99 Levels to Hell Soundtrack

99 Levels to Hell Soundtrack, Dalle Oldman, 2013

Dalle Oldman’s 99 Levels to Hell soundtrack release could only really have happened in the age of self-distributed digital albums. Few labels would have been willing to put out a 78-minute soundtrack for a game as low-profile as 99 Levels to Hell. Unfortunately, the album’s second half gives them a perfectly respectable excuse: it is a collection of cliché-ridden, bland sound collages consisting largely of eerie noises. These dark-ambient level themes inspire boredom far more readily than they evoke tension or dread.

But the glacial second half is not why this soundtrack matters. What makes 99 Levels to Hell essential listening for heavy metal fans are its first forty minutes. After all, this is a game about descending ever closer to the Horned One’s realm. What better accompaniment could there be than a very, very heavy dose of death metal, with a few thrash-metal flourishes thrown in for good measure?

Across the decades, a fair number of game scores have made effective use of metal’s screaming guitars and pummelling drums. Very few, however, have dared to venture into the genre’s more extreme substyles. Oldman has no such hesitation. He plunges straight into the abyss and, in the process, writes the heaviest, most pulverising metal riffage ever composed for a game soundtrack. Almost immediately, 99 Levels to Hell lunges for the jugular with an unending supply of spectacularly brutal, ten-ton riffs.

Music of such furious heaviness might seem like overkill for a fairly modest 2D platformer. But perhaps it is precisely the game’s cartoonish look and underlying quirkiness that allow Oldman to get away with writing music that seems far too large for the game it accompanies. 99 Levels to Hell’s colourful sprite work has no pretence of realism, no particular gravity of narrative to support. All it really asks for is music that pushes the player’s adrenaline during boss encounters as hard as possible.

By that measure, the soundtrack is an outright triumph. It is a wall of sound rendered in raging shades of black, supported by a production style that balances force and clarity beautifully. Yet if sheer heaviness were all Oldman had to offer, the metal half of 99 Levels to Hell would quickly start numbing the listener into submission. Thankfully, he avoids pinning the music to maximum intensity at all times without ever sacrificing its searing aggression. The early tracks are mid-tempo monsters, perfectly oiled churning machines that listeners can easily climb aboard for the descent into the underworld.

“Big Red” and “Spider” slow things down further, enveloping the music in the suffocating crawl of some unstoppable beast from hell. Only later does Oldman truly accelerate the tempo, to glorious effect. The sense of anticipation keeps building until it finally finds release in the blazing “Mad Pope” and “Satan”. Both are displays of white-hot fury, channelling the soundtrack’s ferocious energy into ten minutes of some of the most uncompromising battle music the medium has produced.

Oldman matches this variety of tempo with a knack for weaving small fragments of melodicism into the music. That opens up points of contact with the soundtrack beyond straightforward, joyful headbanging. Early on, he peppers several tracks with clean, melancholic guitar motifs that prove surprisingly effective in their haunted atmosphere. Their slow-moving gloom contrasts perfectly with the mercilessly pounding riffage around them. These Gothic rock-inflected elements make way in “Virus (Brain 1)” for genuinely catchy and defiant guitar melodies. What makes this elaborately constructed track more impressive still is the way Oldman combines those fists-to-the-sky chorus gestures with heavily syncopated rhythms clearly indebted to prog-metal overlords Meshuggah.

Oldman’s riffage itself also carries a fair amount of melodic content. At times, it can even sound consonant, as in the majestic riffs of “Meat Ball”, surveying the carnage from somewhere high above the battlefield. Elsewhere, it becomes actively hostile. Tortured guitar glissandi first raise their wailing heads in “Wall Worm”. Oldman then keeps developing these twisted melodic shards, which burst like shrapnel through “Meat Balls” and “Tron (Brain 2)”. Their strangled howl grows louder and more piercing in “Mad Pope” and “Satan”, before mutating into outright stabs of raw guitar dissonance in “Hell Mode”. By the time “99 2.0” fades out, one is left with the exhilarating realisation that metal game soundtracks do not get more intense than 99 Levels to Hell. Sometimes one half of an album is enough to provide heaven for metalheads.