The Greatest Game Music - Reviews of truly outstanding game music

MUSHA Soundtrack

MUSHA Soundtrack, Toshiaki Sakoda, 1990

It’s safe to say that Compile’s well-regarded Aleste series reached its pinnacle with 1990’s MUSHA for the Sega Genesis. It ranks as one of the 16-bit era’s best shooters, with lightning-fast gameplay, an immensely challenging difficulty level (that still toned down the borderline unfairness of earlier Aleste games) and some of the most breathtaking visuals ever seen on the Genesis – all the impressive considering that MUSHA was a first-generation title. What really helped to set the game apart was its visual style. Feeling that MUSHA had to differ significantly from its franchise predecessors, the developers came up with an unusual mix of sci-fi tropes and traditional elements of Japanese lore – your flying mecha shoots super-charged electric shurikens while facing off against enemies like robotic ninjas and Japanese castles on tank treads.

Another one of MUSHA’s virtues fondly recalled by many gamers is its superlative soundtrack, delivered by Toshiaki Sakoda. Sakoda had worked on previous Compile titles such as Aleste 2 and the first two instalments of the Crush Pinball series. On this occasion, the music formed a more important part of the game’s stylistic foundations than usually. In fact, art director Kazuyuki Nakashima used the phrase “Edo Metal” as he pitched the game’s concept to Compile’s leadership. According to Nakashima, the developers soon settled on a “speedy heavy metal sound that would match the fast scrolling and would play from the start of the opening demo non-stop without interruption”.

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Homeland Soundtrack

Homeland Soundtrack, Hayato Matsuo, 2005

Nintendo’s GameCube wasn’t blessed with a huge number of system exclusives – and what made the situation even more frustrating was the fact that many games were only released in specific territories (out of the nearly 650 GameCube titles, only 281 were ever released in Japan!) As a result, there’s not a huge number of hidden GameCube treasures waiting to be unearthed – but those that do exist can be particularly obscure and little-known. Case in point: Homeland, an online RPG by Dragon Quest developer Chunsoft that was only released in Japan. It proved innovative in several ways – one of only four online games for the system, it was the only GameCube title where the console acted as a server. And instead of allowing parties of just four (like the GameCube’s Phantasy Star Online), Homeland let players band together in groups of up to 36!

Looking at the game’s simple, if charmingly naive visuals, it’s not difficult to understand why Homeland didn’t leave Japanese shores, considering it was released only a year before the next console generation hit the market. Consequently, most gamers missed out on Homeland’s delightful soundtrack by Hayato Matsuo. Considering that Matsuo had started his career under the tutelage of Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama and that by 2005, he had composed the scores for several of Chunsoft’s Shiren the Wanderer games, it was no big surprise to see him tackle Homeland as well.

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EverQuest II Soundtrack

EverQuest II Soundtrack, Laura Karpman, 2004

In some ways, EverQuest II ended up between a rock and a hard place. Its predecessor EverQuest – together with Ultima Online – had established the genre of MMORPGs as we know them today. That meant that expectations for EverQuest II were high, to say the least. To the credit of developer Sony Online Entertainment, they released a product that was polished, accessible and among the best MMORPGs released up to that point. It just wasn’t the kind of quantum leap that EverQuest had been. And then World of Warcraft landed and changed MMORPGs forever. EverQuest II was ultimately far from a commercial flop – it did peak at 325,000 subscribers – but it didn’t stand a chance against World of Warcraft and the millions of subscribers it attracted. Still, EverQuest II retained a dedicated fan base, with the sixteenth expansion Reign of Shadows released in 2020, fourteen years after the base game’s release.

The developers put significant emphasis on the game’s audio – several reviewers commented on the impressive amount of recorded speech, delivered by high-profile actors such as Christopher Lee and Heather Graham. For the EverQuest II soundtrack, Sony turned to Laura Karpman. Karpman, making her game score debut, was an intriguing choice. A classically trained composer and jazz performer, Karpman had written for the concert hall, but also for film, television and theatre. By the time she worked on EverQuest II, she had already gathered several Emmy Award wins and nominations, with her biggest assignment being the score for Steven Spielberg’s TV series Taken. EverQuest II was the beginning of a productive career in video games for Karpman, while she continued her work in various other media. Meanwhile, in 2016 she became the first woman elected to the music branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors.

