Video games have a rich musical history, but only recently, with new sound technology and higher budgets, have we really seen what the medium can do sonically. So, from the best soundtracks and scores to the greatest curated radio stations, here’s the best video game music of all time.
Super Mario Bros.
Koji Kondo had a job that would worry even most professional composers. He had to come up with a score that felt fresh every time you heard it, had only a crude electronic apparatus to compose on, and he had only a forty-second loop. The result was a calypso-influenced snatch of music that has a reasonable bid for being one of the most famous pieces of music of all time. It’s so famous, and so accomplished a technical feat, there’s serious music criticism written about it. Research for getting it out of your head remains ongoing.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
The Grand Theft Auto series has always been well-known for its awesome music choices, but Vice City is arguably an achievement in music supervision. Each “radio station” mixes the songs you’d expect from 1986 with deeper cuts from artists ranging from Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Run-DMC. The result is a mix of songs, across a shocking number of genres, that not only makes sense inside the game as a radio station’s regular music rotation, but also serves as an introduction to entire swaths of music you might not otherwise experience.
The Last of Us
Gustavo Santaolalla is no slouch in the soundtrack department: He won back-to-back Best Composer Oscars in 2005 and 2006. You likely last heard his work on Making a Murderer. But his score for The Last of Us, one of the best console games of the last generation, was something else again. Santaolalla rejected the ideas that drove most video game scores at the time, composing his work as if scoring a movie. While the themes he delivers are undeniably impressive, it’s the atmospheric music when you’re playing the game that most captures attention. Santaolalla’s score is a constant companion, carefully increasing the tension, emphasizing the game’s rare moment of peace, and making a chance meeting with a giraffe a thing of beauty.
BioShock Infinite
BioShock Infinite had a tricky musical concept: The people of a floating city from the 1910s, Columbia, found “rifts” to other realities and heard snatches of song through them. So, among other things, the first thing you hear is a recomposition of God Only Knows performed by an old-timey barbershop quartet. Garry Schyman not only had to carefully select tracks from the proper era, using old-timey songs like “That Old Time Religion” to chilling effect, he also had to figure out how a musician from 1910, when faced with Cindy Lauper, would struggle to understand it. The results speak for themselves.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Finally, we come to another pop cultural feat: Creating an entirely new era of music. The central conceit of Wolfenstein: The New Order, is that the Nazis ultimately win World War II. So, every musical trend in America between 1945 and 1960 had to be reinterpreted with a… distinctly different slant. It’s unnerving not least because of how cheery it all is: The Nazis like a good beach song just like the rest of us, it seems.