The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

Which came first the chicken or the egg? Or in the case of Warner Bros cartoons, the animation or the music? Following on from the silent movies of old, I would have said it was the action, but I would be wrong. In fact a lot of the music was written and performed by Raymond Scott in the 1930’s prior to it being used to accompany cartoons from the 1940s onwards. More recently Scott’s music has been painstaking transcribed by Stu Brown and others for the Raymond Scott Project and was performed a couple of nights ago at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.

It was an electric performance, literally, as at one stage the percussionist Stu Brown was playing a piece using an some sort of oscillating synthesizer hooked up to a typewriter! Not only was the performance hand clapping and foot stomping inducing, the sheer energy of “Powerhouse” made me feel like getting out of my seat and running up and down.

On the way home from the gig I couldn’t help but wonder if those “Looney Tunes” were ultimately influential in video games. I’m no musicologist, but the soundtracks of games from the 80’s like “Maniac Miner” spring to mind. So if the right kind of music can have such a “Get up and Go” feel to it, what about an “ExerGame” based on a cartoon capers style chase sequence?