Chiptune Archives - The Greatest Game Music

A Nightmare on Elm Street Soundtrack (NES)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES), David Wise, 1989

Before developer Rare became one of gaming’s powerhouses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it toiled away for several years as one of the many companies churning out NES titles for various distributors. One of those distributors was LNJ – infamous for the usually low quality of the products that the company peddled. More than a few of their games were developed by Rare – almost all of them justifiably forgotten.

One of the stronger results of the collaboration between LNJ and Rare was A Nightmare on Elm Street – based of course on one of the most popular horror franchises of the 1980s. “Stronger” doesn’t mean that the game was an unqualified success – according to critics, it was merely better than most other LNJ titles and all in all made for a passable platformer. The game arguably would have been more distinctive had Rare stuck with the original concept where gamers controlled Freddie to hunt down teenagers. It’s not hard to see why this initial draft of the game was scrapped, particularly on a Nintendo console.

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Battletoads in Battlemaniacs Soundtrack (Sega Master System)

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs Soundtrack (Sega Master System), Matt Furniss / David Wise, 1994

There aren’t a lot of Sega Master System ports of SNES games. There are even fewer ports where the Master System soundtrack improves on the SNES original. And if that score emerges from what was an unfinished release, we might be dealing with a minor miracle. Or maybe such a lucky outcome wasn’t entirely unpredictable. After all, it was Matt Furniss (working with Shaun Hollingworth under the Krisalis moniker) who ported the Battletoads in Battlemaniacs SNES score.

The Master System port of Battletoads in Battlemaniacs has a chequered history. The game – ported by Syrox Developments – was scheduled for a European release in 1994 through Virgin Interactive. The game had progressed far enough that at least two reviews of it were published in UK gaming magazines. However, Virgin Interactive cancelled the release for unknown reasons. At a later stage, the game saw the light of day in Master System-loving Brazil through Tec Toy. However, it’s not clear whether that release took place in 1994 or 1996.

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Battletoads Soundtrack (NES)

Battletoads Soundtrack (NES), David Wise, 1991

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.

Mind you, it wasn’t quite the deluxe product you would hope to see from a commemorative release like this. iam8bit’s album was missing the DMC samples Wise used, for example the drums on “Title Theme”. It does make you wonder what materials the album producers were working with. Thankfully, this can’t distract from the eccentric brilliance of Wise’s work. A comparison with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES games and their music is not only apt, but also proves insightful. The Konami titles took the new jack swing genre popular around the late 1980s and early 1990s and harnessed its fusion of hip-hop, dance pop and R&B to generate the kind of hard-swinging urban cool that would fire up gamers. Battletoads, on the other hand, has something very different in mind.

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Dick Tracy Soundtrack (Game Boy)

Dick Tracy Soundtrack (Game Boy), George Sanger, 1991

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.

Prolific developer Realtime Associates handled Dick Tracy’s NES and Game Boy versions – which meant gamers had another soundtrack from in-house composer George Sanger to look forward to. Interestingly enough, the NES and Game Boy ports turned out to be sufficiently different from one another to warrant one score for the NES game and another one for the Game Boy title. Of course, Sanger wrote both soundtracks, with the Game Boy one coming out on top. The NES version is jazzier, but in its adherence to that genre’s stereotypes, it’s also less interesting than the ambitious Game Boy equivalent. What also helps is that the compositions on the Game Boy score are significantly longer and more substantial than on the NES.

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Donkey Kong Land 2 Soundtrack

Donkey Kong Land 2 Soundtrack, Grant Kirkhope / David Wise, 1996

When Donkey Kong Country was released on the SNES in 1994, it was hailed as a technical marvel that very few people would have expected to see on the ageing hardware. When Rare released a Game Boy port called Donkey Kong Land a year later, jaws hit the floor again. How could those Silicon Graphics workstations-rendered 3D sprites possibly translate to the monochrome Game Boy display? Turns out it was possible to bring those pre-rendered graphics to the 4-bit platform – although the result was visually overly busy and impacted gameplay.

One year later, Rare released Donkey Kong Land 2 – the Game Boy port of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. This time, the developers had figured out how to keep the visuals less cluttered and the game more playable. True, reviewers pointed out the lack of original content – DKL2 was more or less a straight port of DKC2. However, the SNES original’s outstanding gameplay qualities made the Game Boy version one of the system’s best platformers.

