All the talk of the best game music on The Guardian Games Blog’s Chatterbox Friday inspired me to pull together a post on my favourite game musicians
David Whittaker
- Greatest hits: Speedball (1988), Shadow of the Beast (1989), Xenon II - Megablast (1989)
- Listen to his music @ ExoticA Game Music Archive
- Comments: Xenon II - Megablast…need I say more? David Whittaker has written some of the most memorable music to the early Bitmap Brothers games
- Greatest hits: R-Type (1989), Turrican I (1990), Turrican II (1991), Star Wars - Rogue Leader (2001)
- Listen to his music @ ExoticA Game Music Archive
- Comments: Factor 5 games have always been accompanied by fantastic music courtesy of Chris Hueslbeck from the wonderful Turrican series to most recent Star Wars Gamecube games. He has a load of albums available on his website if you like his music
- Greatest hits: Lemmings (1991), WipEout(1996), WipEout 2097 (1997), WipEout Pure (2005)
- Listen to his music @ www.coldstorage.org.uk
- Comments: In my mind the best tracks on all the WipEout games have always been the ones written by CoLD SToRAGE (Tim Wright). You can listen to his fantastic music by downloading tracks from his website (free of charge!). Don’t forget to listen to Messij and Doh which are my favourite tracks from WipEout. Back in January 2006 I commented on Tim’s newest album - Melt which you can check out by clicking here
Richard Joseph
- Greatest hits: Gods (1991), Chaos Engine (1993), Speedball II (1991), Cannon Fodder (1993)
- Listen to his music @ ExoticA Game Music Archive
- Comments: “War, it’s never been so much fun…” (Cannon Fodder title music) I’ve loved his music since his early collaborations with the Bitmap Brothers (Gods, Chaos Engine, Speedball II and Magic Pockets) and then with Sensible Software (Cannon Fodder, S.W.O.S)
Koji Kondo
- Greatest hits: Super Mario Bros (1985), Super Mario 64 (1996), Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time (1998)
- Listen to his music @ Play any Nintendo game!
- Comments: Nintendo’s in house musician…mmm, there’s one or two iconic soundtracks in his discography! Personally I loved the music to Ocarina of Time as it was memorable, suited the gameplay perfectly and most importantly, it didn’t annoy the crap out of you!
If anyone’s feeling particularly rich and fancies a CD of classic arcade music (including R-Type!) check out this ebay auction
Links:
Wikipedia - Video game music
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