The Greatest Game Music - Reviews of truly outstanding game music

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! Soundtrack

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! Soundtrack, Jonathan Geer, 2020

What do you do if you have delivered two successful instalments of your cooking simulation franchise and are wondering where to take things next? If you are developer Vertigo Gaming, the answer is: don’t change your winning formula, but have some fun with the premise. In other words: the core loop of clicking on the right ingredients at the right time while juggling multiple food orders didn’t change much. Reviewers did point out issues with the game’s UI and occasionally punishing difficulty level, but by large and enjoyed Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! (and its appetising art style). Where things took a left turn was with the game’s narrative. Set in a post-apocalyptic USA, your restaurant empire has been blown to pieces and now you’ve hit the road with a couple of helpful robots who’ve let you turn their van into a food truck.

Less surprising was the game’s choice of composer: Jonathan Geer returned after delivering solid work on the previous two CSD games. However, this was easily his most ambitious franchise entry so far, sporting significantly longer compositions than previous CSD titles – with the soundtrack clocking in at a whopping 102 minutes. And it’s not just the scope of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! soundtrack that impresses. Geer’s most creative work yet in his already eclectic discography is impossible to swiftly sum up and label with a genre tag. If one had to find easy descriptors, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! might well be dubbed game music’s most ingenious easy-listening score.

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Kessen Soundtrack

Kessen Soundtrack, Reijiro Koroku, 2000

Since their inception in the mid-80s, KOEI’s many historical strategy games had always been more of an insider proposition. It felt a bit like series such as Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were reserved for those gamers who were willing to spend hours parsing menus and stats, while carefully planning their next move. Several of these titles had made it to the US market but never turned into eye-catching best-sellers. That changed with Kessen, one of the PlayStation 2’s launch titles. Set once more in feudal Japan, Kessen emphasised spectacular visuals and battlefield action, attracting far more attention internationally than any previous KOEI game. Ultimately, Kessen was successful enough to spawn two sequels. However, several contemporary reviewers pointed out that the game lacked the usual complexity and depth of a KOEI strategy game, making for an entertaining but shallow experience.

Kessen’s producer Kou Shibusawa had created the game with cinematic ambitions in mind – which had direct implications for the Kessen soundtrack. Throughout the first half of the 1990s, KOEI had consistently raised the bar for the production values of orchestral game scores – even recording Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV and Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki with overseas symphony orchestras. However, in the following years, KOEI reverted to using smaller domestic ensembles or even just synthesisers. Kessen turned this development around, recorded once again overseas – this time by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra (who had recently made waves with their demonstration-quality recording of Outcast the year prior).

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Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV Soundtrack (PC-98 – Soundware Version)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV Soundtrack (PC-98), Jun Nagao, 1994

As with Nobunaga’s Ambition, developer KOEI tended to make only incremental changes to the gameplay formula of its other flagship series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Heavy on strategising, resource management and processing stats while set in feudal China, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire differed little from its franchise predecessors of historical turn-based strategy titles. Still, reviewers agreed that as long as you were tuned into this particular kind of games that favoured depth over action and fancy visuals, Wall of Fire provided addictive entertainment. As was common during the early 1990s, the game was ported to several computer and console platforms (even the 32X!) – not that there was much perceivable difference between the ports, with the 32-bit versions of the game looking virtually identical to their 16-bit brethren.

However, there was one component of Wall of Fire’s presentation that quickly stood out – and that was the soundtrack of the PC-98’s Soundware version. In the years before Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, KOEI had begun to revolutionise game music. After all, this was the company that commissioned the first orchestral game score (Hiroshi Miyagawa’s Pacific Theatre of Operations in 1989). It also launched Yoko Kanno’s astonishing career with a series of game score recordings using live ensembles. In 1992, for the first time, Kanno had been given access to a standard-sized orchestra to record Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden and KOEI must have liked what they heard.

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Final Soldier Soundtrack

Final Soldier Soundtrack, Masakatsu Maekawa, 1991

There’s no doubt that one of the TurboGrafx-16’s strengths was its stellar line-up of shoot’em ups. However, that also meant any developer who decided to throw their hat in the ring would find it harder to stand out from the crowd. Hudson Soft should have been well-placed to hit the target with Final Soldier, their third entry in the Star Soldier franchise and successor to commercial and critical success Super Star Soldier. Alas, Final Soldier offered little that other shoot’em ups hadn’t already brought to the table. Contemporary reviews agreed that this Japan-only release delivered the polish expected from a Hudson Soft shoot’em up. At the same time, a lower difficulty level meant that the game was over relatively soon for experienced players. A solid, well-designed game rather than a great one, seemed to be the general conclusion.

Scoring duties for the Final Soldier soundtrack went to Masakatsu Maekawa, who had already amassed several years of industry experience by this stage, debuting with 1986’s Metro-Cross (at least he probably did – available sources aren’t entirely clear). A member of developer Now Production since graduating from university, Maekawa was immensely prolific in the 1990s, for example working on Hudson Soft franchises such as Rolling Thunder, Adventure Island and Splatterhouse. Leaving Now Production in 1994 to form his own company Music Worx (a subcontractor for game sound) did little to slow his output during that decade.

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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 and some of the most breathtaking visuals ever seen on the Genesis – all the more 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 Japanese lore. As a result, 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 critical part of the game’s stylistic foundations than usually. In fact, art director Kazuyuki Nakashima used the phrase “Edo Metal” to pitch 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 vast number of system exclusives – and what made the situation even more frustrating was that many games were only released in specific territories (out of the nearly 650 GameCube titles, only 281 ended up on store shelves 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, 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 Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama’s tutelage 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 MMORPGs as we know them today. That meant expectations for EverQuest II were high, to say the least. To the credit of developer Sony Online Entertainment, they released a polished product, 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 effort into the game’s audio – 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. Her most significant assignment had been 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 most significant success might well have been Atlantis: The Lost Tales. Reviewers praised Atlantis’ visuals and intense atmosphere, bolstered by panoramic 360-degree first-person views of the pre-rendered environments and significant amounts of pre-recorded speech. 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 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 working 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. Estève would create the music and sound effects for several other Cryo titles in the years to follow, 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 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 director. The first video game adaptation of Dune equally struggled to actually see the light of day – to the point where publisher Virgin Games cancelled the game (and launched the development of what would become Dune II), only to find out later that Cryo Interactive had secretly continued work on Dune. Thankfully, there was a happy ending to the story. Due to its innovative mix of adventure and strategy elements, Dune became 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 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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