A Gen Z’s Thank You Letter to Brian Wilson

Plus, the strange link between The Beach Boys and Undertale.

Okay, I promise my Substack called “The Video Game Storyteller” isn’t about to become a music blog. I acknowledge that between this article and my guest post about Taylor Swift and Temple Run on David Burton’s Substack, my writings this week have been more musically leaning than normal.

But after hearing the news that Brian Wilson died on June 11, aged 82, there was only ever going to be one thing I wrote about this week.

Because Brian Wilson was a towering figure in the history of popular music whose work with The Beach Boys and as a solo artist will live on well beyond 2025. His songs carried emotions as powerful as the sea he so often wrote about, flowing into the ears of millions around the world, an ever-breaking wave surging from generation to generation.

For me, Brian Wilson is my creative hero. Even though I was born decades after his biggest hits, I too was swept up by his music. There will be plenty of in-depth retrospectives written about Brian’s life and career in the coming weeks and months. That’s not what I’m trying to do today.

Instead, since hearing of his passing, I wanted to write a thank you letter to Brian, expressing what his music meant to me and, more importantly, how it made me feel. So that’s the purpose of today’s article. I’ll also throw in some recommendations about my favourite Brian Wilson songs and albums in case you wanted to dive deeper into his works beyond the likes of “Good Vibrations”, “Surfin’ USA”, and “God Only Knows”.

And right at the end of this post, I’ll explore the small, but fabulously bizarre intersection of The Beach Boys and video games. Just so you can’t say this article has nothing to do with gaming 😊

Thank You, Brian Wilson

Dear Brian,

Your music was summer.

Fun, fun, fun. Girls on the beach. Surfin’ Safari. Teenagers and hot rods and doo-wop. A glorious sunbeam with warmth and light enough for all. You were the California myth, and I believed in it. I still do. Your early songs crafted an image of youthful buoyancy that will always lift me up. Tunes that are simultaneously of their time and timeless. You immortalised a generation and have influenced all that have come since.

But your music was also winter.

The song that made me really pay attention to you for the first time, the one that made me see you as someone more than just another one of the clean-cut boys in the stripy shirts singing “Barbara Ann”, was “She Knows Me Too Well”. That song’s moody chord changes and ominous lyrics were one thing, but when you hit that high note in the chorus, something broke inside of me. Your voice and songwriting had the power to elicit emotions I can’t capture in words. Wistful, perhaps? Yearning?

It awoke a love of your compositions that has lasted to this day. When I first became a fan of your work, the last original Beach Boys album was already in the rearview mirror, you had completed what would be your final tour to my home country of Australia, and what most consider to be your golden era of creativity was half a century ago. None of that mattered. Your music—lush and sensitive and beautifully naïve—found its way into my soul and made a permanent home there.

As a broke nineteen-year-old, I would move through the world listening to your songs in headphones that only played in the one ear. This worked out just fine as you mixed all your tracks in mono—a quirk of being practically deaf in your right ear. You and the rest of The Beach Boys would sing to me about love and longing, solar systems and vegetables. You know, all the important stuff! It was a necessary musical education that taught me serious art can sometimes be silly and that, as Mike Love’s character puts it in your biopic, Love & Mercy: “Even the happy songs are sad”.

Pain was too common a theme throughout your life. As such, people often place the adjective “tortured” in front of the word “genius” when describing you. I never knew you personally, but my guess is that you weren’t too comfortable with either label. It’s true that you suffered terrible abuse and created works that will stand up there with the greats of musical achievement. But at the start of it all, you just wanted to make music with your family that would bring people joy. And I feel that desire never left you.

So thank you, Brian. Thank you for giving us endless summers. Thank you for helping infuse pop music with a complexity and legitimacy that continues to influence artists to this day. Thank you for your soaring, innocent falsetto. Thank you for your rich, powerful harmonies. Thank you for fighting on despite all the hardships you faced. Thank you for writing “God Only Knows”, the song that played while I signed my wedding certificate to the woman I love. Thank you for making me feel. Thank you for making me smile.

In the end, I truly hope you knew how much you and your music were—and will continue to be—loved.

Love and mercy,

Harry

So, You Want to Listen to Brian Wilson’s Music

Okay, not long now until I get to the weird and wonderful world of The Beach Boys video games. But first, let’s talk a bit more about Brian Wilson’s music.

