Gaming music

[Monkey]

I love old computer game music. I'll take a look at some of my Amiga games, or even my Spectrum ones. The only problem is that there is too many good soundtracks to choose from.

Apidya - The Quest Begins
Laser Squad - Intro
Super Cars 2 - Intro

[Hoax]

Hotline Miami has a pretty great soundtrack, though, it starts off pretty slow.

The track used in the trailer is great too. Link

Most recent nostalgia blast was this from UT

[Word]

Non-atari-games:
Knights of Honor (the intro is like a medley)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyVgRi31vJM

Patrician (the full soundtrack is on youtube, but here's some gameplay footage)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me0zsKB9dV0

and Lego Island (I linked that already in another context I think - the music during the racing game sounds a bit like early Pink Floyd to me for some reason)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfpnAYSorNM

bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oD3lh9u77U

[saragei]

Digger (Windmill Software, 1983), citing from the FAQ:

Q: What's the music that plays in the background?
A: The background music for the main part of the game is called "Popcorn". It was written by Gershon Kingsley in 1969 and was made popular by the group "Hot Butter" in 1972. It has since been covered by many other artists. There is a site about the song here.

The background music for the bonus is the William Tell Overture by Rossini.

The music which plays when you die is "Funeral March" by F. Chopin.

Addictive, and the music plays a major role in it being so.

[AshitakA]

maybe not that old, but it suits :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTwlAT_AwU

[Jonathan]

and Lego Island (I linked that already in another context I think - the music during the racing game sounds a bit like early Pink Floyd to me for some reason)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfpnAYSorNM

I just wonder how they managed to fit all that inside a tiny hill. The union of the island and the race track would show the huge track extending out to sea, dwarfing the actual island.

[Word]

Yeah, I used to think it's all underground (and even under the ocean) when I was a kid. There's some giant dome whose dark blue color suggests I'm correct. Then again, why can't you see it while you're taking part in the jet ski race? I also like The Torpedoes song more than Miserlou simply because I knew them first. Oh, and Torpedo! The song that played when everything was destroyed terrified me.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I used to think it's all underground (and even under the ocean) when I was a kid. There's some giant dome whose dark blue color suggests I'm correct.

I can see how a solid dark blue color can pass for the ocean given the technical limitations of the time. The problem is that the spatial arrangement doesn't make sense. The floor of the dome is hardly below sea level, and the dome is huge! They must have cheated when they made the race track version of the island. Obviously the other underground portions are simply occluded by the hills as seen from the track. You can't see the dome from the outside portion of the race because it's out beyond the far clipping plane and possibly otherwise culled.

I only occasionally got to play Lego Island and didn't play all the way through, but good memories. The fun of setting all the vehicles loose would soon turn into frustration, trying to catch them again. That would probably be easier now that I'm much faster with the mouse and frame rates are better.

[sinewav]

They must have cheated when they made the race track version of the island.

I used to make levels for the game Descent and many fan-made levels broke physical reality by creating environments inside other spaces. In the drawing below I have a corridor leaving a cube then intersecting it. The game would not render the parts of the corridor as it ran through the cube but you could still fly through it. It wouldn't surprise me if the LEGO game developers used similar tricks to squeeze out more space from the game's engine.

[Jonathan]

I used to make levels for the game Descent and many fan-made levels broke physical reality by creating environments inside other spaces. In the drawing below I have a corridor leaving a cube then intersecting it. The game would not render the parts of the corridor as it ran through the cube but you could still fly through it. It wouldn't surprise me if the LEGO game developers used similar tricks to squeeze out more space from the game's engine.

I don't think so. Apparently the game even used the archaic Direct3D retained mode, which is most certainly entirely Euclidean. They must have used a separate island for the race. One telltale sign is that it's been stripped of all detail.

Edit: David Patch (the art director) says it's a Tardis. I mentioned it to "one14am" (one of the art people) on YouTube who then asked him. Thanks! You'd think those people would be harder to track down.

[Word]

Haha, I want an autograph!
Yesterday I also remembered that I tried to follow the fire trucks through these wormhole-tunnels when I was 5. And I don't have many memories from that age.

[Phytotron]

One might think I would have some good responses for this, but while I appreciate music within a game and agree it can enhance the experience, I've never been one to listen to it outside of the game itself. Consequently, it doesn't often get committed to memory as well as regular music. Then there's just age. I'm sure there were some NES or even old arcade tunes I dug, but I just can't recall them off-hand. Plus, it may be that the simpler bleep and bloop sound may not commit itself to memory very well, either.

