When does video game music get too repetitive?

polygon.com:

I enjoy games that make me think, which means I often find myself pausing — not literally pressing pause, but simply staying still — to consider what I need to do next. Those are the moments, like stopping to investigate how I can climb that wall in Ori and the Blind Forest or checking my inventory before heading into the mines in Coral Island, that game soundtracks come into the forefront of my mind.

And there are a ton of those moments in any given game. So how do composers make game music that doesn’t, frankly, get annoying? These days, game soundtracks regularly exceed 100 tracks — but players are liable to spend hundreds of hours putzing around massive games like Elden Ring. Even after collective days of playtime — or hours spent trying to grind through a tough level where the music doesn’t change — songs from our favorite games are nostalgic, motivating, thrilling. How?

We asked 13 video game composers, who have scored the likes of Hollow Knight, Assassin’s Creed, and Pacific Drive, just that: When writing music for video games, you know going in that the songs will be replayed over and over. What are a few tactics you use, whether they relate to music theory or game design, to make sure players don’t get annoyed with in-game music?

Here are their answers.

[These interviews were conducted via email and edited for format and clarity.]

My general rule is that if I don’t hate myself after obsessively listening to my own music for the purpose of the project, on repeat, in development, then it can’t be that annoying.

The ultimate goal is to devise music that provides a balance between the feeling of repetition and variation. If you repeat too much within one loop, that’s only going to get multiplied when each loop occurs, and will therefore become very irritating. On the other hand, if you through-compose inside the loop — that is to say, if you have no repetition and always have it evolving — you may end up with something that is hard to grasp, and the loop point