What’s a good way for a ragtag group of video-game heroes (or for a heroic rogue flying solo) to either get some respite from the action or gear up for a momentous narrative? Going to the opera—and maybe even performing in it.

While video games have a long history of using musical excerpts from opera and classical music, most of the time, it’s either a needle-drop or an intertextual reference. The 1983 arcade platformer Mario Bros. famously prefaced its main theme with the opening bars of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, for instance. However, operatic sequences that occur in-game, featuring diegetic songs (meaning that both the player and the characters are supposed to hear them as songs), have become a more common occurrence. These games, as Tim Summers notes in Cambridge Opera Journal, “feature staged opera as part of a sequence that clearly aims to form a significant part of the aesthetic experience of the game.”

Two games, Hitman: Blood Money (2006) and Assassin’s Creed III (2012), both ask the player to enact an assassination during the performance of a staged opera. Hitman: Blood Money stages Puccini’s Tosca while you maneuver the character into killing both the actor playing the male lead, Cavaradossi, and a diplomat. By contrast, in Assassin’s Creed III, set in 1754 England, you play as nobleman Haytham Kenway; your character sits through John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in order to kill an audience member sitting in one of the boxes. This assassination takes place as the aria “If Any Wench Venus’s Girdle Wear” is performed.

In a way, both Assassin’s Creed and Hitman challenge the assumed highbrow status of opera and the assumed lowbrow status of gaming, suggesting a more complex and compatible negotiated relationship through their fusion in the game worlds. Representing opera in games, especially in the style found in Assassin’s Creed and Hitman, is technically tricky and not undertaken lightly—likely implying a sincere belief by the game makers in its significant value for the game experience.

“Though The Beggar’s Opera is of a distinctly different genre to the kinds of opera usually used in opera visits in film (Italian opera tends to dominate), this piece is nevertheless apt for Assassin’s Creed,” writes Summers. “The geographic/historic setting of the game provides certain boundaries for the operatic repertoire that could be included, and, in doing so, the presentation of this opera serves to help define those same contextual factors for the player.”

In other instances, video-game composers write their own in-game operas. Here, Square Enix’s horror role-playing game Parasite Eve (1998) stands out, as the operatic scene, with music composed by Yoko Shimomura, serves as a prologue for the horror-themed plot that unfolds between Christmas and New Year’s. The opera involves a prince pleading with his father to allow him to marry a woman named Eva, whom the king believes to be evil. After the king orders Eva’s execution by burning at the stake, Eva starts to sing an aria. A change in video style, supported by Eva’s aria, kickstarts the rest of the game’s events, for which the player assumes the role of Aya Brea, a New York City police officer who stands in opposition to Eve. The same opera is performed again in the standard ending of the game, and, artistic merits aside, it serves to showcase that the world Aya Brea and her companions inhabit isn’t just a linear set of obstacles and enemies, but a place pulsating with its own culture.

The most famous in-game operatic scene, however, occurs in Final Fantasy VI (1994), where, to gain control of an airship, a band of player-controlled rebels attempt to thwart the abduction of Maria, an opera star. One of the rebels, Celes, impersonates Maria, setting herself up as the target by acting as the title character in the opera Maria and Draco. Kidnapped, she will be carried to the airship and open it to the rest of her party. To move the plot forward, the (human) player, first asked to read the libretto and memorize it, has to fill in the gaps of the lyrics as Celes/Maria gets onstage using a multiple-choice interface. The opera sequence is a lighthearted mini-game, and eventually, the party is made to battle the villain on stage.

“The sequence has become a significant touchstone in video game culture,” writes Summers. “It is particularly notable for the effusive reports of emotional responses that typically accompany its discussion in casual and journalistic discourse.”

Video games are, by their own nature, multi-disciplinary artworks where sight, sound, and interactivity coexist and have immersion as a byproduct. Both Parasite Eve and Final Fantasy VI’s opera scenes are exaggerated visual-sonic spectacles, which are especially striking given the technological limitations at hand. These sequences stretch any sense of logical causality, but nevertheless serve as important moments of expression for their characters, thereby “uniting…‘meaning and sensation,’ extravagant theatricality, and emotionalism,” Summers writes, drawing on the work of music historian Sarah Hibberd.

Overall, video games rely on the creation of virtual universes as spaces for play more than do films. Citing Theodor Adorno, Summers writes that the insertion of an operatic sequence conjures phantasmagoria, “the perfection of the illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis…[a] magic delusion,” cementing the world-building and narrative universe of a game.

“Games are concerned with the ostentatious deployment of technology to create seductively engaging fictional worlds,” writes Summers. “When opera and games fuse, the similarities between seemingly disparate art forms are accentuated, and the shared pleasures, values, and experiences made obvious.”

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