So most of my submissions are going to be a little more recent. Certainly Mario 64 and LoZ: Ocarina of Time had great soundtracks.

All the old Rare games had good ones. Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and one cannot forget Conker's Bad Fur Day and "The Great Mighty Poo."

I thought the soundtracks for the first two Metroid Prime games were great. Nothing I would listen to outside of the game, but they fit the mood and aesthetic of the games so well.
Metroid Prime - Full Original Soundtrack HD
Title Theme - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes OST (HQ) (playlist)

XIII was a game that had everything going for it from the standpoint of presentation, but the actual gameplay just didn't hold up. For those unfamiliar, it was based on the 'graphic novel' by the same name. The game pays tribute to its origin not only with its cel-shaded graphics, but with other comic book-like elements as well, including some game mechanics. It has a great story, decent voice acting (OK, David Duchovny voices the lead, and if you thought he sounded like he was on valium on TV...but there's Adam West!), and a thoroughly suitable and groovin' soundtrack—a mix of 60's spy jazz and 70's espionage funk, heh. In the game, the music is dynamic, however this fella did a nice job editing them together to create full tracks: XIII OST

Beyond Good and Evil has a nice soundtrack, a few to dance to, and a few even induce a tear.

More recently I've been working through some PC games from the late 90's and early aughts, bought from GOG. One was Omikron: The Nomad Soul. David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels scored several tunes for this one, a few of which were performed by a band in the game called The Dreamers. You can find the cutscene music videos on youtube. Just about all the original songs they wrote ended up on Bowie's subsequent album, Hours.... I have a feeling that when the devs/producers approached Bowie and Gabrels about doing the soundtrack, they were expecting he would continue on with the sort of sound he had used on Outside and Earthling, his most recent albums to that point, which would have fit perfectly with the aesthetic of the game. Other than a couple tunes, I felt most of the to-be Hours... songs didn't really fit in with Omikron. Nice album in its own right, though.

Then I played a game called Outcast. Really enjoyed that one. The score has a suitable and really well-done John Williamsy kind of sound. In fact, I often found myself leaving the game humming a few specific themes from Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and E.T., heh. And it was all performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. I guess they were hard up for cash at that time, heh. The soundtrack comes with the game which can be had for cheap on GOG, but can also be heard here: Outcast OST.

Syberia had some really nice music. Too bad the game was so short.

Moving on to a second post because of link limitations....

[Phytotron]

Then there's MDK. Its soundtrack was composed by Tommy Tallarico, whose name should be recognized by at least a few here. There's one song in particular I liked from that, which was surely a pastiche of the theme from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, which I love—both the film and the theme. It's called "A Padded Cell."

That brings me to another song in that style. Back in the 90's I had a few shareware discs for my Mac. One included a game called PacMac Deluxe. Here are a couple videos for it: 1 and 2. It had an amazing tune called "Ural Volga," apparently an original composition made just for the game, but I haven't been able to track down the composer. One webpage attributes it to a Rive Gauch, but La Rive Gauche is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. So, I don't know. You can hear some of it in those videos, but I've attached the actual .mod of it. That played natively on Ubuntu for me, not sure about other OS's.

UralVolga.mod.zip

(114.93 KiB) Downloaded 102 times

I've never played that LEGO Island game, but in listening through its soundtrack I found it features a similarly styled tune: The Jail.

All these can probably be traced back to Nino Rota's I Clowns.


I'm sure there are several others I thought were great, but I just can't recall them at the moment.

and Lego Island (I linked that already in another context I think - the music during the racing game sounds a bit like early Pink Floyd to me for some reason)

What? How? That's just boogie-woogie derivative, with a few other things thrown in there. I don't think I've ever heard any Pink Floyd that sounded remotely like that.

[Clutch]

How..how did I forget about the Donkey Kong Country theme?

[Word]

and Lego Island (I linked that already in another context I think - the music during the racing game sounds a bit like early Pink Floyd to me for some reason)

What? How? That's just boogie-woogie derivative, with a few other things thrown in there. I don't think I've ever heard any Pink Floyd that sounded remotely like that.

Oh, I was mostly referring to the middle part of Astronomy Domine, I just think of that whenever I remember the Lego racing music.
And yes, the Polka-esque sound of both The Jail and the Ural Volga tracks is a much more apparent similarity...

(since you are back again, did you see that post? not that it is related to this topic in any way )