Some platforms produced too few outstanding scores to warrant a full retrospective — but that does not make the scores themselves any less exceptional.
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
Matt Furniss / David Wise, 1994
There aren’t a lot of Sega Master System ports of SNES games. There are definitely even fewer ports where the Master System soundtrack improves on the SNES original. And if that score emerges from what was an unfinished release, we might be dealing with a minor miracle — though perhaps the outcome was less surprising than it first appears. After all, it was Matt Furniss who ported David Wise’s Battletoads in Battlemaniacs SNES score — which was one of the maestro’s lesser works, melodically uninspired and lacking momentum in its buzzing guitar sound.
Furniss’ take on Wise’s material is the sort of smart distillation and tweaking that makes a score written for a far superior sound chip work on a more limited platform. There was little hope of translating the guitar focus of the SNES score to the Master System. Furniss navigates this issue by putting less emphasis on the melody instruments. Instead, he writes fantastically tight, rock-solid rhythms rendered through the Master System’s best-sounding rock drum imitations. Their sound is all the more impressive considering the platform’s infamously bright, light timbres.
Beautifully spacious yet authoritative and hard-hitting, the jaw-dropping drums are the star here, driving each piece forward with relentlessly grooving, stomping energy. Their lo-fi, near-industrial nature gives them a grittiness and energy missing from the original score.
All this is not to say that the melodies Furniss either adapts or writes himself are lacking. Not surprisingly, given his background in the European computer music scene, most melodies come in the shape of cleverly layered arpeggios. Both on “Title” and “Ragnarok Canyon”, these bubbly arpeggios trade places regularly with bass melodies, helping the music’s variety and sense of forward direction. Even so, while Furniss’ melodies get the job done, their purpose really is to support the rhythms and their never-ceasing propulsive drive.
“Snake Pit” is the culmination of this approach. Turning the SNES’ soft, percolating percussion into fierce ostinati, Furniss’ port uses its breathless pace and anthemic melodies to deliver the soundtrack’s most adrenaline-driven, rocking track. Furniss’ pronounced use of vibrato on the sustained, decaying notes that close several of his melodies is a nice touch — as close an approximation of guitar tones as one could hope for on the Master System, and a fitting close to the platform’s finest soundtrack.
Descent Soundtrack
Johann Langlie / Brian Luzietti / Larry Peacock / Jim Torres / Tim Wiles, 1995
The mid-90s were a golden era for video gaming, marking the popularisation of 3D gaming and of Red Book game audio. These two momentous developments came together in Descent, the first fully 3D first-person shooter. Descent‘s original PC version came with a MIDI score heavily influenced by then-popular industrial metal bands like Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and Front Line Assembly. A few months later, the composers of the game’s Mac port had actual instruments and Red Book audio at their disposal — no need to mimic such forceful musical inspirations through MIDI emulations.
Descent‘s ceaselessly creative industrial metal score is a beautiful example of the artistic freedom that composers often enjoyed around that time. The result is a masterful exercise in maximalist genre-bending, a monumental beast of a game score written when composers discovered the joys of working with live instruments — throwing caution and restraint to the wind in the process.
Most tracks on this score enthusiastically cram in so much that they can’t help but break through the five-minute mark. The stylistic foundation of Descent might be industrial metal, but the composers mix in such a staggering amount of ideas and styles that the score emerges as something entirely original. Some cues pioneer the stomping groove of the industrial funk that Frank Klepacki would later build his Command & Conquer scores around.
Elsewhere, listeners find excursions into melodic 70s hard rock, trippy 90s electronica, apocalyptic synth ostinati, squealing free jazz saxophone parts, and blindingly dissonant guitar riffs that verge on avant-garde metal. All of it is dialled up to 11 to maintain maximum intensity, yet paced in such an assured fashion that the music’s relentless attitude never becomes overbearing. Listen to how the composers layer their competing musical ideas on “Titan Mine” as the piece keeps building into the sort of majestic, magnificently controlled chaos only very few scores ever achieve. Descent is a momentous achievement — industrial music at its most excessive yet tightly controlled, not just gritty and adrenaline-pumping but also convincingly expansive and spacious in its world-building.
