The 4 Best Game Gear Soundtracks

The Sega Game Gear launched in Japan in October 1990 as Sega’s answer to the Nintendo Game Boy, offering a colour backlit screen and — crucially for music — a modified version of the SN76489 sound chip with an additional stereo panning register that allowed each of its four channels to be directed independently to left or right speakers. Composers were working with pure square waves and noise, without the FM synthesis of the Genesis or the programmable wave channel of the Game Boy, and many of the platform’s soundtracks were rushed ports with little compositional ambition.

The exceptions are remarkable precisely because they emerged from such unpromising conditions. Motoi Sakuraba and Masaaki Uno produced a historically epic score of astonishing emotional complexity at launch, weeks after the hardware arrived in shops; Motoaki Takenouchi built a pseudo-orchestral fantasy score of genuine stature from square waves alone; Paul Lathem — a composer whose only known credit is this single title — created one of the era’s most atmospheric handheld action scores from just three tracks; and Kojiro Mikusa closed the platform’s Japanese life with a miniature platformer score of impeccable craft. The four scores collected here represent the exceptions: music that found genuine expressive range within very tight hardware limits.

An alphabetical list of soundtracks, selected for the excellence of their compositions from all available Game Gear scores.

Each playlist has been carefully curated to include the strongest cues from each soundtrack. Audio is encoded at 192 kbps Opus. All rights remain with the original composers/publishers; this is for personal listening only.

Arena: Maze of Death Soundtrack

Paul Lathem, 1995

Three tracks is not much to work with — even for a handheld title, that was sparse by 1995. Yet the Arena: Maze of Death soundtrack builds a surprisingly potent bleak atmosphere that utterly envelops the listener, perfectly suited to the game’s dystopian sci-fi setting.

It’s all the more surprising that Arena appears to be the only game Paul Lathem ever scored. Listening to the soundtrack’s lengthy, patiently developing cues, you would be forgiven for assuming this is the work of a veteran of the European computer game scene — particularly once the layered arpeggios kick in, providing the score’s few surges of excitement and hard-won empowerment. Within just a few minutes and even fewer cues, Arena convincingly establishes its sombre world. All three tracks are grounded in minor keys — D minor, F minor, and C minor respectively — giving the score a tonal consistency that deepens its atmosphere of desolation. One gloomy musical idea is repeated often enough to deepen the mood, yet the writing remains varied enough to avoid undue fatigue.

Lathem takes great care to build some of the Game Gear’s longest compositions around shifting constellations of the same basic contrast. Industrial grooves and pulses animate these expansive cues, insistent enough to evoke an unforgiving atmosphere without tipping into monotony. Their gritty intensity provides exactly the kind of steady, satisfying rhythmic drive you want from an action game.

What makes the score feel unusually affecting, however, is its melodic writing. The tunes are sparse and slow, not merely contrasting with the churn of the rhythmic undergrowth but seeming to teeter on the edge of being swallowed by it. Lathem makes clever use of the Game Gear’s limitations, pushing bright, borderline tinny leads into the highest registers, where sustained notes shiver and jitter under the onslaught. He also repeatedly sends melodies tumbling downward in chromatic glissandi, intensifying the sense of insecurity and threat. Even at only three tracks long, Arena is an uncommonly emotional, powerfully minimalist handheld action score.

 

Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya Soundtrack

Motoaki Takenouchi, 1993

Considering the limitations of the Game Gear’s sound chip, writing a pseudo-orchestral fantasy score for the platform might seem like a doomed undertaking. Thankfully, Motoaki Takenouchi defies the odds and delivers a soundtrack to rival Motoi Sakuraba’s outstanding Zan Gear. It is no surprise that, following this release, Takenouchi became the Shining franchise’s go-to composer, leading to highlights such as the Sega Genesis’ Shining Force II (one of the greatest pseudo-orchestral scores on that platform) and Shining Force CD (ditto for the Sega CD — unsurprising, given it rearranges significant portions of Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya).

What is the secret of Takenouchi’s success? It is simple: flood the score with strong musical ideas, write richly varied melodies, and support them with arrangements that constantly generate forward motion. Three of the Game Gear’s four sound channels are stuck playing square waves — but that still leaves room for ambitious writing built from busy, intertwining lines. Takenouchi’s approach is not always intensely contrapuntal; instead, “A Long Journey”‘s A section shows how he supports a memorable, enterprising lead with layered backing figures that unobtrusively add texture and depth. The result is the kind of sprawling, expansive music associated with the best fantasy scores.

Such sophisticated writing has few peers among handheld chiptune RPGs, and it stands as one of the Game Gear’s most convincing arguments for the platform’s musical potential. Admittedly, not everything here works equally well. When the mood turns menacingly brooding, the relative lack of melodic material can cause the music’s quality to dip. Even so, the remaining cues — many of them sturdy and faintly militaristic — still display an impressive range of emotion and compositional approaches.

