This got me thinking about other instances of musical plagiarism in games. There are the famous examples of course, mainly the Sonic 3 soundtrack ripping off _Hard Times_ by the Jetzons or the various stolen riffs from the Dragonball Z: Budokai and DOOM games, but I was wondering what other examples I didn't know about.
Just in case anyone doesn't know about the Sonic 3 example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OWC5Hosv8](Definitely not Icecap Zone)
@jeelz#7733 Oh that‘s fun. I didn’t know about the Light Crusader connection! I wonder if this happened more in that era, when audio fidelity was just high enough to have some distinct instruments and games lacked the audience size to recognize the plagiarism. I wonder if this happened much on computer games after MIDI took off.
I love this stuff though! I always thought the castle theme from The Legend of Dragoon sounded kinda close to Al Stewarts 'Year of the Cat'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdky4NDCmqA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqZc7ZQURMs
Just to clarify on that Jetzons thing, that wasn't a ripoff, that was the Jetzons composer using his own composition twice - sega paid him for some tracks alongside michael jackson.
@jeelz just posting a bare youtube link will embed it. (also light crusader rules, and I had no idea about this composition similarity!)
There are some pretty famous game-on-game ones, notably Jim Power:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTXn8TfD_ms
really bare-faced ripping off Ys 3 (he said he must've done it unconsciously)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DNt3ZaS6zQ
@exodus#7748 Oh go figure. I wonder how many times that's happened, where a non-videogame musician works on a game score and re-uses an old piece.
I'm kind of surprised that game composers would rip off each other! I figure if one were to plagiarize, they'd want to grab from a source further away from their own work. But I guess it's either usually not intentional or the person doing it is more concerned about meeting a deadline than being untraceable.
Zelda‘s Lullaby seems to be a pretty direct quote from Steve Hackett’s Hand of the Priestess. It's not complete plagiarism because the two tracks diverge after the bit of shared melody, but the bit in common is pretty egregious.
This is super off-topic but there is this thing with spanish TV in which sometimes they will use videogame soundtracks on super random stuff like, the other day I heard music from Into the Breach used in a trashy reality show about couples or something like that. I have no idea if they own the rights to use the music or they use it because they figure nobody will complain about it, but it drives me insane every time I see it happen. I think it was this track but I have also seen times happening with anime soundtracks and other niche stuff (which makes it more suspicious I think!).