Reviews of truly outstanding game music
The Battletoads soundtrack might be David Wise’s best and most creative NES score. That’s certainly no small feat – after all, Wise scored a whopping 46 NES games during his prolific career. Of course, a soundtrack release was all but impossible in 1991. It took until 2015 – when enterprising game music label iam8bit released a raft of Rare scores on vinyl – that the Battletoads soundtrack received its belated, but very much deserved album release.
The success of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman kicked off the first wave of comic-book movies to hit cinemas. Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy – released the following year – might have looked like it was riding on the caped crusader’s coattails, but in fact the project had been in development since the early 1980s. It turned out to be one of the decade’s more artistically and financially successful comic book movies, with its extravagant visual design drenched in primary colours still impressive decades later. Unfortunately, none of the film’s many video game adaptations – mostly for 8-bit platforms – could hope to match that kind of visual splendour.
There’s no doubt that one of the TurboGrafx-16’s strengths was its stellar line-up of shoot’em ups. However, that also meant any developer who decided to throw their hat in the ring would find it harder to stand out from the crowd. Hudson Soft should have been well-placed to hit the target with Final Soldier, their third entry in the Star Soldier franchise and successor to commercial and critical success Super Star Soldier. Alas, Final Soldier offered little that other shoot’em ups hadn’t already brought to the table. Contemporary reviews agreed that this Japan-only release delivered the polish expected from a Hudson Soft shoot’em up. At the same time, a lower difficulty level meant that the game was over relatively soon for experienced players. A solid, well-designed game rather than a great one, seemed to be the general conclusion.
Board games are arguably a lot easier to turn into video games than say movies. They already function as games, have a set of clearly defined rules, and often enough feature just enough backstory to efficiently set up the game’s world. The sheer number of Dungeons & Dragons video games is a testament to the close connection between both worlds. Of course, the success of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop games inspired others to follow in their footsteps. In 1989, US board game manufacturer Milton Bradley tried their hand at a fantasy-themed title called Hero Quest. Despite its generic presentation, the game was fairly successful around the globe, with several expansions, new editions and even novels published.
Many computer game soundtracks of the 80s and early 90s consist of only one longer cue, sometimes with a few shorter pieces and jingles added. As such, these scores don’t warrant individual reviews, even when these works are of outstanding quality. What makes more sense is to combine several such soundtracks by a single composer into one review.
Part of the ecosystem of European (and particularly British) home computers was that games were usually released across a range of platforms, including the C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, PC, Amstrad CPC and Acorn 32-bit – obviously to increase presence in the marketplace and thus sales. Due to the technological differences between all of these systems, they would also feature different soundtracks – or rather one score ported and adapted to each platform. That was the situation developer Krisalis Software (previously trading as Teque Software Development) and their in-house composer Matt Furniss found themselves in during the late 80s and early 90s.
You could argue Raiden wasn’t a terribly innovative or flashy title, released at a time when there was no shortage of shoot’em ups jostling for the genre throne. Still, Seibu Kaihatsu’s game turned into one of the best-known vertical shoot’em ups, spawning an extensive franchise that would see new games released even decades after Raiden first delighted arcade audiences in 1990. What did set the game apart from the competition was not just its refinement of existing gameplay concepts but also its almost proto-bullet hell approach, filling the screen with tons of projectiles. As would befit a popular shoot’em up from the genre’s golden era, Raiden was released across many computer and console platforms. Likely the best contemporary port was the FM Towns conversion – a familiar story at the time, given the platform’s superior processing power.
Back in 1991, dedicated soundtrack releases for Western game soundtracks were pretty much unheard of. One of the pioneers was Origin Soundtrack, a compilation of music from some of Origin‘s high-profile games of 1990/91. Exactly how Origin Soundtrack came about still remains a bit of a mystery. What seems to be confirmed is that the album is an unauthorised collection of music. Its producer and engineer was veteran composer Martin Galway, who had just finished work on Wing Commander II. His aim was probably to showcase his work and that of other composers at Origin on a stand-alone basis.