Hero Quest II: Legacy of Sorasil Soundtrack
Patrick Phelan, 1994
The Amiga CD32 sold around 100,000 units and was discontinued after eight months on the market — hardly the platform you would expect to produce one of the most remarkable Western orchestral game scores of the 1990s. Patrick Phelan’s work on the Amiga version of Top Gear 2 was one of that platform’s classic scores, and his orchestral work on Litil Divil had shown promise — but Hero Quest II: Legacy of Sorasil operates on a different level altogether, and really deserves a great deal more attention when the conversation turns to the history of Western orchestral game music.
Even by today’s standards, the two compositions forming the bedrock of Hero Quest II are stunningly ambitious. Clocking in at 11 and 13 minutes respectively (without loops!), “In-Game 01” and “In-Game 02” bear witness to Phelan’s astounding ability to shape his pieces. He balances the development of his material with smartly judged repetitions of melody bits that underline the music’s earthy, folk-inspired nature (only the five minutes of low-key rambling that open “In-Game 02” disappoint). Both compositions feel like long, solemn processions through a medieval world full of roughly-hewn cathedrals and soldiers ploughing on through mud towards the battlefield, waiting in eerie silence before the ferocious clash of arms.
There is little of the swash-buckling adventure and exuberant orchestrations often found in fantasy game scores. Instead, Hero Quest II paints its domain in many shades of brown and grey — a more realistic take on medieval times if you want, but certainly not one chosen very often by game composers of the era. The Amiga CD32’s Red Book audio capacities prove crucial in allowing Phelan to clad such reflective material in vibrant timbres — listen to the extended bassoon solo opening “In-Game 01” (Phelan’s orchestral samples are first-rate for a 1994 game score). Besides, Hero Quest II can also change gears — on “In-Game 03”, for instance, which combines medieval and baroque dance influences to utterly charming effect. On the other end of the spectrum, “Menu” is both triumphant and grim, exploding into a monumental climax for towering brass backed by a vortex of swirling, biting strings. It is a stunning moment of surprise — and you might well sum up the entire score with those words.
Red Alarm Soundtrack
Ken Kojima, 1995
The Virtual Boy was hamstrung by technical compromises and an infamously awkward design, and never really stood a chance. That is a shame, because its six sound channels — two more than the NES and Game Boy — could have pushed chiptune game music into fascinating new territory. Instead, the console’s rapid demise left little opportunity for composers to explore its potential. Only one soundtrack truly demonstrates what the system was capable of: Ken Kojima’s Red Alarm, one of the Virtual Boy’s better-received titles among a library of just 22 games.
Although the Virtual Boy was technically a 32-bit platform, its audio character sits much closer to the Game Boy’s gritty, abrasive timbres. Kojima leans fully into that sonic identity, crafting a laser-focused score that fuses two high-intensity idioms: industrial rock’s single-minded, ferocious momentum and prog rock’s knotty rhythmic complexity. From this dazzling, churning cosmic furnace emerge melodies that span a wide expressive range — sometimes soaring defiantly above the pulverising rhythms, sometimes eroding piece by piece under the weight of the syncopated assault.
The soundtrack unfolds as a sustained struggle between empowering — at times even achingly beautiful — melodic ideas and grinding layers of ever more discordant rhythm. As the game presses deeper into hostile territory, Kojima’s virtuoso control of constantly mutating material allows him to subtly rebalance these opposing forces. What begins with one of the catchiest shoot ’em up melodies of the 1990s on “Stage 1” gradually mutates into a blasted wasteland: rhythms verge on white noise, while melodies splinter into bitter staccato fragments, panicked cries, breathless arpeggios, and wailing siren calls.
Listening to Red Alarm in full is no small undertaking, given the music’s relentless complexity, abrasiveness, and near-asphyxiating atmosphere. Yet the effort is richly rewarded. This is one of game music’s densest and most ambitious industrial scores, driven by unyielding, piston-like rhythms that threaten to overwhelm — and are then repeatedly counterbalanced by Kojima’s superb melodic construction. Even when those melodies seem on the verge of collapse, they never truly vanish. Red Alarm stands as one of the most audacious and compelling shoot ’em up soundtracks to emerge from the genre’s golden era.
SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millenium Soundtrack
DECO / Kira / Yoshihiko Kitamura / Mitsuo / Miwa, 1999
After spending much of the 1990s locked in competition over who reigned supreme in the fighting game arena, Capcom and SNK finally joined forces for a series of crossover titles that united their star-studded rosters. The first of these was the aptly named SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium, released for SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket Color — and it was given the finest soundtrack ever written for the platform, created by four members of SNK’s in-house sound team.
Before The Match of the Millennium, chiptune renditions of Street Fighter and King of Fighters music were already plentiful. Most of those handheld adaptations, however, focused on faithfully replicating their 16-bit counterparts. The composers here aim higher. Rather than merely preserving familiar material, they actively reshape it, treating the original themes as raw material for playful and inventive reinterpretation.
This approach is especially striking in the Street Fighter character themes — perhaps because their melodies are so iconic that any deviation is immediately noticeable. New melodic lines are constantly woven in to complement Yoko Shimomura’s classic compositions, striking a careful balance between reverence and renewal. Elsewhere, subtle atmospheric shifts give familiar cues a new complexion: high-pitched oscillations lend “Chun-Li” an added layer of mysticism, while the once lumbering “Zangief” is transformed into something unexpectedly light and almost playful.
The greatest surprise, though, lies in the SNK material. Hearing these themes rendered through the same limited chiptune palette as the Capcom cues throws their stylistic differences into sharp relief. Where the Capcom pieces tend to launch straight into their signature melodies, the SNK themes favour longer forms, cycling through sections and melodic leads influenced by genres well beyond video game music. On the Neo Geo — and even the Neo Geo CD — those genre experiments could sometimes falter, whether through thin, buzzing guitar simulations or awkward jazz syncopations.
Remarkably, many of these compositions emerge stronger on the humble Neo Geo Pocket Color. Freed from clutter, their long, winding melodies take centre stage, supported by arrangements that retain the originals’ ambition while refining it through tightly woven countermelodies and occasional polyrhythmic touches. This is deconstruction done right: preserving what works, discarding what doesn’t, and then building something new on top — a masterclass in adapting music written for vastly more powerful hardware.
Tempest 2000 Soundtrack
Julian Hodgson / Ian Howe / Alastair Lindsay / Kevin Saville, 1994
Tempest 2000 was released in 1994 on the ill-fated Atari Jaguar — one of the very few genuinely outstanding titles on that platform — and its soundtrack album was among the earliest instances of Western game music receiving a dedicated CD release. That early exposure helps explain why it has built such a devoted following. The problem is that the album — later repurposed for the game’s PC and Sega Saturn ports — does not reflect the music as it appears in the Jaguar original. These are rearrangements, and in the process they shed much of what made the score so compelling. On album, the tracks tend to sprawl, padded out with additional material that rarely justifies their extended running times. The cleaner, more powerful synthesis also blunts the jagged edge that gave the original music its bite.
The clear recommendation, then, is to seek out the punchy, tightly constructed Jaguar versions. Each cue channels the manic intensity of early 1990s techno and rave, perfectly aligned with Tempest 2000‘s psychedelic visuals and relentlessly demanding gameplay — and crucially, never lapsing into monotony. With their clever deployment of frantic breakbeats, these tracks hit like short, sharp jolts of caffeine. The genre label should not be off-putting: yes, the composers lean heavily on techno’s pounding rhythms to propel the action, but they do so with considerable finesse.
No idea is allowed to linger for long. The music continually pivots to the next surge of adrenaline, ensuring it never overstays its welcome — precisely where the arranged versions lose their grip. Skittering beats and synthetic pulses are frequently stacked into surprisingly intricate layers, heightening tension as competing elements vie for dominance. Harsh, acerbic lead lines that occasionally dissolve into near-white noise only intensify the experience further.
Tempest 2000 ultimately stands as a superb time capsule of a very specific musical moment. It distils the restless energy and innovation of early 1990s electronica into a concise, purpose-built score — one that serves its game with absolute precision.
Leave a Reply