battle sequence. Whether the player lives or dies, there’s no fanfare, no funeral march. Instead it’s a long, sedate piece, full of sustained notes on the rebec. “The key thing here is that you don’t notice the fight stopping so much,” says Joe Henson. “The outro just ebbs away into the background, so you don’t really notice it’s gone - but maybe you feel the tension releasing.” The outro deliberately avoids suggesting finality - because the game designers don’t want you to switch off the game and go to bed when the fight ends. They’d much rather you spent another four or five hours inhabiting this vast world they’ve built. “Musically it’s lovely when things peter out and become calm again,” says Joe. “You’re not completely destroyed by the fight. “As a player you go, ‘Oh, I actually can keep going. I can continue with my quest.’”

‘The last bastion of melody’

From its origins in the arcades, game music has blossomed into a mainstream artform. Fans snap up the music to Minecraft and Red Dead Redemption on vinyl - while concert halls echo to the sound of Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy score or Koji Kondo’s Legend of Zelda theme (written, as it happens, in a single night after he discovered Ravel’s Bolero was still in copyright and couldn’t be used).

Gamers play Square Enix's Final Fantasy XV

at the 2016 Tokyo Game Show

(Getty Images)