The Gamers Arms

What are your favourite game soundtracks?

I keep coming back to Crusader: No Remorse (1995)




And Quake II (1997)

I love the System Shock 2 soundtrack but I hate it in the context of the game.

Bastion had a fantastic soundtrack.

The Witcher 3's was great as well, very evocative of setting.

The Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite soundtracks are particularly pleasing to me. Both the licenced tracks and the original score just suit the game to an absolutely tee...





The Girls Just Want To Have Fun cover on the calliope from Infinite makes my heart sing...



And of course Katamari Damacy...





There's so many more that others will help jog my memory I'm sure.

I've probably listened to more game and film soundtracks than I have regular music in my life. It just means more to me.

Nintendo have been doing great stuff with their first-party games in recent years. Mario Kart 8 is probably my favourite, from the amazing jazzy remix of the original SNES theme to the adventurous Shy Guy Falls to the funky Electrodome.

Picking a World of Warcraft soundtrack almost feels like cheating, because it probably has more money spent on it than most games' entire development budgets, but Wrath of the Lich King's was simply incredible. From the haunting to the intrepid to the brave, past the weirdly funky, to what I think may be one of the beautiful pieces of game music ever written, "Invincible". The full soundtrack to just this one expansion (and its three major patches) is more than half a day long and it doesn't really dip in quality.

I always have to pick out "To Zanarkand" from Final Fantasy 10. It's by far the best piece of music from the game, the rest is decent, but this one track stands out.

Bastion is another classic, but I think you have to listen to it paired with the wonderful, gruff narration - it's a masterpiece of a game, but you really need to experience it all together for it to have the full effect. The ending theme, "Setting Sail, Coming Home" is one of my favourite pieces of music (as in, ever, across any genre) because it's associated with the bitter-sweet nostalgic feeling the game's ending gives.

My top 10 game tracks would probably consist of 4 or 5 of Jeremy soule's pieces from the Total Annihilation soundtrack. Never has there been so many incredible, different, classic compositions together in one game.

I've said it before, but I think he made an error with that game; he should have held most of them back for future projects and just stuck to one or two themes. He was way too generous to the makers of the game to include so many.

As Raid has just reminded me with his Mario Kart tracks. Mario Galaxy's soundtrack is also excellent throughout in particular the Gusty Garden Galaxy theme which Mario Kart 8 pays homage too in the Cloudtop Cruise track. Joyous.

Syndicate Wars:

Sound good shouts in here.

A lot of my favourites are a bit more modern, barring classic JRPG OSTs from various Final Fantasy games.

Nobuo Uematsu is one of my favourite composers of our era:



Ben Prunty makes very chilled out synth stuff:



Same chap did these two:





Everything about the new Doom OST kicks serious arse too:

Ack, how could I forget Doom '16? It fits the game perfectly, giving an incredibly oppressive feel to the game, and it's one of the few games where that's appropriate. It also keeps up the tempo in a game that relies on fluidity. It's a fantastic soundtrack. Bethesda also get props for that specific video, as the visualiser is just brilliant.

Mick Gordon gave a very fascinating talk at GDC in 2016 where he explained the various methods he used to get the heavy synth sounds and guitar tones. The guy is an excellent composer and bit of a mad scientist when it comes to combining effects. He put a ton of old distortion, delay and reverb pedals together; routed in various different ways and then plugged a bunch of synthesizers into them and basically made this huge oscillating monstrous sound. As if it could get any more metal, one of the synths he used was a massive old Soviet model.

And the guitar tone in one of the tracks is blended with a chainsaw sample from the original game. About 2 minute 4 seconds into this track.


So bad ass.

Also the ROF of the guns is in tempo with the music which is amazing!

Like a couple of people have already mentioned, the BioShock (particularly Cohen's Masterpiece) and Witcher 3 (particularly Hunt or Be Hunted and The Fields of Ard Skellig) soundtracks have some fantastic pieces in, and Jeremy Soule always knocks it out of the park. Other favourites for me are:

The Legend of Zelda: 25th Anniversary orchestration of Gerudo Valley:


Icarus from the Deus Ex: Human Revolution OST:


Super Mario 64: Dire Dire Docks: (The original is great, but I love a good orchestration)

Just realised all my choices are from the mid-nineties. That seems to have been my personal gaming "golden age".

As far as modern soundtracks are concerned, I've not been exposed to all that much as I haven't seriously PC-gamed for a decade now.

I've never actually played this game, but the soundtrack is great: