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davidn
What, yes, okay, I'll keep doing it. How are you gentlemen - formative album five is the soundtrack to Zero Wing!
This might seem a bit of an absurd choice because people know and love this game mostly for its farcically poor translation, but I really wanted to include something that represented my roots in loving game music. I thought about a few different soundtracks to represent it - Frank Klepacki's guitar smashings on Command and Conquer, the excellent soundtrack to the first Soul Blade game (which I actually started writing this post about before changing my mind) - then settled on this due to it being the most power metal thing ever forced through a 16-bit FM chip.
It really shows where the sound I loved came from - game soundtracks at the time had to rely on synthesis unless they wanted to devote 75% of their cartridge space to music alone, and I think that forced music for action games to be attention-grabbing with a strong focus on melody to get its energy across. This was a combination of sounds that I didn't know existed in "real" music for a very long time, but now that I understand where the roots of a lot of this came from I've begun to recognize a lot of influence from early metal in games (take Doom for example, which lifted some Alice in Chains and Metallica songs wholesale).
The composition that went into the Zero Wing background musics is something that still impresses me, despite the Megadrive showing off its comparatively poor sound chip through its bizarre and alien efforts to sound like drums and electric guitars - the sound of that attempt is just immensely nostalgic to me. And the intricacy of the drums particularly stands out!
