1992 Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Erik the Viking Soundtrack – Review

Erik the Viking Soundtrack, Neil Baldwin, 1992

It’s a shame that Neil Baldwin wrote his two best NES soundtracks for games that in the end were shelved. At least game music fans discovered Hero Quest‘s excellent score once the game’s developer released the ROM online. On the other hand, Baldwin’s second cancelled project Erik the Viking was pretty much unknown. That is, until Baldwin posted the soundtrack on his website Duty Cycle Generator.

Action adventures like Erik the Viking require a fair amount of world building, and in this undertaking, the music has to pull its weight too. As such, the Erik the Viking soundtrack required Baldwin to create a more varied and larger score than what he had previously written on the NES. He rises to the challenge quite formidably, as Erik the Viking pushes Baldwin’s music into previously unexplored territory.

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Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden Soundtrack (PC-98) – Review

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden Soundtrack (PC-98), Yoko Kanno, 1992

As with previous instalments of the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, KOEI only tweaked details for its fifth instalment, Haouden. Clearly KOEI had hit upon a winning formula, happy to churn these games out to an audience hungry for their fix of historic strategy games that prioritised gameplay depth over fancy graphics. Not surprisingly, what stood out most about Haouden’s presentation was its soundtrack, provided by series regular Yoko Kanno.

Kanno had been given the opportunity to record previous franchise scores with live performers – a rare occurrence in video game music at the time. And thankfully, KOEI seemed willing to increase the music budget for each subsequent Nobunaga’s Ambition title. Bushou Fuuunroku had benefited from a mostly live ensemble – a chamber music-sized orchestra supplemented by a few solo performers and synths. For the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack, KOEI went one step further and hired a larger ensemble, now amounting to a small symphony orchestra.

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Terminator 2: Judgment Day Soundtrack (NES) – Review

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

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

In the end, that game took nearly seven months to arrive, hitting the NES in 1992, with conversions to the Master System and Game Gear to follow. Coming from LJN, few contemporary reviewers were surprised to find the game a frustrating, at best middling affair – although the developers at Software Creations had at least made an effort to follow the film’s story line closely. Where the game really shone was with its soundtrack, penned by Geoff Follin on one of the few occasions where he didn’t share scoring duties with his brother Tim.

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Wing Commander Soundtrack (FM Towns) – Review

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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