Manfred Linzner Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Fast RMX Soundtrack

Fast RMX Soundtrack, Bjulin / Manfred Linzner / Martin Schioeler, 2017

One of gamers’ great frustrations (at least at the timing of writing in 2020) remains Nintendo’s steadfast refusal to revive its classic F-Zero franchise. The last time fans got to enjoy a new F-Zero title dates back to 2004, when F-Zero Climax was released for the Game Boy Advance – only in Japan, adding insult to injury for Western gamers. Thankfully, German developer and Nintendo loyalist Shin’en Multimedia seemed determined to fill the gap with its Fast franchise. Kicking off in 2011 with WiiWare title Fast – Racing League, the franchise went from strength to strength with 2015’s Fast Racing Neo for the WiiU and 2017’s Fast RMX, a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. All three games received applause from reviewers for their stellar presentations and gameplay that created an overwhelming sense of speed, as well as its Ikaruga-style system of polarity switching to receive extra speed boosts.

Fast RMX essentially served as an expanded version of Fast Racing Neo, including all of that earlier game’s racing tracks and DLC, while adding a few new courses of its own. This was reason for game music fans to celebrate – Fast RMX gathered all of the outstanding music written for Fast Racing Neo and added more content still, arriving at 2+ hours of music spread across almost 50 compositions. The masterminds behind the score(s) were Shin’en Multimedia veterans Manfred Linzner and Martin Schioeler, joined by relative newcomer Bjulin.

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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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Iridion II Soundtrack

Iridion II Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2003

As the new millenium dawned, shoot’em ups were arguably nowhere near as popular as during their heyday of the 1980s and 90s. Still, there were more than enough developers around that still had a fondness for the genre and kept the flame burning. One such studio was Shin’en Multimedia, founded in 1999 by former members of Amiga demoscene group Abyss. Focusing on Nintendo’s handheld consoles in the early years of their existence, Shin’en turned what had been conceived as a Game Boy shoot’em up into a Game Boy Advance launch title – Iridion 3D. Despite the game’s much-lauded pseudo-3D graphics, reviews were tepid due to frustrating gameplay. Two years later, Iridion II was received much more positively. Its gameplay broke little new ground, but critics agreed that it was a pleasant reminder of the more straightforward shooters of yore – and no review failed to mention Iridion II’s stellar presentation.

Part of this was one of the best-sounding scores to ever grace the Game Boy Advance. For some, this might be damning the Iridion II soundtrack with faint praise, given how difficult the GBA hardware made it to produce music that didn’t sound like a muddy, substandard SNES score. But keeping these hardware limitations in mind elucidates just how much of an accomplishment this soundtrack is. And if you are not familiar with all this technological background, the music’s strengths will easily help you look past the still somewhat grainy sound of the samples used.

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Nanostray 2 Soundtrack

Nanostray 2 Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2008

Manfred Linzner remains one of Western game music’s better kept secrets – although his scores deserve to be much better known. His work particularly turned heads with the Game Boy Advance scores for Iridion 3D and Iridion II – and not just because of their catchy melodies. These scores were technical marvels, proving one could create high-quality sound on a console infamous for its lacking audio capabilities. Fortunately, the Iridion scores have seen an excellent release through a widely available arrange album. However, the vast majority of Linzner’s discography – including excellent work like Fix & Foxi 1 – Episode 1: Lupo – remains commercially unavailable.

Enter the Nano collection – a digital soundtrack bundle that includes the full scores for the four titles in the Nano shoot’em up franchise, as well as another very strong arrange album. Among the original scores included in this release, Linzner’s Nanostray 2 soundtrack is the strongest work. Significantly more fully-fledged and varied than its predecessor, Nanostray 2 closely mirrors the game in its general character. It doesn’t greatly innovate on tried-and-true shmup genre formulas, but polishes its components to an impressive degree.

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