Games with good music

After browsing MIDI archives all week for some tunes that would go well with a Doom WAD, I've come to the conclusion that most games have crap music. Or at least unmemorable generic fantasy/electronic rubbish which could be easily switchable between games and wouldn't ruin the mood at all. Maybe it's just hard to find music that suits Doom. Anyway, it got me thinking about games which have had good soundtracks.

I always loved the One Must Fall 2097 Theme, which Spork enjoyably used as the menu music in Ultimate Simplicity. The rest of the game music is well suited and good to listen to even today. Interesting to note this game actually included a MOD player backend, and you can extract the music from the game files and play it in something like MilkyTracker.

As mentioned in the Obscure FPS thread, the Marathon 2: Durandal theme totally blew me away when I first heard it, and it still sounds great.

The Command & Conquer series sure had some classic music. Who could forget hearing Act On Instinct for the first time, or the totally kickass Hell March?

Diablo featured an excellent soundtrack, changing as you progressed through the town, dungeon, catacombs, caves (best) and into hell itself.

A few of these I even keep on my MP3 player along with the Doom music.

What are some games you can remember having awesome soundtracks?
(post links if possible!)

The music that plays while flying around in space in Privateer 2: The Darkening is forever embedded in my memory. I always thought it was really perfect sounding space music. However I can't find a link to it on youtube or anything, so hopefully somebody knows what I'm talking about.

The Terminator for Sega CD has some of the best video game music ever.

And a few passables.

Hooray for the One Must Fall theme! :D Going down that route, I really loved a lot of the music Epic Megagames did early on. Games like Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall, Unreal, and Unreal Tournament all had fantastic music that I still go back and listen to today. On a semi-related note, I liked quite a few of the songs from Deus Ex as well.

Pretty much anything from Tyrian kicks ass, and I'm a sucker for the music in the Castlevania series. I also have some strange fetish for chiptunes from C64. Oh, and then there's the soundtrack from the Amiga version of Shadow of the Beast, which still sounds pretty damn amazing. It's vaguely reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, which is one of my favorite electronic music artists.

EDIT: For some reason one chiptune always comes to mind when I'm thinking of C64 music, and that's Overlord by Glenn Gallefoss. Not to be confused with this more well known song of the same name.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/everything-else/44944-games-with-the-most-phenomenal-soundtrack-music-you-ever-heard/

Tyrian. Nuff said. EDIT: And I took too long digging up links so Spork beat me to it.

The obvious stuff like Descent or ROTT (too many to link to) or System Shock will never get old for me. Those are some of the best MIDIs ever made.

When it comes to MODs, Crusader: No Remorse takes the cake. An Asteroids clone called Piranha also has some awesome MOD music, some of it quite similar to OMF in style.

Tunnel B1 has a great soundtrack, this being the best track.

Too many Amiga, C64 and Atari games to list here.

Ace Combat 5. I've got most of the 4-disc soundtrack on my iPod.

Some of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikg7sO6QjAI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYyR8zcYDZw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5H2P0yGKIo

P.S. In high school I brought this one in for an assignment and everybody laughed at me :(

Super Jamie said:
The Command & Conquer series sure had some classic music. Who could forget hearing Act On Instinct for the first time, or the totally kickass Hell March?

Diablo featured an excellent soundtrack, changing as you progressed through the town, dungeon, catacombs, caves (best) and into hell itself

I have the entire C&C series soundtracks downloaded, and I agree with Diablo, that and pretty much every Blizzard game had amazing soundtracks

EDIT: And I am guilty of loading up Marathon Durandal on my 360 just to hear that theme from time to time

Some awesome ones here, keep em coming! Interesting that OMF, Tyrian and Zone 66 are all known for their awesome soundtracks, and the composers are all well-known around the demoscene. And I love chiptunes too, the SID and GameBoy produce some of the most awesome sounds known to man :)

One I forgot to mention was Street Fighter II!

YouTube user garudoh's channel has three playlists with over 500 videos of game music. Some good gems in there no doubt.

Just about anything out of the demoscene is fair game to me. Crusader, Deus Ex, Death Rally (because it's freaking Purple Motion!), and hell, most of the PopCap games (because it's freaking Skaven!). I seem to have a thing for Future Crew. =P

Also, the DS game The Dark Spire has some freaking intense music.

Just as a sample of the long list of Amiga titles I would've posted here if I had time, Jim Power, Turrican 3 and Ruff 'n' Tumble.

Edit: As for PC games, Radix slipped my mind.

I kinda liked some of the unreal music. It definitely set the theme of the game well.

That Dark Spire game looks really cool!

I remember having a folder full of various cracks and keygens which I kept around simply because they had awesome music :P

If you like really good quality remixes of C64 themes, check out Instant Remedy. I had a few email conversations with this guy in the late 90s, and still have all his tracks from when they were free on his website. Since his release on c64audio they seem to be paid downloads now, but there are previews.

And this custom hardware chiptune project just blows me away!

Toejam and Earl 1 & 2 (genesis). This stuff is ingenious imo, never doubt the funk of peabo.

Diddy kong racing (n64). Really solid intricate hyper happy melodies.

space station silicon valley (n64) had some good tracks.

Sonic the hedgehog (genesis). Everyone already knows this one.
megamans... (mega...men?) (nes). Ditto.

Gameboy battletoads (the one with the evil queen).
gameboy balloon kid.

rise of the triad (aka the music of hell revealed).. Really quality compositions. I love havana smooth or whatever.

