The tempo change upon picking up a power-up. Those rapidly ascending notes before each level begins. With newfound clarity and complexity of arrangement, 1991’s Sonic The Hedgehog had a soundtrack by Nasato Nakamura that absolutely personified its hero.
NFS UNDERCOVER SOUNDTRACKS SERIES
It sounded like a visiting soundtrack from a high-budget TV series about undercover cops and modded sports cars, and as such gave the whole game a sheen and thoughtful atmosphere it otherwise had no right to hold.ġ6-bit consoles brought great advances in graphics, but their sound chips were also ready to impress the cross-legged consumers that sat before them. But there’s also a collection of spacious, experimental electronic tracks from Recoil (aka Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder), Amin Tobin, and the aforementioned Trent Rezor’s brooding, glitched-out meditations. There’s typical Need For Speed fare here in the hair rock of Airborne and a From First To Last track to tick the emo quota ( NHL had that covered for the decade, anyway). What stands out here is the weirdness, the leftfield nature of its picks, and how well a Nine Inch Nails track works with the image of a Corvette blasting along a highway. We might just as easily have mentioned Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz’ involvement with a certain other NFS, but instead we’re picking Need For Speed Undercover from 2008.
Track upon track of deliberately unfriendly and abrasive synth arrangements, set to driving, bitcrushed 808s that keep tempo perfectly with a man in a chicken mask smashing someone’s head into nothingness on a bathroom floor.Īlong with FIFA, EA’s Need For Speed was the games industry tastemaker for well over a decade thanks to carefully soundtracked annual releases that always, always reached number one in the charts by Christmas. If you want to know what that sounds like, it’s Hotline Miami’s soundtrack. Hipsterism is about consumer choices as surrogate for personality, signifying oneself as so discerning that it would be impossible for an overlap to exist between their taste and yours. So when Hotline Miami turned up in 2012 looking like the Megadrive tie-in of Drive and soundtracked by underground synthwave artists like Perturbator and M|O|O|N, it was perfect for the time. The early 2010s were a strange time, which most of us spent either calling people hipsters, deflecting accusations that we were a hipster, or worrying about Miley Cyrus. It was the use of real-world, licensed tracks in a new way – to absorb you in a different era, and poke fun at it at one and the same time. This wasn’t just a tastefully selected roster of songs to drown out the silence, as GTA III’s soundtrack was. We can thank ‘80s cinema’s obsession with guns, car chases and explosions for that. It was music that made sense in our new, insistently pastel-shaded surroundings, and it seemed to soundtrack our every drive-by and police chase perfectly. Many of us probably hadn’t heard Corey Hart’s Sunglasses at Night or Pale Shelter by Tears For Fears before they started pumping out of a Cheetah tuned to Wave 103.
And it did so using music as the crux of the whole endeavor. For its next trick, 2002’s GTA: Vice City, it lampooned an entire decade of pop culture in a kind of walk-in pastiche. In 2001, Rockstar introduced us to a new level of freedom and agency within 3D worlds in GTA III. You’ll laugh, you’ll be moved, you’ll switch tabs to cue up a song from an old NHL game halfway through and then come back. We’ve compiled 10 of the most moving, memorable, influential and simply enjoyable musical accompaniments to games throughout the years, including original scores and mixtape-style soundtracks. Oddly enough the answer to all those questions and every subsequent one about gaming music is May 16 by Lagwagon. They give us a frame of reference – what’s the culture of this activity we’re indulging in, virtually? What do they creators want us to be thinking and feeling in this moment? The best game soundtracks bring out emotions from us that visual images and pressing X can’t. Game music is more important than we ever probably stop to consider.
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