Most gamers, I think, have a certain Pavlovian reaction to the music from our favorite games. They remind us of fantastic moments in games past (and perhaps fantastic moments to come), and sometimes just hearing a song from a game is enough to get you totally psyched to play more. For Nintendo fans, game music becomes especially important thanks to the NES and Super NES. Both had sound chips that were, with a few exceptions, superior to most other things on the market at time of release.
The composers who wrung soundtracks out of those bleeps and bloops created a whole generation of chiptune addicts. This list is a tribute to what I think are some of the absolute greatest, most memorable video game songs ever produced by Nintendo hardware. To this day, they send chills down my spine and make me want to pick up a controller and go kill something made out of pixels. In some cases they're musically interesting in their own right, just for being able to squeeze compelling melodies out of hardware that's unimaginably primitive to the modern gamer.
10. Red Wings Theme - Final Fantasy IV
FFIV, localized as FFII, was one of the first titles available for the SNES. A lot of the music in that game just sounded unimaginably good, going beyond anyone's expectations of what game music could be. No song underscored this more than the impressive Red Wings theme, which is played early on in the game and only a few more times after that. Parts of the melody sounded somewhat like actual instruments, almost, and the soaring parts of the melody were catchy as hell. The bridge portions would become a tense cacophony fraught with danger, hinting at all the sinister skullduggery afoot in the FFIV plot.
Now we're accustomed to games announcing to us, in the beginning levels, that we're about to embark on a mind-blowingly awesome adventure that shall involve befriending countless numbers of neat-o characters. With FFIV, this entire approach to console RPGs felt fresh and new, and frankly pretty amazing. Most RPGs, early on, promised nothing but extensive grinds where you repeatedly killed whatever monster was the low man on the totem pole. In FFIV, the game opens with you razing a village and angsting about whether or not you're doing the right thing as you command a fleet of airships. It was a nice change of pace, and I'm a little sad that in the years since there's been a bit of a regression to the mean.
9. Mega Man 2 - Boss Fight Theme
The only inarguable flaw in the Mega Man 9 soundtrack is that its boss battle theme is vastly, inconceivably inferior to Mega Man 2's. This is forgivable, as Mega Man 2's boss battle theme is perhaps the Platonic ideal of all boss battle themes. It is really just the perfect theme, the exact moment in a Mega Man stage where you realize that all your struggling through the previous level may have been for nothing. A Robot Master-shaped brick wall is about to come flying toward you, and only your reflexes and wits are going to save you from exploding into a series of flickering circles.
Now, the Mega Man 2 boss theme is very short, and that's because it was just a loop that repeated incessantly. It actually managed to form part of the insidious tension of a good Mega Man 2 boss fight-- the more times you heard the theme loop, the more danger you know you were in. Any ideal Mega Man boss battle is going to be over in less than 30 seconds. The longer you're running around and jumping, the higher the likelihood of screwing up and taking damage. There aren't many boss battle themes that make me feel genuinely anxious for my life, but Mega Man 2 has one. Every boss battle theme since then is just trying to be roughly half as good.
8. Punch Out - Fight Music
Punch-Out is another one of those NES games so old it features at most two or three music tracks. As with the others, one of the few songs it did feature is so awesome that the melody gets seared onto your brain and eventually becomes indistinguishable from the sheer joy of playing the game itself. Playing Punch-Out was an experience that came down to pure joy, too. It wasn't hard enough to feel too frustrated but always offered enough resistance to make you feel like a badass for moving on.
Specifically, Punch-Out seemed to be a game designed to make you feel like you were Rocky, only if you know Rocky could somehow be the inspirational figure of the first film and yet still manage to win. The Punch-Out main theme takes more than a few cues from the Rocky theme, but a lot of what makes it so interesting is in seeing how PUnch-Out's derivation tailored itself to the limitations of the NES sound chip. A modern game that wanted to copy the Rocky theme would just, literally, copy the Rocky theme and probably most of the instrumentation. The result would definitely be less interesting than what Punch-Out came up with.
7. Chrono Trigger: Frog's Theme
Chrono Trigger doesn't inhabit the hallowed, nostalgic place in my heart that it honestly should, because I somehow or other managed to never own a copy. I rented it a few times, so to be honest I'm not sure what my problem was. Maybe this was a case of my parents being cheap, or maybe I was stuck in the World of Ruin when Chrono Trigger came out and honestly thought I could beat FFVI before picking up a new RPG. Either way, I can say that I did play Chrono Trigger long enough to know that it had badass music, and especially to know that Frog had the most badass music of all.
This is because Frog somehow manages to be the most awesome character in a game full of awesome characters (yes, Frog is better than Magus, and those who think otherwise have imperfect reasoning faculties). Frog's theme did an amazing job of underscoring everything that was fun about the character, to the humor in how seriously he took himself and the tragedy of realizing that once, he really was a knight with a certain amount of personal dignity. Frog's theme picks up a lot of the basic musical motifs of the Fabul theme from FFIV, but it's just one hell of a more interesting theme, to the degree that Frog is one hell of a more interesting character than Yang.
6. Mega Man 2 - Dr. Wily's Castle
Modern games are, I think, a little too generous with their rewards. It seems like every little thing you do unlocks an achievement or gives you a new move or nets you a bunch of points you can spend on crap later on in the game. Rewards for victory in games used to be just a little bit less obvious. For instance, in a modern game, making it to the boss's lair usually nets you all sorts of glorious shinies, from chances to save at a checkpoint to opportunities for harvesting power-ups. In Mega Man 2, your only reward for getting into Dr. Wily's Castle was listening to this song.
