I linked to the article from my feed prior to reading your text here. I was going to mention, or ask you about whether you think classical music is being well represented in the gaming world? Much like films, it seems that a number of games have classical scores. Would you still say it's in decline or perhaps are the media that brings it forth just changing? Again, thank you for the introduction to Erik Satie and for deepening my knowledge of classical music. I look forward to checking out these links. I'm going to put that Satie link in my comment so that people can listen as they read what you wrote... and so I can test out the new video embedding :)
Classical music in the gaming world... In the past, I would say yes. The NES and early days, for whatever reason, had an unusual amount of 8-bit transcriptions of famous classical pieces. Maybe composers were lazier back then in composing pieces for quick games or something and just opted to use the public domain with careless abandon, but there was a lot of exposure to classical. I played a lot of NES games and loved the music only to realize at a much older age that they were from classical composers. In any case, here are some examples with the NES transcription being first and the real version afterwards: Binary Land Stage theme: Erik Satie's Je te Veux: Winter Games (Famous for being skewered by the Angry Video Game Nerd): Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers: ....And I could go on. The only reason I don't is because I'm forgetting the NES titles. The latest gaming device I own is a Nintendo DS. Since then, two console generations have happened with me not being a part of them, and as such I can't really say if modern games are helping to expose new generations to classical music, since I haven't played any modern games. I can guess that it is, and that gaming helps, though. There's Eternal Sonata, the Xbox 360 game where you can play AS Chopin, and has some music from him as such: I guess GTA III did have that opera station, but most people probably never even tuned into it. I do know that Saints Row fares better and has a classical station in the latest one, because my sister played the game and enjoyed doing crazy stuff with classical playing, lol. So those some more modern games with classical presence, so that's a positive sign, especially since my sister doesn't listen to classical, and she talks about enjoy Beethoven, even if it's in the context of the wacky world of saint's row. I would say Gaming helps with classical representation, although I suppose there hasn't been many big games where classical takes the forefront like a film would. Maybe I'm just forgetting them or not aware of any, though.