-
pretty much all of those wouldn't work in doom (aside from ROTT) though (diddy kong racing... um, no.. unless its a jokewad).

Sonic CD - I'm one of the few North Americans to love the US Sonic CD sound track.

Quake - I thought Trent did I great job matching the music with the gritty environment of the game. I'm glad Romero didn't have his way and have a more thrash metal sound track. I always use the music when playing this game.

This thread has me thinking hard, trying to remember more games with music I liked. I'll be back...

Warcraft II music (also look for the expansion set chunks). The Warcraft III music, for instance, is weaker.

If we stick to 90s PC games, all stuff from EPIC megagames kicks ass. Warcraft II and Dune II also had memorable soundtracks. A few older and certain shareware games like Indianapolis 500, Peter Box (some of the most kickass Adlib music ever heard), Solar Winds and Cool Croc Twins also are pretty memorable.

If we go ever further in the past and on other platforms, Xenon II Megablast, Sierra games, Shadow of the Beast series on the Amiga and even a few Amstrad CPC games like Ghost'n Ghouls, Rodland, Solomon's Key etc. also left a mark.

Regarding arcade music, TAITO always had memorable soundtracks for its games (not surprising, since they have their own music division called Zuntata, and they released game soundtracks on records, CDs and cassettes before it was "hip" to do so).

Diablo did have good music (and I'm surprised someone agrees with me that the caves had the best...aside from maybe Tristram), and Diablo II had some pretty good music as well, especially in act 2 and some of act 3. Starcraft had good music as well.

Descent II had an amazing CD soundtrack. ohGr, Type O Negative and even a track or two by Mark Morgan. Speaking of Mark Morgan, any soundtrack he does is awesome. He did both Planescape: Torment and the first tow Fallout games.

I really liked the temem song to Deus Ex. The rest of the soundtrack wasn't horribly impressive really, aside from the UNATCO music which was just kind of good background music.

As far as console games go, Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger are both amazing. In fact, my favorite soundtrack arrangement ever has to be Brink of Time, which is a jazz-rock arrangement of a bunch of the music from Chrono Trigger done by the guy who did the OST. Here's the forest theme, and the main theme, and hey look, the rest of the soundtrack has been posted there, including both of my favorites.

There's some cheesy stuff here:

http://www.tsmusicbox.com/

I really like some of the Quake 2 tunes, especially Stealth Frag

Ah, consoles! Everyone laughs at me for this, but I think the Killer Instinct theme is totally awesome. I own a still-sealed boxed KI for SNES which has the "Killer Cuts" soundtrack CD inside it. I've torrented the CD, it's rad :P

Ah yes, Quake II did have some amazing music. And again, Stealth Frag is likely my favorite of them all. Oddly I thought I was the only one. I kind of like Trent Reznor's Quake soundtrack as a creepy ambient piece, too.

I actually had the Killer Cuts CD for a while. It was one of the first CDs I ever bought. It was $1 at a computer show. :P

Descent II is decent too

Descent II is descent II (or that was deliberate)

They've been said already, but as far as soundtracks go, I really liked Descent, Descent 2, and especially ROTT. I remember I created my own ROTT tape back in the day recorded off my old Casio keyboard. Amazing soundtrack.

Herzog Zwei and Ranger-X also had really good music. I went through and recorded all the music from them directly off my Genesis a few years back, and I still listen to them from time to time.

MechWarrior 2.

Shadowgrounds

Technician said:

Sonic CD - I'm one of the few North Americans to love the US Sonic CD sound track.

I thought most of it was pretty good, I just wish the tracks lasted longer and looped better. When I ripped the PCM music for the "past" zones, I let most of them loop twice before fading out.

Anyway, I suppose I should have mentioned before; Stellar Fire, Ecco: Tides Of Time and Flashback are also some of the best SCD soundtracks around. I just happened to be listening to The Terminator when I first posted. I'd say it might be the best based on the first 4 tracks and final track, but the second 4 tracks were rather generic and forgettable. SF and Ecco are more consistent in quality, though I don't think anything tops the best Terminator tracks, so it's kind of hard to rank these overall.

Ryathaen said:

MechWarrior 2.

Oh and that reminds me, Quake Mission Pack #1, closely followed by #2, both by the Mechwarrior 2 composer, are two of the best PC game soundtracks around (snare drum was way too loud throughout #2 though).

ah, thanks for mentioning Tyrian, guys. now i have to play through it again. and Crusader too, dammit.

i think the awesomeness of Stephane Picq hasn't been mentioned yet. the re-mastered CD version of his Dune soundtrack is probably my most favourite game album ever. the original MOD tracks impressed me hugely as a kid, and i think they're still damn sweet. especially the ornitopthere theme. the game was weird, but i don't remember anything with similar 'magical feeling'. not sure if they fit doom, but their inclusion would definitely make me turn on the music. :P

dew said:

the original MOD tracks

You are referring to the Amiga version?

The ones you linked to are from the PC version and have that unmistakable Adlib sound (bell sounds, synth bass, wood percussions etc. with no hint of digital aliasing). Compare to the amiga version, which even have an "ohhhh" chorus voice and stereo ;-)

With some like you may be able to find the original adlib tracker files in http://chiptunes.back2roots.org/ (once it's up and running again) and you can play them in Winamp with Adplug.

yeah, the amiga version is preferrable, but this guy had the most complete collection on youtube. :) the adlib version is still cool, though, and they're both far, far superior to the mt-32 version. ugh, did cryo just hate roland or what?