On headphones, a good fiction podcast has a whole second track running under the dialogue. Footsteps cross from left to right. A door closes somewhere behind you. A fridge hums, and without anyone saying so, you know it's a kitchen late at night.

Casino games are built out of borrowed craft like that, and not much of it came from casinos.

Radio

The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop opened at Maida Vale in 1958 to make sounds that didn't yet exist, first for radio drama and then for television. Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe set it up, and in 1963 Delia Derbyshire used oscillators and tape to realize Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme. In 1973 Neumann showed its KU 80 dummy head at the IFA trade show in Berlin, a pair of microphones set into the ears of a model human head, and German radio drama producers took it up to put listeners inside the scene.

A card being dealt on a screen has a sound made from scratch to feel physical, the way a Radiophonic effect was, and the ambience under a card game is usually a short loop, so someone has to hide the join. Game audio teams reach for the dummy-head idea whenever a sound has to come from behind you.

Television

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? first aired on ITV in September 1998 with a score by Keith and Matthew Strachan built on one idea: the music under the questions rose a semitone with every step up the money ladder, so the room could feel the stakes climbing before the next figure was read out.

Live studio games took the whole format, a host at a table, lighting cues and a rising sting before the reveal, and put it on a stream. The presenters who are hosting these live casino games are running a quiz show with one problem no TV host ever had: they can't see the contestants. The stream only goes one way, and where a game has chat, that window is the only thing coming back.

Video games

Koji Kondo wrote the music and sound effects for Super Mario Bros. in 1985, and the coin chime is probably the two most copied notes in gaming. The borrowing that matters more is structural. Jason Kapalka's Bejeweled, released by PopCap as Diamond Mine in 2000, popularized the pattern where matched gems vanish and the ones above fall into the gap, sometimes matching again on the way down. Cascading reels do exactly that with symbols. And when a bonus round needs its music to change without a hard cut, the idea comes from LucasArts, whose 1991 patent for what became iMUSE described "dynamically composing music and sound effects" as a game unfolded. Monkey Island 2 used it first.

Sport

In 1992 UEFA hired the composer Tony Britten to give the Champions League an anthem, and he built it on Handel's Zadok the Priest. "There's a rising string phase which I pinched from Handel and then I wrote my own tune," he has said. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it with the chorus of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and it plays before every match to tell you the stakes have changed before a ball is kicked.

A sting at the start of a bonus round does the same job at a smaller scale, cueing the change before anything on the reels has moved.

The one thing they couldn't take

When Sarah Koenig's Serial arrived in 2014, Apple said it was the fastest podcast ever to reach five million downloads and streams on iTunes. Welcome to Night Vale had already shown in 2012 that a fake community radio station could hold a whole fictional desert town together, and fiction podcasts like Wolf 359, set aboard a failing space station, pushed the form further. Gabriel Urbina, who created it, put together a list of his own podcast picks here in January.

Serial went out weekly from October 2014, and a lot of the talk about it happened in the seven days between episodes, the one part of the craft a game played in a single sitting has no use for.