Last week Tech Insider spoke with video game music aficionado Emily Reese. She loves video games, loves music, and loves to talk about the new and unlikely creativity that emerges when the two art forms meet. That intersection is the subject of her show "Top Score," a Minnesota Public Radio program that focuses on video game music. Really!
We asked Reese to send over a list of her favorite game soundtracks, and the results are absolutely overflowing with good ideas.
"There are so many more but I feel like this is getting out of control!" she wrote, "TOO MANY AMAZING SOUNDTRACKS!!!"
Collected here is a selection from that list. These scores broke technical or creative boundaries, and added depth to games – some of which weren't so great otherwise. Nearly all the soundtracks are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, or Bandcamp. Because each one was crafted for a particular mood and activity, we've included some suggestions as to how you might bring them into your own life.
If after reading this you want to learn more about the craft of video game scoring, you can visit the "Top Score" show page here.
The 1986 "Metroid" soundtrack was a brooding rebellion against arcade-pop.
When "Metroid" came out, game design was something very different than it was today, and soundtrack designers had to be hardware technicians as much as musicians. Composer Hirokazu Tanaka studied electrical engineering in college before joining Nintendo.
In a 2002 interview with "Gamasutra," he described writing individual 1s and 0s onto a chip. The soundtracks of that era had to take up about as much memory space as these few paragraphs of text. Where other composers used that technology to generate catchy tunes for the arcade, Tanaka had other interests:
I had a concept that the music for Metroid should be created not as game music, but as music the players feel as if they were encountering a living creature. I wanted to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects ...the melody inMetroids only used at the ending after you killed the Mother Brain. That's because I wanted only a winner to have a catharsis at the maximum level. For the reason, I decided that melodies would be eliminated during the gameplay. By melody here I mean something that someone can sing or hum.
In other words, Tanaka crafted a reponsive, mood-setting soundtrack that behaved more like a movie score. That legacy persists in many of today's best games.
Listen to the soundtrack in the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ti1V0YMULGs?rel=0
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"Super Mario Land" had a trippy, glitchy soundtrack to match its oddball gameplay.
"Super Mario Land" was an early GameBoy release that broke the mold of the Mario franchise. Notable for its distinct style and artwork – as well as the strategic innovations necessary to scale NES gameplay to the (then) new, handheld world – it featured another Tanaka sound creation. Its melody is warm and inviting, looping without feeling repetitive. And the glitchy, syncopated beat has a deliberately incomplete feeling that propels you forward through the game looking for resolution. These elements combine to produce the sort of music you might actually want to listen to on a tiny, lo-fi paleo-mobile device.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/6GWxoOc3TFI?rel=0
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"Kirby's Dreamland" played a fun, relentlessly upbeat march.
"Kirby" is, in many ways, "Mario"-lite. Both are "platforming" games that have players move from left to right across a screen, jumping and dodging to avoid obstacles. But where "Mario" follows a mustachioed plummer through increasingly difficult stages into some hardcore gaming, "Kirby" features an adorable puffy bubble's much less frustrating quest. The series keeps things cute, friendly, and simple enough not to get frustrating.
Masahiro Sakurai, who went on to create "Super Smash Bros," created "Kirby's Dreamland" in 1992 for the GameBoy console. The first game in the series, it featured a peppy, fun soundtrack by Jun Ishikawa to match its cheerful disposition.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/-EAw3CGscwg?rel=0
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Also good for: skipping across a field with your toddler; celebrating your promotion within a candy company.
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