Thing is, this song is so mind-blowingly awesome that just getting to fight your way through a level while listening to it is reward enough. If the MM2 boss theme is the essence of anxiety and creeping terror, this theme is a heroic triumph. You've made it, you beat the eight Robot Masters, and now all that waits before you is a final harrowing challenge. This is a song that does more than sound appropriate to a hero's adventures; it makes you feel like a hero for making it as far in the game as you did.
5. Castlevania - Vampire Killer
The Castlevania games fall only slightly behind Mega Man 2 when it comes to making ludicrously good use of the NES sound chip, and of the Castlevania NES themes the one that manages to kick the most ass is Vampire Killer. Music like this coming out of a video game was a mind-blowing experience back in the day (you know, the 80's). It remained mind-blowing as young gamers learned that Konami could be relied upon to consistently put more effort into their NES titles that almost any other third-publisher.
To be honest, I used to play a lot of the original Castlevania just so I could hear this particular theme, especially when I was a wee tiny gamer of about five or six years. I would play my copy until I got far enough in the game that something besides Vampire Killer played, then reset and play the first part of the game over again. I never beat Dracula in NES Castlevania, but boy was I good at the first level. In any subsequent Castlevania that uses Vampire Killer at some point in the game (and there are a lot of them), I'm always tempted to make a save just before that area and then replay it... oh, five or six times.
4. Final Fantasy VI - Terra's Theme
For some reason, I had a hard time beating FFVI when I was younger. It's not that the game was hard; it's that the game was very long, and I would keep getting distracted by homework, or new games, or would just get into the World of Ruin and sort of lose interest. I would always get the urge to finally finish FFVI a few months later, and then go into my save (always, always abandoned in the World of Ruin) to try and figure out what the hell I was doing when I stopped playing.
Usually, this resulted in me getting very frustrated and just deciding to start the damn thing over again. So I'd restart, and get to the super-long credits sequence with the Magitek armors slowly approaching Narshe, and this is the song that would play. I loved this song, lonely and sad in a way that video games had not ever been for me before. It was still heroic, though, and promised a great journey for the player that could endure the World of Ruin and make it to the final dungeon. Eventually, I did, but I don't regret all the times I restarted my game just to hear this song again.
3. Legend of Zelda Overworld Theme
Now, Legend of Zelda evolved in a way that is, musically, very unlike the Mario games. The overworld main theme that was so catchy in the original Legend of Zelda that it was one of roughly four songs in the game has become a mainstay of the Zelda series, to date showing up in pretty much every single major title that used the name. This is a song that's been rearranged a thousand ways, from its humble chiptune origins to full orchestrations, and what's amazing is that virtually every version of this song is somehow just as amazing as the first one.
The defining idea of the Zelda series over the years, regardless of changes in the perspective and controls, has always remained "adventure". These are games about exploring dark caves and trudging to the farthest corners of the world just to see what's there, as much as to rescue the Princess to get the McGuffin or whatever else is going on. The Zelda main theme somehow manages to perfectly capture the concept of exploration, with a melody that always strives to propel you forward into the unknown. Some arranges of this theme meander, some remix the melody significantly, and YouTube is full of people playing it on every instrumental known to man... and in their way, all of these versions are good. They all feel like playing a Zelda game.
2. Super Mario Bros. Main Theme
For perhaps the vast majority of the population, this simple little tune is in itself their idea of video game music. People who've never played Super Mario Bros. know this song, and every chiptune-loving geek out there has probably tried his or her hand at arranging a version of it on some godawful cheap Casio keyboard, or perhaps in the Mario Paint music program. Hell, it's even one of the few game songs Nintendo allowed into Wii Music.
What's funny about the Super Mario Bros. main theme is that it never became a series mainstay. It appears in a few other Mario games as an easter egg, notably Super Mario World and Mario Sunshine, but didn't turn into a perennial main theme like the Zelda Overworld theme or Vampire Killer. There were only something like five or six songs to listen to at all in Super Mario Bros., and this one is somehow by far the best. It's jaunty and catchy and the melody propels you forward without making the cheerful overworld stages feel threatening. In many ways this song is the essence of what made those old Mario platformers feel so fun and free in spite of how linear and grueling they could actually be.
1. Tetris A Type Theme
So, including this as "video game music" is cheating a little, I know. The song that is known to most people my age as "that Tetris song I started hearing in my dreams while I hallucinated that I was playing" is actually a well-known Russian folk song called Korobeiniki. While I make note of this in the interests of accuracy, though, I have to say that I don't really care. The Tetris A Type theme shall always be the Tetris Song to me, and in some ways it is the song that embodies the Game Boy.
It was a cheerful and soothing little ditty, far superior to the horrors that would pass for music in later Game Boy titles. You'd hear it while you played Tetris for hours in the car, while you listened to one of your parents take your Game Boy and play Tetris while you were doing something else, resounding in your head while you were doing something else but really thinking about playing Tetris. Something about the way the folk tune merged with the ever-falling blocks made for an unforgettable and compelling experience. I can't actually make myself play Tetris to other music now. I'll go out of my way to get to level 20 in Tetris DS just so I can hear this song.
