Terminator 2: Judgment Day Soundtrack (NES)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Soundtrack (NES), Geoff Follin, 1992

A closer look at the history of films and their game adaptations reveals James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a watershed moment. At the time of its release, T2 became one of the highest-grossing films of all time worldwide. Its futuristic, action-packed plot and revolutionary visuals made it an obvious candidate for adaptation into video games. What is more, the film arrived at a point when the home games market had diversified and matured enough to support two console generations simultaneously. The result was a glut of T2-related games, followed soon after by numerous titles based on The Terminator. The creators of Terminator 2: Judgment Day were clearly aware of the commercial potential of games. After all, the film’s end credits closed with the instruction: “Play the hit Nintendo game from Acclaim/LJN Entertainment.”

In the end, that game took nearly seven months to arrive, reaching the NES in 1992, with Master System and Game Gear conversions to follow. Coming from LJN, it surprised few contemporary reviewers that the result was, at best, a frustratingly middling affair, even if the developers at Software Creations had at least made an effort to follow the film’s storyline closely. Where the game truly distinguished itself was its soundtrack, written by Geoff Follin on one of the few occasions when he did not share scoring duties with his brother Tim.

Geoff is on record as saying that, despite boasting one of the most impressive discographies of any NES composer, his “heart was never really into it”. You would never guess as much from listening to the Terminator 2: Judgment Day soundtrack. This score stands as one of the most daring and experimental works written for the NES. There is a resemblance to David Wise’s later Battletoads soundtrack, in that both composers undermine the conventions of chiptune action scoring. But where Wise twists those tropes into something new yet recognisable, Geoff all but throws them out of the window. Neither score is simply concerned with motivating players or rousing them for battle. T2, however, goes further still, aiming to unnerve and unsettle, and ultimately to persuade the listener that the struggle for the future may already have been lost.

“Title Screen” is the Terminator 2: Judgment Day soundtrack’s most conventional piece, yet even here the seeds of the score’s dystopian mood are firmly planted. The technical wizardry expected of a Follin score is already evident in its powerfully stomping drums, fantastically grooving elastic bassline, and lush cascades of arpeggios that hint at melody amid the torrent of notes. Despite the obvious absence of stereo effects on the NES, Geoff creates a vibrant, three-dimensional soundscape. He uses brilliant echo effects on the arpeggios and cleverly manipulates the sound chip’s volume settings to push musical elements towards and away from the listener.

It is the sort of maximalism one expects from a Follin score, but the mood is foreboding, punctuated by frequent breakdowns that return to the opening’s ominously pounding drums. More disconcerting still is a mid-section of buzzing sounds that crawl like maddened insects, pushing the music into unmistakably horror-inflected territory.

Things only grow bleaker from there, though in spectacular fashion. The soundtrack’s level themes are astounding compositions. All of them run for more than six minutes and display a fascinating minimalist bent that feels like the opposite of the usual sonic onslaught associated with a Follin brothers score. Make no mistake, however: every musical element Geoff employs is as meticulously shaped and fussed over as the NES’ limited sound hardware could possibly allow.

“Level 1: Truck Stop” retains a few action-scoring conventions, with rhythms that are at times almost upbeat. Ultimately, though, Geoff seems entirely uninterested in underscoring the on-screen action directly, instead creating abstract soundscapes that operate on their own logic. The cue slowly builds from a gloomy melodic riff and masterful variations on a particular arpeggio figure. Then, at 1:35, it abruptly breaks down, shifting into what feels like an entirely different composition full of metallic clanging and upward-rising arpeggios that end on impossibly high chromatic intervals, unnerving the listener just before they vanish into the circuitry of a malevolent supercomputer.

Here and on the other level themes, Geoff demonstrates remarkable control over the music’s complex architecture and emotional force. No matter how cerebral the Terminator 2: Judgment Day soundtrack becomes, it never ceases to fascinate. On “Level 2 & 4: Drainage Canal / Cyberdyne”, he deepens his innovative use of arpeggios, deploying them not so much to thicken the sound as to unsettle through ingenious manipulations of timbre. The cue relies on nervous arpeggios racing through their highest registers as if being squeezed to death, mixed with whining, high-pitched drones. Geoff then sets this emotionally raw material against robust rock drums in a host of different constellations, again blending action and atmospheric scoring in ways that were virtually unheard of on the NES.

“Level 3: Pescadero State” continues in a similar vein, tightening the screws further by intensifying the music’s warped creepiness, wholly appropriate for a level set in a mental institution. It is “Level 5: Steel Mill / Ending”, however, that emerges as the soundtrack’s true masterstroke. Opening with washes of noise-channel hiss, siren-like sounds, and ominous mechanical pumping, the piece is a masterful sound collage that relies almost entirely on alien timbres, on hardware that was never designed for such purposes.

Here Geoff breaks virtually every rule of action game music. At one point, the track collapses altogether into twenty seconds of nothing but churning noise. Later, it seems to become trapped on a distant arpeggio motif that has drifted beyond the earth’s orbit and now circles maniacally in the dark. There is hardly any melody here, nor much in the way of rhythmic gratification. This is machine music, almost entirely stripped of warmth or anything recognisably human. And yet it is utterly gripping, a work of baffling brilliance with few peers on chiptune hardware. “Level 5: Steel Mill / Ending” drives home the point that the Terminator 2: Judgment Day soundtrack is far more than a mere platformer score. It is a vision of a desolate future in which humanity’s survival hangs by an ever-thinning thread, until at last it snaps.