Shoot'em Up Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack

Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack, Yoko Kanno, 1998

After a somewhat rocky start (that initially didn’t even see all episodes screened), Cowboy Bebop went on to become one of anime’s cultural milestones – on both sides of the Pacific. Setting itself apart from almost anything else produced for TV animation in either Japan or the USA, Cowboy Bebop merged disparate genres and visual styles in ways that helped the series introduce many new Western viewers to anime. Its cross-cultural appeal was partially based on its use of tropes that were familiar to Western audiences – Western, pulp fiction, film noir and cyberpunk (all within a space opera setting). Shinichirou Watanabe’s creation turned out to be popular enough to spawn a movie sequel and feature on many ‘best of’ lists in the years that followed.

As one would guess by looking at the series’ title, music played a crucial role in its eclectic aesthetic. Not surprisingly, the collaboration between director and composer on Cowboy Bebop was closer than usually – and the result was one of the most distinctive, attention-grabbing anime scores ever written. After her breakthrough with the orchestral fantasy masterpiece that was The Vision of Escaflowne, Yoko Kanno changed gears in spectacular fashion. Using jazz (and its many permutations) as the basis for Cowboy Bebop, Kanno branched out into a dizzying array of genres. She successfully dappled in everything from blues and metal to country music and opera, matching the series’ free-wheeling stylistic approach. Ultimately, Cowboy Bebop cemented Kanno’s status as one of anime’s foremost composers, able to seemingly nail just about any musical genre.

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Final Soldier Soundtrack

Final Soldier Soundtrack, Masakatsu Maekawa, 1991

There’s no doubt that one of the TurboGrafx-16’s strengths was its stellar line-up of shoot’em ups. However, that also meant any developer who decided to throw their hat in the ring would find it harder to stand out from the crowd. Hudson Soft should have been well-placed to hit the target with Final Soldier, their third entry in the Star Soldier franchise and successor to commercial and critical success Super Star Soldier. Alas, Final Soldier offered little that other shoot’em ups hadn’t already brought to the table. Contemporary reviews agreed that this Japan-only release delivered the polish expected from a Hudson Soft shoot’em up. At the same time, a lower difficulty level meant that the game was over relatively soon for experienced players. A solid, well-designed game rather than a great one, seemed to be the general conclusion.

Scoring duties for the Final Soldier soundtrack went to Masakatsu Maekawa, who had already amassed several years of industry experience by this stage, debuting with 1986’s Metro-Cross (at least he probably did – available sources aren’t entirely clear). A member of developer Now Production since graduating from university, Maekawa was immensely prolific in the 1990s, for example working on Hudson Soft franchises such as Rolling Thunder, Adventure Island and Splatterhouse. Leaving Now Production in 1994 to form his own company Music Worx (a subcontractor for game sound) did little to slow his output during that decade.

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IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 2009

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey arrived at the tail end of the World War II game genre’s huge popularity. As such, game music fans had witnessed many different approaches to underscoring this most devastating of armed conflicts. Especially Michael Giacchino‘s oeuvre had been a potent display of how to put war into music in various ways.

Jeremy Soule hadn’t worked on a WWII game before Birds of Prey and the same year’s Order of War. However, his fantastic action material on Total Annihilation had a militaristic ferocity and soaring momentum that made him a logical choice to score a flight combat game such as Birds of Prey. True, the game itself didn’t add anything new video games’ depiction of the clash between Allied and Axis forces. However, Soule’s IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey soundtrack found an approach both novel and rooted in the composer’s previous works.

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Iridion II Soundtrack

Iridion II Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2003

As the new millennium dawned, shoot’em ups were arguably nowhere near as popular as during their heyday of the 1980s and 90s. However, more than enough developers 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 ever to 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 quickly help you look past the still somewhat grainy sound of the samples used.

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Lair Soundtrack

Lair Soundtrack, John Debney / Kevin Kaska, 2007

The dichotomy of “bad game, great music” has rarely presented itself more strikingly than in the case of Lair. A much-hyped PlayStation 3 title, Lair crashed and burned due to its unwieldy control scheme. Ultimately, probably the only good things to emerge from the wreckage were Lair’s gorgeous visuals and its excellent music. Written by film score veteran John Debney with support from Kevin Kaska, the Lair soundtrack quickly gathered praise from game music reviewers. In fact, soon the music achieved such acclaim that soundtrack fans clamoured for a complete score release. Their pleas were answered in 2014, when La-La Land Records released a two-disc set of the Lair soundtrack with improved sound, making the previous iTunes release superfluous.

In a way, it’s not a surprise that Debney and Kaska’s work turned out so well. Debney had demonstrated his ability to write outstanding orchestral action music with Cutthroat Island (ironically another financial disaster). Developer Factor 5 was keen to give the game’s fantasy narrative a cinematic, widescreen feel. This led to Debney being hired to provide a suitably grand score. In several interviews, Debney mentioned how much he enjoyed the creative freedom he was given on the project. With a budget to record with full orchestra and several soloists at Abbey Road Studios, Debney made the most of this opportunity to write a score that would be a love letter to the fantasy genre and to Debney’s personal inspirations – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Basil Pouledouris and others. As Debney puts it in the album’s liner notes, his aim was to write “Star Wars meets Conan”.