Yes, you should listen to Pet Sounds. It remains the defining moment of Brian’s career with many—including myself—considering it his magnum opus. But a common misconception with Brian and The Beach Boys’ music is that outside of Pet Sounds and a handful of their earlier singles, there’s not much else worth listening to.

It’s just not true. Brian had several moments of brilliance pre-and-post-Pet Sounds that are just as worthy of praise as anything on that album. So, if you wanted to dive a bit deeper into Brian’s discography, here are some of my favourite songs and albums of his that show the breadth of his talent.

Some of my favourite Brian Wilson/Beach Boys songs:

1. Surf’s Up – otherworldly songwriting. Between Brian’s haunting composition and Van Dyke Parks’s painterly lyrics, this song is the result of two creatives operating on a celestial level.

2. ‘Til I Die – a musical existential crisis caught on tape.

3. This Whole World – brother Carl Wilson’s bright vocals are perfect on this jubilant ode to life and humanity.

4. Wonderful – locking into a pristine, almost nursery rhyme-like melody, Brian’s voice has never sounded so angelic.

5. Melt Away – proof that even later in his career, Brian could craft melodies that would move mountains.

And some of my favourite Brian Wilson/Beach Boys albums:

1. The Smile Sessions (2011) – the closest we will ever get to hearing the most famous unreleased album in the history of rock music with The Beach Boys’ original vocals.

2. The Beach Boys Today! (1965) – a crisp, sunny A-side gives way to a B-side filled with some of Brian’s most sophisticated ballads. It’s a proto-Pet Sounds that shows a maturing artist in transition.

3. Sunflower (1970) – of all the albums mentioned here, Sunflower is the most democratic amongst the member of The Beach Boys. Sure, Brian still has some terrific contributions, but this is also the album where Dennis Wilson and Bruce Johnston really blossom as songwriters.

4. Friends (1968) – a short and sweet album of breezy hippie tunes that always puts me in a good mood.

5. The Beach Boys Love You (1977) – the last Beach Boys album where Brian took creative lead has him leaning in to his loveable goofy side.

And finally, as promised, let’s dive into The Beach Boys’ history with gaming.

The Beach Boys in Video Games

Fans of the Super Nintendo JRPG Earthbound may recognise the incredibly unsettling track “The Place” that plays towards the end of the game. What you may not know is that those eerie distorted vocals are actually a sample from The Beach Boys’ song, “Deirdre”—written by Brian Wilson and Bruce Johnston. Earthbound’s composers, Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, were big fans of the band and wanted the game’s music to emulate the feel of The Beach Boys, so it’s cool they used actual vocals from the group in the soundtrack (even if there exists no public record that they sought permission).

Adding an extra layer to this musical Russian doll, two decades after Earthbound’s release, Toby Fox sampled “The Place” in the track “Amalgam” for his game Undertale—therefore, also sampling “Deirdre”. So now we need another developer to compose a track that samples “Amalgam” to keep this incredible trend alive.

Despite being set in 1912, there’s a moment in BioShock Infinite when a floating platform appears with a barbershop quartet performing “God Only Knows”. This is particularly surreal as that song only released in 1966, but its inclusion does fit in with the game’s themes of parallel universes, constants and variables, you get the idea. I’m not complaining as I really like this particular rendition of the classic Brian Wilson song.

And now let’s get to the really weird stuff.

In the early 90s, The Beach Boys made an attempt to appeal to a younger crowd by creating a cartoon called Camp California. The show was going to focus on anthropomorphic versions of The Beach Boys getting up to totally rad 90s things! The only problem was that, for whatever reason, the show was never made.

What we did get were two video games based on the unreleased cartoon. Yo’ Bro was developed for the TurboGrafx-16 and is a top-down skateboarding game, while Camp California released on the TurboGrafx-CD as more of a traditional platformer. Neither game was particularly good, but it is kind of neat hearing 16-bit renditions of Beach Boys classics like “I Get Around” and “California Girls”. Probably worth noting that Brian had nothing to do with the doomed Camp California project.

Thanks for reading this different kind of article today. Next week’s post will be back to regular programming. In the meantime, be sure to check out my guest post, “Taylor Swift, Temple Run, and Mending a Broken Heart”, on David Burton’s Substack if you haven’t done so already. See you next week!

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The Video Game Storyteller is a free Substack written and formatted by Harry Fritsch on the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people, the Traditional Custodians of Meanjin (Brisbane).

All images were either captured directly by the author or sourced from publicly available promotional screenshots.

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