Battletoads Soundtrack (NES), David Wise, 1991
The Battletoads soundtrack may well be David Wise’s best and most inventive NES score. That is no small claim, given that Wise scored a remarkable 46 NES games over the course of his prolific career. Naturally, a soundtrack release was all but impossible in 1991. It took until 2015 – when the enterprising game music label iam8bit issued a raft of Rare scores on vinyl – for the Battletoads soundtrack to receive its belated, but very much deserved, album release.
That said, it was not quite the deluxe release one might have hoped for from such a commemorative edition. iam8bit’s album omitted the DMC samples Wise used, including the drums on “Title Theme”. That naturally raises questions about what source materials the producers actually had available. Thankfully, none of this can obscure the eccentric brilliance of Wise’s work. A comparison with the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games and their music is not only apt, but revealing. The Konami titles drew on the New Jack Swing sound popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, harnessing its blend of hip-hop, dance-pop, and R&B to generate the kind of hard-swinging urban cool that fired players up. Battletoads, by contrast, has something rather different in mind.
Things begin fairly conventionally – if in rousing fashion – with “Title Theme”. The titular idea is a three-note stomp shared between both square-wave channels, answered by one of the NES’s better guitar imitations. Upbeat and driven by an earthy rock ’n’ roll groove, “Title Theme” feels like the perfect opener for an 8-bit beat ’em up. These rock influences – heard earlier in more straightforward form in Wise’s Snake Rattle ’n’ Roll – do recur elsewhere on the Battletoads soundtrack, though less often than one might expect. “Turbo Tunnel” is the game’s most conventionally action-oriented cue, offering a chiptune take on head-nodding mid-tempo rock. With its relentless forward motion, steady but varied drum writing, and motivating melodic phrases, it feels, perhaps unsurprisingly, like music from a racing game.
The later vehicle stages reveal the score’s real stylistic agenda. “Surf City / Terra Tubes” has little interest in straightforwardly underscoring the level’s high-speed action. Rather than offering players strong melodic material to latch onto, it focuses on interlocking, unexpectedly subdued rhythms whose twitchy quality makes them enticingly slippery. The opening melody behaves accordingly: it begins with a sustained note that decrescendos away, as if fading from view before it has properly begun.
“Volkmire’s Inferno” is even less willing to obey the usual rules of 8-bit action scoring. Staccato chords that would normally drive the piece refuse to land squarely on the beat. The result is a breathless, jerky progression that hints at melody without ever fully stating one. Wise teases the listener further when the cue’s B section suddenly unveils the soundtrack’s most uplifting and catchy tune. But even here, the major-key melody feels hurried, each note being cut off almost before it can settle. Beneath all this playful surface activity, polymetric pulse-wave and noise-channel lines further complicate the cue’s design. If an NES soundtrack ever managed to combine math rock and pop music, it is here.
Elsewhere, Wise stays somewhat closer to action-scoring convention, but only in order to bend it to his own idiosyncratic ends. The first stage theme, “Ragnarok Canyon”, is an almost entirely groove-based mood piece, full of cool swagger and quiet superiority. At this stage, the mood is glum and enigmatic, but the player still feels in control – even if the cue keeps building towards a revelation that never quite arrives. “Wookie Hole” likewise works primarily through layered rhythms, though with greater urgency this time. An explosion-like effect at 1:09 finally brings some sense of release, but the music quickly snaps back into another convulsing episode.
And as the final stage approaches, just when one might expect the music to intensify in obvious fashion, Wise does the opposite. “Intruder Excluder” perfectly highlights the soundtrack’s minimalist, at times almost skeletal quality. Its ceaseless rhythmic momentum remains elusive rather than empowering, and at times even feels wilfully repetitive. What little melody there is appears only in the form of short, sharp phrases. They refuse to offer any real melodic release, serving instead only to shove the music forward still further.
Again, unlike the Konami TMNT games, this is not a score designed to fill the player with confidence before the final showdown. “The Revolution”’s precariously rising arpeggios and anxious electronic pulses sound merely like a fist clenched in nervous anticipation. Like the game itself, the Battletoads soundtrack makes clear that the odds are stacked against the player. In the end, it becomes an unexpectedly effective exercise in world-building, creating an environment that is uncanny, hostile, and yet persistently fascinating.
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