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Atlantis: The Lost Tales Soundtrack

Atlantis: The Lost Tales Soundtrack, Pierre Estève / Stéphane Picq, 1997

By the second half of the 1990s, French developer Cryo Interactive had found its niche: lavishly produced, Myst-style adventure games. The reception of these titles amongst critics remained somewhat ambivalent, but there’s no denying that Cryo’s approach was effective. Their biggest success might well have been Atlantis: The Lost Tales. Sporting panoramic 360-degree first-person views of the pre-rendered environments and significant amounts of pre-recorded speech, Atlantis was praised by reviewers for its visuals and strong atmosphere. At the same time, perceived gameplay flaws once again often resulted in average scores. That didn’t stop the game from selling more than 300,000 copies by late 1998, starting a franchise that would generate four more titles in future years and outlast Cryo itself.

Scoring duties for the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack went to the duo of Pierre Estève and Stéphane Picq. Picq had been Cryo’s main composer since the company’s very beginning, writing the entrancing music for its breakthrough hit Dune. Estève was a more recent addition to Cryo’s musical team, approaching the developer in 1995 after having worked as a rock musician and composer for French television and radio. His first project with Cryo turned out to be Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man. In the years to follow, Estève would create the music and sound effects for several other Cryo titles, even remaining with the Atlantis franchise after the developer had closed its doors in 2002. His anthropological interest in a vast range of musical cultures – witnessed by his solo albums Bamboo and Metal – was a perfect match for Picq’s eclectic composition style.

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Emperor: Battle for Dune Soundtrack

Emperor: Battle for Dune Soundtrack, David Arkenstone / Frank Klepacki / Jarrid Mendelson, 2001

While Westwood Studios’ Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty wasn’t the first real-time strategy game, it codified many of the genre’s conventions and kicked off its 1990s boom era – epitomised by Westwood’s own Command & Conquer juggernaut. So in some ways, it seemed fitting that 2001’s Emperor: Battle for Dune, Westwood’s third Dune game, was poised to break new ground again as the developer’s first 3D RTS title – or was it? Ultimately, Battle for Dune was met with favourable feedback from reviewers and gamers, but few would have hailed it as anything more than a solid entry in a genre that was getting very crowded. Ultimately, Battle for Dune became Westwood’s final RTS game – not a revolution, but rather a bookend then to the developer’s pioneering work.

Things were more interesting on the music side of things. Emperor: Battle for Dune featured the same three factions as Dune 2000 had a few years earlier: House Atreides, Harkonnen or Ordos (the latter a non-canon addition to the Dune universe which allowed the developers to add some variety to their games). And as on Dune 2000 – and of course the Command & Conquer titles – RTS game music superstar Frank Klepacki was drafted to write the soundtrack. However, this time Westwood requested a distinct style of music for each house. That effectively tripled the workload, so Klepacki brought in additional composers he had worked with in the past – David Arkenstone and Jarrid Mendelson. Arkenstone had collaborated with Klepacki on Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny and Lands of Lore III, while Mendelson had made crucial contributions to one of the Command & Conquer franchise’s most unusual entries – Tiberian Sun.

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Dune Soundtrack (PC)

Dune Soundtrack (PC), Stéphane Picq, 1992

It feels like early media adaptations of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune were doomed to run into equally epic troubles during their production. There’s of course the convoluted story of how Dune finally reached cinema screens in 1984 after more than a decade of failed attempts, only to disappoint at the box office and alienate its own director. However, the first video game adaptation of Dune equally struggled to actually get made – to the point where publisher Virgin Games cancelled the game (and launched development of what would become Dune II), only to find out later that Cryo Interactive had secretly continued development. Thankfully, there was a happy ending to the story. Partially thanks to its innovative mix of adventure and strategy elements, Dune become a commercial hit, with 300,000 units sold by 1997, paving the way for Cryo’s expansion and prolific output throughout the 1990s.

In their assessments, contemporary reviewers put unusual emphasis on Stéphane Picq‘s soundtrack for Dune. Picq’s work soon became part of game music history when Virgin Records released an arrange album titled Dune – Spice Opera. At this point in time, album releases of Western game music were nearly unheard of, so for a European game soundtrack to receive an arrange album was entirely unexpected. The work clearly left its mark – when online game music criticism started to pop up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dune – Spice Opera garnered rave reviews for its unusual and creative aesthetics. It remains a fan favourite, its official release in Europe making it one of the first pieces of game music available for purchase by budding fans of the art form.

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Fast RMX Soundtrack

Fast RMX Soundtrack, Bjulin / Manfred Linzner / Martin Schioeler, 2017

One of gamers’ great frustrations (at least at the timing of writing in 2020) remains Nintendo’s steadfast refusal to revive its classic F-Zero franchise. The last time fans got to enjoy a new F-Zero title dates back to 2004, when F-Zero Climax was released for the Game Boy Advance – only in Japan, adding insult to injury for Western gamers. Thankfully, German developer and Nintendo loyalist Shin’en Multimedia seemed determined to fill the gap with its Fast franchise. Kicking off in 2011 with WiiWare title Fast – Racing League, the franchise went from strength to strength with 2015’s Fast Racing Neo for the WiiU and 2017’s Fast RMX, a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. All three games received applause from reviewers for their stellar presentations and gameplay that created an overwhelming sense of speed, as well as its Ikaruga-style system of polarity switching to receive extra speed boosts.

