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Over the years, video games have developed into a multi-billion dollar industry. Today's games involve millions of hours of work, and take years to produce. The music contained in these, as well as older, games is an equal work of art that is often overlooked. Whereas movie soundtracks have been praised for years, until 2005 video game music was largely a curiosity outside Japan. It is only recently that concerts consisting solely of video game music, such as Play! A Video Game Symphony and Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy, have sold thousands of tickets around the world.

Some games today are even marketed on the strength of their soundtracks' primary composers. For example, the 2008 Xbox 360 game Lost Odyssey advertised in its pre-release commercials that its music was composed by legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Unfortunately, however, many game music composers and artists remain under appreciated compared to those involved with movie soundtracks.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the late 1990s, an online video game music community began to form. One of the first sites, VGMusic, offered and continues to offer strict MIDI sequences, largely of older (NES and SNES) consoles. Contributors to VGMusic sequence songs and then submit them for the world to listen.

By 1998, the community consisted largely of independent sites offering MIDI and Impulse Tracker (*.it) files. Some of these songs, which began to move towards "remixing" as it is known today, were mashups of 20 minutes of music from an entire game's soundtrack. Searching for songs was a tedious task, because there were no one-stop sources for such remixes.

In 1999, OverClocked ReMix, a site that limited its postings through strict judging, was formed. Still popular today, the site has received contributions from hobbyists, aspiring artists, and professional composers such as Jeremy Soule. A panel of judges evaluates and votes on each submitted song, and at the time of this writing, fewer than 5% of submissions are posted.

Compos, or online competitions that challenge participants to produce the best songs, started to appear around 2000, but took a hit when the heavily vaunted Ultima Eternity competition folded. Later, live instrument recordings became popular, leading to the creation of Dwelling of Duels, a competition where at least one live instrument is required in a song. Each month, competitors are required to interpret a piece from a specific game or series,

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