“The Last Selection” shifts with astonishing subtlety from an elegant, almost dance-like opening to a troubled mood that culminates in desperate staccato declamations. Writing a convincing chiptune adagio is one of the toughest challenges game composers face, but “The Prince of Tragedy” becomes the score’s most moving display of Takenouchi’s melodic gifts, unexpectedly full of pathos. Finally, “Departs to Another World” offers the soundtrack’s boldest classical-inspired writing on the Game Gear: indomitably adventurous, and developing its material with utter confidence. There is no better proof than Sword of Hajya that writing a chiptune epic on the Game Gear’s SN76489 sound chip is indeed possible.

 

Sonic Blast Soundtrack

Kojiro Mikusa, 1996

The last Game Gear title released in Japan, Sonic Blast was probably no one’s idea of a fitting close to an era. Still, the game at least produced a delightful soundtrack, courtesy of Kojiro Mikusa, who had already gained plenty of experience on earlier Sonic handheld entries. Sonic Blast easily ranks as his best franchise score and the strongest handheld Sonic soundtrack of the 1990s.

This is not a score that reinvents the wheel or aims to blow minds. Mikusa delivers an entertaining, succinct soundtrack that cheerfully gets the job done and moves on (few tracks loop later than the forty-second mark). Stylistically, it is a typical platformer score, but it executes the form with unusual polish, thanks to carefully wrought arrangements and instantly charming melodies.

“Green Hill Zone” sets the scene, presenting its catchy tune in straightforward fashion while the remaining square-wave channels add beguiling, silvery ornamentations that flit around the melody line. With the partial exception of “Blue Marine Zone”, Mikusa consistently knows when to move on to the next riff: two or three ideas are enough to carry a cue when bolstered by such an expertly crafted backdrop. Meanwhile, the crunchy noise-channel percussion adds subtle syncopations and deftly placed breakdowns that never interrupt the groove, but still add just enough spice.

Each track introduces its own twist on the formula. “Special Stage” maintains “Green Hill Zone”‘s upbeat mood, but its B section carries an almost pastoral charm. “Boss Theme”‘s off-beat, high-pitched accompaniment gives the cue a playfully experimental edge, while “Yellow Desert Level” uses pentatonic scales and melodic repetition surprisingly skilfully to create an attractively heady atmosphere. “Red Volcano Base” and “Silver Castle Zone” sit on opposite ends of the spectrum: the former opts for lumbering, persistent rhythms and cautiously advancing melodies, while the latter is the score’s most frantic cue, its constantly tapping percussion pushing the soundtrack’s bubbly disposition into something more frenetic. Sonic Blast might not aim especially high, but that does not make it any less satisfying.

 

Zan Gear Soundtrack

Motoi Sakuraba / Masaaki Uno, 1990

You would not expect a composer to pack a historical epic’s cinematic sweep into a humble Game Gear score. You certainly would not expect this feat on a first-generation title for a musically challenged platform. And yet that is precisely what Motoi Sakuraba and Masaaki Uno accomplish on Zan Gear.

It is a jaw-dropping soundtrack in several ways. No other Game Gear score offers compositions of comparable emotional complexity and richness. These cues are multi-tiered creations that develop with astonishing patience, bolstered by the composers’ decision to favour long-form pieces capable of real dramatic flow. Take “Turbulent Age”, and the way its carefully prepared tempo shifts make the music’s eventual eruption feel all the more thrilling after a slower episode.

There is not a single dud among the many melodies Sakuraba and Uno conjure. The confidence with which the music unfolds is deeply impressive. A cue like “Age of Heat Haze” can therefore build a calmly majestic atmosphere while still finding room for introspection. If you need further proof of the composers’ melodic gifts, listen to “Tears of Mortification”. Its pace is steadier than that of other cues, but this allows Uno to write what may be the most expansive melody heard on the Game Gear, a tune that never fails to captivate.

Hearing such lavishly arranged music on a game released just two weeks after the console hit the Japanese market is astonishing. Part of the fascination lies in the composers’ technical wizardry. In unshowy fashion, they do a sterling job of prioritising voices through subtle volume shifts while varying textures, frequently switching between contrapuntal episodes and beautifully harmonised melodies. The score maintains a remarkably consistent energy throughout — rather than building to climaxes or decaying toward resolution, it sustains its intensity from beginning to end, giving the music an uncommon sense of grandeur and inevitability. Listen to “Final Dirge”, and the genuine pathos of its most striking moment: a simple two-note ostinato, set in sorrowful harmonies and surrounded by more complex material that makes the passage of unadorned sadness all the more arresting.

It is hard not to feel some disappointment that the Game Gear’s broader discography did not consistently fulfil the promise of an early masterpiece like Zan Gear. Even so, the score’s existence is proof enough that excellent music was possible on this platform from day one.