Fast RMX essentially served as an expanded version of Fast Racing Neo, including all of that earlier game’s racing tracks and DLC, while adding a few new courses of its own. This was reason for game music fans to celebrate – Fast RMX gathered all of the outstanding music written for Fast Racing Neo and added more content still, arriving at 2+ hours of music spread across almost 50 compositions. The masterminds behind the score(s) were Shin’en Multimedia veterans Manfred Linzner and Martin Schioeler, joined by relative newcomer Bjulin.

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Iridion II Soundtrack

Iridion II Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2003

As the new millenium dawned, shoot’em ups were arguably nowhere near as popular as during their heyday of the 1980s and 90s. Still, there were more than enough developers around that still had a fondness for the genre and kept the flame burning. One such studio was Shin’en Multimedia, founded in 1999 by former members of Amiga demoscene group Abyss. Focusing on Nintendo’s handheld consoles in the early years of their existence, Shin’en turned what had been conceived as a Game Boy shoot’em up into a Game Boy Advance launch title – Iridion 3D. Despite the game’s much-lauded pseudo-3D graphics, reviews were tepid due to frustrating gameplay. Two years later, Iridion II was received much more positively. Its gameplay broke little new ground, but critics agreed that it was a pleasant reminder of the more straightforward shooters of yore – and no review failed to mention Iridion II’s stellar presentation.

Part of this was one of the best-sounding scores to ever grace the Game Boy Advance. For some, this might be damning the Iridion II soundtrack with faint praise, given how difficult the GBA hardware made it to produce music that didn’t sound like a muddy, substandard SNES score. But keeping these hardware limitations in mind elucidates just how much of an accomplishment this soundtrack is. And if you are not familiar with all this technological background, the music’s strengths will easily help you look past the still somewhat grainy sound of the samples used.

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Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack

Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2000

One day historians will sit down and determine how many hundreds of licensed platformers were released for the Game Boy and the Game Boy Colour. Then again, we might never know the exact number – the market share of both platforms was so large that even local releases promised commercial success. Case in point: Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo (and no, there was no second episode, so maybe things didn’t turn out as planned). The game was based on an animated TV series, which in turn was an adaptation of a weekly German comics magazine first published in 1953. The magazine ran for decades and at the height of its success boasted a circulation of several hundred thousand per week. Of course, abroad the two anthropomorphic foxes and their friend Lupo weren’t particularly well-known, so this Game Boy Colour title remained an obscure Germany-only game.

While very few will remember Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo, it deserves a place in the annals of game music for its outstanding soundtrack. It was one of the earliest works by Manfred Linzner, who had graduated from the Amiga demo scene of the mid-1990s to scoring commercial products. After writing music for several Amiga games, Linzner began to focus on Game Boy Colour and later Game Boy Advance titles. His productivity in these early years of his career is astounding – for the years 2000-2002, Mobygames lists 36 music credits for Linzner! The highlights from this fertile period of his career are Iridion 3D and the Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo soundtrack.

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Taikou Risshiden V Soundtrack

Taikou Risshiden V Soundtrack, unknown composer, 2004

There’s no doubt that Koei’s most prominent franchises of historical war simulations are Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga’s Ambition – both of them spanning several dozen games and ports. However, Koei worked through this particular subject matter in other games as well, for example the Taikou Risshiden titles. The first game in this particular franchise – almost unknown outside of Japan – was released in 1992 for PC-98, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. The series continued up until Taikou Risshiden V, which saw the light of day in 2004 – and apparently concluded the franchise. The Taikou Risshiden games set themselves apart from other Koei history simulations through their sandbox-style gameplay that gave players greater freedom in choosing their path to victory. For example, available job classes included not just samurai but also pirates, merchants and blacksmiths, while gamers were free to roam the game’s world at their leisure.

Musically speaking, the Taikou Risshiden franchise had always held promise, but ultimately failed to make waves – despite renowned anime composer Michiru Oshima scoring the first game in the series early in her career. Finally, the Taikou Risshiden V soundtrack managed to unlock the potential that lay dormant in these games, producing one of the best orchestral PS2 scores that charms listeners with an exquisite wealth of melodies and colours. Unfortunately, there’s no information in the English-speaking parts of the internet about who composed the music – and while the game’s Wikipedia page details a score album, such a release isn’t confirmed by any other sources such as VMGdb.

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