Run and Gun Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Alpha Squad Soundtrack

Alpha Squad Soundtrack, Stemage, 2011

On the Alpha Squad soundtrack, Stemage – founder of metal band Metroid Metal – faced the same challenges as many artists who made their name in the game music arrangement scene and now embarked on their first original soundtrack. No longer able to rely on other composers’ works, can the new material still meet heightened expectations?

Alpha Squad was a deliberate throwback to the top-down arcade-style shooters from the 80s and early 90s. Stemage’s metal chops certainly marked him as a fitting candidate to score the action-filled mayhem. Developer Dragon Divide had acknowledged that much when they contacted Stemage to write music for Alpha Squad. At the same time, his soundtrack would need to strike a significantly more upbeat note than his Metroid Metal output to match the game’s tongue-in-cheek approach and no-frills gameplay.

[Read more…]

Kinect Star Wars Soundtrack

Kinect Star Wars Soundtrack, Gordy Haab / Kyle Newmaster, 2012

It’s curious to see how little joy music fans could derive from the soundtracks for so many Star Wars games. Often, they were ultimately compilations and adaptations of John Williams’ immortal scores – in which case, it felt like you might as well just get the real deal and buy the movie score album. Of course, there’s also a fair number of Star Wars games that came with an original score. But from Clint Bajakian’s Dark Forces to Jeremy Soule‘s Knights of the Old Republic, Frank Klepacki’s Empire at War and Mark Griskey’s The Force Unleashed titles – while they all did a competent job at replicating Williams’ signature franchise sound, the music often suffered from a significant lack of substance and felt underdeveloped.

Enter Kinect Star Wars, probably the last game one would expect to generate a decent soundtrack, given its thoroughly negative critical reception. But score collectors willing to look past the game’s deficiencies would find an orchestral score that managed the seemingly impossible. It features orchestral writing of a quality that matches Williams’ classic Star Wars film scores.

[Read more…]

Skeleton Krew Soundtrack (Sega Genesis)

Skeleton Krew Soundtrack (Sega Genesis), Nathan McCree, 1995

Games released at the end of a console’s life cycle often end up somewhat lost to the ravages of time – not entirely forgotten by posterity maybe, but still mostly passed over for the incoming generation of new platforms. Skeleton Krew (we’re deep in the midst of 1990s edginess) by Core Design is one such title. An isometric shooter for the Sega Genesis, Amiga and Amiga CD32, Skeleton Krew failed to elicit much interest from gamers and reviewers back in 1995. Its gameplay featured few innovations, while Skeleton Krew’s six levels meant the fun was over fairly quickly. The game’s one standout feature was its presentation (once you looked past Skeleton Krew’s slightly desperate attempt to be all dark, violent and gritty). Clever use of the Amiga and Genesis’ colour palettes, highlighting the surreal H.R. Giger-inspired bio-mechanical artwork, set the game apart from the competition.

And then there were the soundtracks. For the Amiga CD32 version, Martin Iveson composed a jazz/trip hop score, mirroring what was en vogue in contemporary music when Skeleton Krew was in development. The soundtrack for the Genesis port went for a more esoteric approach. It was written by Nathan McCree, who just came off Star Wars homage Soulstar. Now he would deliver a work that was almost diametrically opposed to that earlier game’s busy orchestral sounds. Given the time of Skeleton Krew’s release and its genre, one might have expected an industrial metal or techno score. Instead, McCree goes for something very different: glitchy, dark ambient compositions, a genre that’s immensely difficult to pull off successfully, particularly on a technologically limited platform like the Sega Genesis. As such, McCree’s work is almost unique among 16-bit soundtracks.

[Read more…]