Puzzle Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Azkend 2: The World Beneath Soundtrack

Azkend 2: The World Beneath Soundtrack, Jonathan Geer, 2012

One of the most exciting experiences for music collectors is to come across a work that defies expectations and delivers something much more involving and satisfying than expected. Jonathan Geer’s Azkend 2: The World Beneath soundtrack is exactly that sort of album. It’s music for yet another match-3 game – a genre whose popularity soared with the advent of mobile gaming. This is not necessarily the kind of game one expects to deliver a full-bodied, lush (synth)orchestral score. However, that’s precisely what Azkend 2 achieves.

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I.Q. Final Soundtrack

I.Q. Final Soundtrack, Takayuki Hattori, 1998

Thankfully, the 32-bit era still had a place for games that were visually extremely simple yet featured addictive gameplay. One such title was 1997’s PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube. It was designed by Masahiko Sato, a professor and digital artist working at the Tokyo University of Arts. Controlling Intelligent Qube’s protagonist, gamers had to clear wave after wave of approaching cubes by marking spots on the stage – floating in the blackness of space – waiting for the cube to roll on top of it. Like the best puzzlers, Intelligent Qube used such an extremely simple gameplay premise – according to Sato designed within an hour – to build an engrossing experience. The result was critical and commercial acclaim – by the end of 1997, the game had sold an astonishing 750,000 copies and won the Excellence Award for Interactive Art at the 1997 Japan Media Arts Festival.

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Sentinel Returns Soundtrack

Sentinel Returns Soundtrack, John Carpenter, 1998

Sentinel Returns was the entirely unexpected sequel to 1980s computer cult puzzle game The Sentinel. That 1986 title was one of the first games to feature solid-filled 3D graphics. Its successor wasn’t as revolutionary, but it still had a striking visual appeal all of its own. The world of Sentinel Returns was an entirely surreal one, unsettling and gloomy. It was full of bizarre flesh-meets-metal inhabitants that only had a vague resemblance to real life objects.

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Zhadnost: The People’s Party Soundtrack

Zhadnost: The People’s Party Soundtrack, David Govett / Joe McDermott / Weston Phelan / George Sanger, 1995

Zhadnost: The People’s Party is one of those games that could have only emerged in the mid-1990s – that heady time when CD-ROM technology was still fairly new and game developers were trying to figure out what do with it. Often enough, the extra storage space would simply be filled up with a Red Book audio soundtrack (The Terminator). Other developers discovered their cinematic ambitions and turned their games into wannabe-movies and full motion video bonanzas. Zhadnost: The People’s Party more or less follows that second approach, but it uses FMVs to realise its very particular vision of a whacko communist game show whose contestants compete for their freedom after having been kidnapped by the totalitarian nation of Bizarrnia. Yes, they don’t make them like they used to.

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