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Lock On Soundtrack

Lock On Soundtrack, Akihiko Mori, 1993

Using the SNES’s famed 3D capabilities for a combat flight simulator seems like an obvious choice. However, despite the popularity of After Burner-style games in the late 80s and early 90s, not many titles of this kind were released on the SNES. One of the few SNES flight simulators was the blandly-titled Lock On (not that the Japanese release name Super Air Diver made any sense, but it sure sounds more fun). For post SNES-era gamers, the best way to view developer Copya System‘s Lock On is probably as a kind of simplified Ace Combat. Some of that simplification was inevitable, given that the SNES’ famous Mode 7 could only generate 3D graphics of limited complexity. However, in the eyes of many reviewers, the bigger issue was the monotonous mission and gameplay structure that distracted from the game’s fluid, fast graphics.

Where Lock On easily shines brightest is in the music department, thanks to some outstanding work by young composer Akihiko Mori. Mori had been working as a game composer since 1990, but mostly on smaller and less thankful projects. His biggest assignment so far had been to generate the sound effects for Copya System’s Paladin’s Quest (scored by none other than Kohei Tanaka). Lock On was easily the most high-profile project that Mori had been assigned to yet as a composer. And indeed, throughout the Lock On soundtrack, Mori displays the enthusiasm of a talented composer who senses that this project could be his big break – and that turned out to be the case indeed.

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MUSHA Soundtrack

MUSHA Soundtrack, Toshiaki Sakoda, 1990

It’s safe to say that Compile’s well-regarded Aleste series reached its pinnacle with 1990’s MUSHA for the Sega Genesis. It ranks as one of the 16-bit era’s best shooters, with lightning-fast gameplay, an immensely challenging difficulty level and some of the most breathtaking visuals ever seen on the Genesis – all the more impressive considering that MUSHA was a first-generation title. What really helped to set the game apart was its visual style. Feeling that MUSHA had to differ significantly from its franchise predecessors, the developers came up with an unusual mix of sci-fi tropes and traditional Japanese lore. As a result, your flying mecha shoots super-charged electric shurikens while facing off against enemies like robotic ninjas and Japanese castles on tank treads.

Another one of MUSHA’s virtues fondly recalled by many gamers is its superlative soundtrack, delivered by Toshiaki Sakoda. Sakoda had worked on previous Compile titles such as Aleste 2 and the first two instalments of the Crush Pinball series. On this occasion, the music formed a more critical part of the game’s stylistic foundations than usually. In fact, art director Kazuyuki Nakashima used the phrase “Edo Metal” to pitch the game’s concept to Compile’s leadership. According to Nakashima, the developers soon settled on a “speedy heavy metal sound that would match the fast scrolling and would play from the start of the opening demo non-stop without interruption”.

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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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Octogeddon Soundtrack

Octogeddon Soundtrack (PC), Big Giant Circles, 2018

“Every game before Plants vs. Zombies, I was just making a game. Now, after making Plants vs. Zombies, I’m making a game in that shadow.” That’s how developer George Fan described the not necessarily easy task of following up one of indie gaming’s biggest successes. But while Octogeddon didn’t sell by the bucketload like Plants vs. Zombies did, it still ranked as another success for Fan, with consistently strong feedback from reviewers and gamers. Like Plants vs. Zombies, Octogeddon works from a deliciously silly concept – this time it’s a homicidal octopus that swears revenge after seeing his friends served as sushi, vowing to destroy the world’s most famous landmarks (think Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty etc.) Fan decided to mix the arcadey nature of the gameplay – including hilarious weapon/tentacle upgrades – with rogue-like elements that helped to keep the game’s early levels challenging, even upon repeated playthroughs.

The Plants vs. Zombies soundtrack – courtesy of Laura Shigihara – had become one of game music’s first indie breakthrough successes back in 2009. Shigihara didn’t return for Octogeddon and instead, scoring duties went to Big Giant Circles (aka Jimmy Hinson). Looking at Hinson’s discography, the charming, action-packed 2D aesthetic and gameplay that Octogeddon sports was right in his ballpark – consider his previous chiptunes-pop smashes Pocket Mine and Extreme Bike Trip. Other scores released since those fairly succinct works had given Hinson the opportunity to create more expansive soundtracks – and Octogeddon is his most successful attempt at a full album-length score yet. He’s is helped on a few tracks by Fan, who has his material arranged by Hinson, ensuring a coherent album flow.

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Red Alarm Soundtrack

Red Alarm Soundtrack, Ken Kojima, 1995

Of course, hindsight is everything, so it’s easy to marvel now at how Nintendo thought that a console as clunky and inherently limited as the Virtual Boy could ever succeed. In defence of Nintendo and Virtual Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi, the console ultimately shipped in a downscaled version, as Nintendo shifted its attention and resources to the Nintendo 64 halfway through the Virtual Boy’s development. The story of the Virtual Boy was ultimately a short one, with only 770,000 copies sold worldwide and the platform discontinued after less than a year.

While only 22 Virtual Boy games were released during the console’s life time, there’s still the odd gem to be found amongst the soundtracks that accompanied these titles. Easily the best Virtual Boy soundtrack is Ken Kojima’s work for Red Alarm, one of the console’s launch titles. A wire-frame graphics rail shooter inspired by Star Fox, Red Alarm was developed by T&E Soft, who had already proven their shoot’em up credentials with the jaw-dropping Game Boy title Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS. Like all Virtual Boy games, Red Alarm found little commercial success, but it was at least better received by reviewers than most other VB titles.

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