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How Listening to Music Can Power Up Your Writing
Revisiting the video game soundtrack from Sega’s Outrun (1986)
What helps concentrate my writing lately is something I would never have expected. Instead of my usual go-to music, I find a youtube video of a video game from the 1980s and listen to the full soundtrack.
Video games were the 16-bit blippity-blip soundtrack all the way through my childhood. From the minute we got home from school, it was always on loop. We knew Nintendo’s calypso grooves or the super-speedy Sonic the Hedgehog (how did Sonic get so fast? It’s still a mystery). Lately, I have tried a few different soundtracks from 1980s video games to see what happens to my writing day.
So far, my favorite piece of video game music nostalgia is the soundtrack for Sega’s OutRun.
A Drive Down Memory Lane
Sega released Outrun in 1986, at the height of the Japanese economic bubble. Designed by Yu Suzuki with music by Hiroshi Miyauchi (aka Hiroshi Yamaguchi). Outrun was one of those games you found in a shopping mall arcade, where you could sit in as if driving a car. Of course, in the mid-1980s, it was not any car, but a red Ferrari Testarossa.
What was unusual about this game was you had a choice of music at the start. It…
