The Greatest Game Music

Reviews of truly outstanding game music

  • Soundtracks
  • Composers
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Wing Commander Soundtrack (FM Towns)

Wing Commander Soundtrack

Wing Commander Soundtrack (FM Towns), David Govett / George Sanger / Nenad Vugrinec, 1992

Very few games foreground their music as much as Wing Commander – and that’s only one way in which it proved to be a watershed moment for game music. Before the player gets to see the game’s intro or even title, game producer Chris Roberts inserts something else, something remarkable: the sight of a pixelated orchestra and conductor, set against the backdrop of a blue planetoid and star-speckled outer space. The orchestra tunes for a few seconds, before the conductor gives the signal to launch into a brief fanfare.

Roberts’ vision for Wing Commander was to create a full-blown space opera à la Star Wars. The orchestra intro in Wing Commander shows that Roberts knew how hugely important music was for his dream project to play like a swashbuckling space opera. The intro also serves as a curtain raiser that heightens expectations. The show is about to start, and it’s going to be of grand proportions. And of course, the sight of the orchestra announces the composers’ symphonic ambitions – a rarity for a 1990 video game. Rarely has a 25-second game intro carried so much meaning and context.

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Tagged With: 1992, David Govett, FM Towns, George Sanger, Nenad Vugrinec, Orchestral, Origin, Shoot'em Up

Zhadnost: The People’s Party Soundtrack

Zhadnost: The People's Party Soundtrack

Zhadnost: The People’s Party Soundtrack, David Govett / Joe McDermott / Weston Phelan / George Sanger, 1995

Zhadnost: The People’s Party is one of those games that could have only emerged in the mid-1990s – that heady time when CD-ROM technology was still fairly new and game developers were trying to figure out what do with it. Often enough, the extra storage space would simply be filled up with a Red Book audio soundtrack (The Terminator). Other developers discovered their cinematic ambitions and turned their games into wannabe-movies and full motion video bonanzas. Zhadnost: The People’s Party more or less follows that second approach, but it uses FMVs to realise its very particular vision of a whacko communist game show whose contestants compete for their freedom after having been kidnapped by the totalitarian nation of Bizarrnia. Yes, they don’t make them like they used to.

It’s not the sort of game that you would expect to generate a great soundtrack. Praise be to George Sanger and his collaborators David Govett, Joe McDermott and Weston Phelan that the Zhadnost: The People’s Party soundtrack turned out to be such an unexpected delight (and actually received an album release as Surf.com). Their solution to the problem of how you’d score a communist game show certainly defies expectations: surf rock.

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Tagged With: 1995, 3DO, David Govett, George Sanger, Joe McDermott, Puzzle, Rock/Metal, Studio 3DO, Weston Phelan

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