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Erik the Viking Soundtrack

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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Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack

Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2000

One day historians will sit down and determine how many hundreds of licensed platformers were released for the Game Boy and the Game Boy Colour. Then again, we might never know the exact number – the market share of both platforms was so large that even local releases promised commercial success. Case in point: Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo (and no, there was no second episode, so maybe things didn’t turn out as planned). The game was based on an animated TV series, which in turn was an adaptation of a weekly German comics magazine first published in 1953. The magazine ran for decades and at the height of its success boasted a circulation of several hundred thousand per week. Of course, abroad the two anthropomorphic foxes and their friend Lupo weren’t particularly well-known, so this Game Boy Colour title remained an obscure Germany-only game.

While very few will remember Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo, it deserves a place in the annals of game music for its outstanding soundtrack. It was one of the earliest works by Manfred Linzner, who had graduated from the Amiga demo scene of the mid-1990s to scoring commercial products. After writing music for several Amiga games, Linzner began to focus on Game Boy Colour and later Game Boy Advance titles. His productivity in these early years of his career is astounding – for the years 2000-2002, Mobygames lists 36 music credits for Linzner! The highlights from this fertile period of his career are Iridion 3D and the Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo soundtrack.

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Hero Quest Soundtrack (NES)

Hero Quest Soundtrack (NES), Neil Baldwin, 1991

Even at the height of the NES’ popularity, there were no official album releases of Western NES game music. That makes a website like Neil Baldwin‘s Duty Cycle Generator a very important contribution towards closing this gap. On his site, game music veteran Baldwin, whose career began on the C64, released all of his NES soundtracks. Baldwin pointed out that part of the reason his website exists was the praise one of his works had generated within online chiptunes communities. That score was Hero Quest, the video game version of the popular fantasy-themed board game. The score’s popularity was all the more surprising considering that the game was cancelled. However, its developer Chris Shrigley released it years later into the NES community, and its reputation built over time. Baldwin’s surprised discovery of the Hero Quest soundtrack’s popularity also kickstarted his involvement with the online game music community.

On Duty Cycle Generator, Baldwin shares his view that the Hero Quest soundtrack “is probably some of the best NES music” he did. It’s safe to say he’s correct in that assessment. Prior works by Baldwin (and his later Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge) can feel like exercises in arpeggio-based NES compositions. Those arpeggios were a relatively easy way to generate a lush sound with the NES’ limited hardware. There’s no doubt that Baldwin handled the arpeggio sounds driving his compositions with virtuoso technical skills matched by few other composers. Still, particularly a fantasy-themed work like Magician feels deficient in other regards, for example engaging melodies and moods.

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Hero Quest Soundtrack (ZX Spectrum)

Hero Quest Soundtrack (ZX Spectrum), Barry Leitch, 1991

Disclaimer: An earlier version of this review stated that the Atari ST port suffered from technical problems. This turned out to be an emulator issue and the ‘Conversion Notes’ section of the review has been updated accordingly.

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 testament to the close connection between both worlds. The success of the Dungeons & Dragons table top games of course 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 a number of expansions, new editions and even novels published.

The inevitable video game ports of Hero Quest arrived in 1991 on several home computer systems and the NES. Developers 221B Software Development looked after the computer ports, while Eurocom handled the NES game. Unfortunately, that title was ultimately cancelled and never officially released. As for the various computer ports, they were reasonably well received by video game journalists, although reviews ranged from very strong to merely middling. While some scribes welcomed the game’s accessibility, others bemoaned its low difficulty level and that Hero Quest stuck too close to its original board game mechanics.

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Kale in Dinoland Soundtrack

Kale in Dinoland Soundtrack, Luming Hao, 2012

How to stand out from the deluge of retro-inspired indie games that have flooded mobile devices and other platforms? Game developer The Rotting Cartridge went with an intriguing, if cheeky idea. Just pretend that your new game is a port of a forgotten Game Boy title released in 1992. Of course, Kale in Dinoland was no lost classic from the olden days of gaming. Instead, it was simply a new 2D platformer, clad in those monochrome graphics that millions of gamers will fondly remember.

Part of that nostalgia-inducing design was of course an appropriately vintage-sounding score, created by Luming Hao. A friend of the game’s developers, Hao wrote the score on popular tracker software LSDj. At the time of writing the Kale in Dinoland soundtrack, Hao studied Computer Science and Music Composition at Lehigh University. That combination of technical and artistic skills would seem to make him a great candidate to pen a chiptunes score.

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