If I knew we were going to get a movie based on the winner I would have gone for Bubble Bobble.
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Maybe someone with more knowledge of the era can correct me on this, but it strikes me that 1986 was really the year video game music became rad.
Games like
The Legend of Zelda
Out Run
Castlevania
Dragon Quest
Bubble Bobble
all have such great OSTs and I can’t think of a soundtrack from an earlier year that can compare.
Like, there was music in games before this, but not of this quality and abundance.
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While I wouldn’t take its soundtrack over most of that list, there’s always the 1985 classic Super Mario Bros.
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I’ll agree with this take for the most part. Most pre NES soundchips are quite bad so while I’ll go to bat for early 80s games until the cows come home, most of them don’t have much going on musically. While there’s some great video game soundtracks from 84 and prior, you can count them on your fingers. Then in 85 you get the NES and the Amiga and Yamaha FM soundchips goin in arcade games like Space Harrier, and then by 86 you get an explosion of good video game music finally.
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While Tim Follin was able to make the beeper on the ZX Spectrum sing, he didn’t really get around to it until 85, and no one else was remotely close to doing what he did with it before that
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This is awesome
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What’s the most stunning about it is that you can still clearly hear every single noise coming out of it is obnoxious garbage, but somehow the whole is great music.
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This is an interesting question because I think it’s a bit of a matter of breadth more than anything. These soundtracks are all-timers, but they also have surprisingly few tracks! Outrun gives you a choice of three radio tunes and then Last Wave on the result screen. Zelda has the title theme, the over world, the dungeons, the final dungeon theme and then the ending jingle. Bubble Bobble has, what? The main theme and the result screen? That’s just about as much as Ice Climber!
It feels like the great distinction is we went from a pretty solid main jingle to maybe also having a little extra tune on the side that also slapped. It feels like damn near every black box series Nintendo game had a pretty solid title screen theme, for example. The lavish musical upgrade of games like Super Mario Bros was that you now had the underground, water and castle theme on top of the main one. I’d argue that Donkey Kong with its cheerful title music and goofy level bassline is just as iconic as Super Mario Bros.
What is the qualifier for being rad? I can think of at least three pre-86 cases that immediately stick out to me as kinda sick.
By 1985 we had cases like Sega’s arcade classic Teddy Boy Blues co-promoting itself with Japanese idol singer Yōko Ishino, featuring the singer performing a chip rendition of a song simultaneously sold as a single.
When I think about early efforts with game music I keep coming back to Sabre Wulf squeezing Bach out of the ZX Spectrum. In this case, Prelude in C Major acts as the literal prelude to your adventure. I think the choice is overt enough to be seen as thoughtful, practically requesting its dignity from the player.
Lastly, there’s the 1984 album Video Game Music by Haruomi Hosono, which arranges audio from Namco arcade games in a way that frames the incidental sounds as harmonious and beautiful in their simplicity. A quick glance on people’s commentary for this album practically boils down to “this just sounds like a guy recording himself playing some games”, but I think that in itself doubles as the album’s statement. Maybe the aural experience of playing games is inherently musical? Maybe the game itself is an instrument you play by accident? Maybe Pac-Man was the moment video game music became rad?
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I was just about to post that Hosono album! The whole thing is pretty great but the Galaga track at the end is straight up euphoric.
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Hey, this is some cool stuff, and I’m glad you posted it, but it’s not changing my mind.
Sabre Wulf having digitized Bach or Mario Bros having digitized Mozart is neat, in retrospect, but like, no one saying “rad” in 1985 was also clamoring for video games to feature Brahms.
This is going to be a personal taste thing, but I don’t think the Teddy Boy Blues single is very good outside of the game, let alone the in-game version.
I also think title screen music is like attract mode. It’s not there when you’re actually playing. I’m not sure if this makes a big difference, but I think it does for me. Music is so much more impactful to me if it’s enhancing what I’m feeling when I play the game, rather than being the ice cream truck jingle that lures me in, only for me to listen to the playground screams of Xevious noises while I actually eat my ice cream.
In any case, while there were glimpses of greatness leading up to 1986, it still seems to me like video game music “got gud” on an industry level in '86. Castlevania alone elevated the standard considerably.
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How much later are we talking about?
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once I take 20 minutes to look up what an amiga is and how to emulate one
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An amiga is a female friend. I’m not sure how to emulate that, though.
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There must have been someone in the 1980s making jokes about nerds having an Amiga instead of a girlfriend, right?
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I tried Amiga emulation but got couldn’t find a good guide to WinUAE to get it running unfortunately.
Instead I played it on the Commodore 64 through emulation. It does run slower, have noticeably worse depth of field, and the camera is not as good. Also not having a joystick and using keyboard feels like I’m not getting the full experience. I fear that even if I were to play on Amiga I would have one or more of these issues.
And yet, it is still Marble Madness.
Which brings me to a philosophical crisis, the essence & artistic vision of Marble Madness is better realized in the 1984 game, and the home port is really just a remake. On top of that, this isn’t the optimal remake, so I think it would be disingenuous to vote for it. I think I should have some consistency and consider Marble Madness, a 1984 release.
So when it comes down to the year 1986, Dragon Quest is the game I’d most like to pick up and play out of anything. I might not want to sit down with the 1986 version as much as the 1989 Dragon Warrior localization, but splitting hairs release-by-release in these yesteryear GOTY discussions is way too annoying, so I’ll just consider all DQ1’s to be a 1986 release. Gotta vote for Yuji Horii’s classic.
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Update: based on the polls posted earlier in this topic¹, I will be posting these discussions monthly (on or around the 15th of the month) with the next one being 1987.
If someone else would like to post discussions for years previous to 1986, you have my blessing. I don’t have a ton of enthusiasm for the pre-1985 eras of gaming, so I’m probably not the best person to do those anyway.
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Should be noted that I didn’t vote because I think every 2 weeks would be perfect.
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I didn’t include that as an option because I can never remember if bi-weekly means every two weeks, or twice per week.
I lost on the timing vote but now I actually think weekly would be too much. Once again and as always the majority was objectively correct
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Fortnitely
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