Video Game Original Music

[Lawnachaun]

There are lots of franchises out there that have great original music. Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and Beat Mania, and other such titles, use "real" songs. Or "popular" songs, rather. But most other games have their own original soundtrack to them. So, this thread is about those games. Which games have some of your favorite songs. Which franchises do you think have the best music.

I'll list off some franchises that I love their music. I don't have an order to this, so I'll just name off games as they come to me. But, here are some of my favorite game franchises with great music....

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The Legend of Zelda
Super Mario Bros.
Castlevania
Mega Man
Metal Gear
Final Fantasy
Street Fighter
Sonic the Hedgehog

Now, I'm not talking about liking a song or two, or whatever, from any of these franchises, or a single game within them. I'm talking about liking a bunch of songs from the entire franchise, across many games in the franchise.

So, with that said, which franchises do you like the music from the most. Again, I'm not talking about the Licensed music from the actual music industry. I'm talking about original scores made specifically for those games. .. So, for me, when I think of 'video game music', these are the franchises that immediately spring to mind. I'm sure there are more that I'm missing. There are even games like Tetris, where I like the songs that are on it. But Tetris has, what, 3 songs. On the original Gameboy version, that is. Although I like them, the other franchises listed have many more songs that I like from them, and across many, many more games. However, if you'd like to list off some of your favorite single songs from games, feel free. The more the merrier, I say.

 

[crunchyg]

Too much greatness to fit into one topic. In the Nintendo realm, once game storage went CD-ROM and allowed storing full-length recorded tracks, Super Smash Bros Melee set a very high bar for game soundtracks. And then Super Mario Galaxy arrived and blew away everything that came before it.

 

[Lawnachaun]

Well, even before CD-ROM based games were out, there were some good cartridge based soundtracks out there too.Lots of games had memorable songs in the NES / Genesis / SNES / N64 days. In fact, even Smooth McGroove has done a lot of acapella's songs from cartridge based games. Mostly coming from the games I listed above. So, even the cartridge games had their fair share of good songs, and not just CD based games.

 

[crunchyg]

Of course, the 8-bit era had amazing soundtracks, I was just focusing on the modern stuff. The original Super Mario Bros soundtrack is so iconic today that most people don't appreciate how groundbreaking it was at the time. The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, and Metroid soundtracks were all breathtaking.

There was a freelancer who went by Virt who composed one of the best Game Boy Color tracks I'd ever heard. It was a demo for a Popeye game, and his track unfortunately was not selected (or maybe the game was cancelled, I can't remember), but you have to listen to it to appreciate it. I'll post a link to it later.

 

[Dreek Lass]

Oh my. You are forgetting the Donky Kong gameboy games. I always thought that that game had superb music. That is not to say that I didn't think the same thing about Super Mario Brothers, because there are a mass of songs on those games that give me everlasting life lol. But some of those Donky Kong tunes are amazing. There are some marvelous remakes of those songs on youtube as well

There was one level with moving clouds in the Donky Kong game and it was just sublime to listen to. That level was pretty difficult too, so I ended up spending hours listening to that song whilst trying to beat the level.

 

[Lawnachaun]

Honestly, I don't remember playing the Donkey Kong games on the Gameboy. I didn't have a ton of Gameboy games, nor did a lot of my friends. So I only played what I had. But Donkey Kong wasn't one of them. I did it a lot at the arcade and on the NES. But no, not the Gameboy version. I think that my cousin had it, but by the time I knew that (as we lived in different cities), I was already out of the handheld scene, and didn't bother with it anymore. Well, that is, until the GBA came out. That got me back in the handheld scene. But no, I never played the Gameboy Donkey Kong game, as far as I can remember.

 

[Damien Lee]

I have a preference for game music that is generated on the actual sound chip as opposed to one that streams off the optical disc. It's more pure and gives a sense of a particular console's sound capabilities just like things were back in the 8-bit/16-bit era. As far as Nintendo franchise go, I absolutely love the music from the Legend of Zelda, F-Zero & Star Fox series. The Super Mario Galaxy games also had amazing music and I've always wanted to pick up the OSTs.

 

[aboleth_lich]

All of the above are excellent, classic examples of original video game music which I also personally love.

While I'm not sure that it would count as original video game music, I would like to add that back-in-the-day I was blown away by how well Green Jelly's straight up rock 'n roll soundtrack for Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage was captured by the SNES--truly demonstrating how advanced its sound capabilities was! (Although that being said, there was an at times particular synthy character to the Sega Genesis' sound that sometime the SNES couldn't quite emulate. Just compare both consoles version of Earthworm Jim.)