Kavinsky, Whose Song Defined GTA IV Drives, Dies at 50

Vincent Belorgey, the French musician and producer known to the world as Kavinsky, has died at the age of 50. He was found at his home in Paris on the evening of July 28, and French authorities have said there were no suspicious circumstances, with early reports pointing to a suspected stroke after days of headaches, as per the BBC. Tributes have come from across music and French public life.

For most people, Kavinsky is the sound of a specific moment. His track "Nightcall" opened the 2011 film Drive and became one of the defining electronic songs of its decade, but for a certain kind of Grand Theft Auto player, Kavinsky's music defined their time in Liberty City. Specifically, his track "Testarossa Autodrive," in the form of the SebastiAn remix, plays on Electro-Choc, one of the radio stations you tune into while driving around Grand Theft Auto IV as Niko Bellic.

For anyone who spent long night drives in that game with that station on, you most likely drove to it.

Kavinsky's music, moody and cinematic and built for empty roads at night, fits what Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has described as the darkest, most sombre entry in the series, a story about an immigrant chasing a hollow version of the American dream in a grey, heavy version of New York.

The game is fundamentally about driving, and his sound is fundamentally about driving. It's a match made in heaven.

When people say they remember Kavinsky through GTA 4, they are really remembering their own late nights in that game, with his music as the score to something they did rather than something they watched. It also says something about his broader influence, which reached a lot further than one film or one game.

Kavinsky never had the mainstream chart profile of some of his French electronic peers, but his influence on a particular strand of music was enormous. He helped popularise synthwave, the nostalgic, 1980s-inflected electronic sound that has since turned up everywhere from indie games to major film scores. A lot of people who have never heard his name have heard his influence, secondhand, in music made by people he inspired.

When an artist dies, their work becomes the way we remember them, and increasingly, for younger listeners, that work lives inside games as much as anywhere else. A generation of players associates certain songs almost entirely with the games they first heard them in. GTA radio stations have quietly become one of the most effective music-discovery and music-preservation tools of the last two decades, introducing millions of people to artists they would never have found otherwise, and keeping those songs alive long after their moment on the charts passed.

Unfortunately, licensed music in older GTA games has a habit of disappearing when licences expire, stripping tracks out of the games that made them memorable. On a day when an artist has died, it's a sad reality we have to think about. We can't guarantee Kavinsky's song will stay in GTA IV forever, which makes the memory of it feel a little more fragile, and a little more worth holding onto.

In the meantime, you still have time to take advantage of the ongoing discounts on the older GTA titles, including GTA 4.