30 Days Of VGM
A 30-day video-game music challenge ran in GravityBeatle’s Discord in March–April 2022, which I took as an opportunity to commentate music in a technical, nerdy way. VGM was the first style of music I seriously took to, at age 13, before segueing into classic rock a year later via playing Elite Beat Agents (a 2006 DS remake of the 2005 Japanese DS game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, which was the direct inspiration for osu!).
#1 Wario Land: The Shake Dimension – Title Screen
i feel like i’m selling this ost short by picking such a simple track but i vibe w the sparsity. the first melody’s really colourful within its scale and then the second half is a trip thru warm fuzzy chromatic chords. the ost as a whole is very modern for vgm and 70s/80s fusion–based
#2 Streets Of Rage 2 – Go Straight
i’m def not the kinda guy to play mega drive games but this caught my ear during a gdq intermission a few years ago. the eerie harmony comes from taking a fixed minor triad shape and moving the root around (progression is i v ♭vii iv), usually in some kinda polyrhythm, which is an idea from detroit techno. sounds like a banger to start off the game tbh. i love this interview as well where someone goes “I didn’t realize that anyone was making full-on dance tracks for a video game” haha
#3 Mega Man 2 – Wily Fortress 1
Abusing EU timezone cos this might be a popular choice Keepo. i first heard it when i was 14 in the bonelich rhythm-action minigame in zack & wiki that had a few classic capcom tunes and man this one went deep into my head, particularly that one ethereal note in the melody… it’s a dorian melody that boldly lands on the brightest (maj 6th) note. when i heard the same idea in a fela kuti song 6 years later, it took my breath away so i looked into it and learned about these scales and dorian became my fave and i stan fela stilllll so yeah was cool that my reaction to this mega man tune predicted that
#4 Super Metroid – Lower Brinstar
sparse soundscape, bold melodies, brooding bass and cutting treble w swathes of space/silence in between… other than the actual beat, it’s basically old-school dubstep :p. the best bit of this is when the sound channels get blocked up on the snes and the bass drops out and leaves a solo piano like this. when it comes back in… best bass drops i’ve heard in my life no joke
#5 Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door – Rogueport’s Underground City
I love this tech where you imply a harmony in the high voices that stays the same, then do all the movement in the bass instead. the melodies live in an E maj scale but the bass keeps saying D, which makes the melody notes stand out brightly as like 9ths, 11ths etc, then only in the second half of the song it resolves to E a bit to make things more comfy. i’ve encountered this a lot in jazz where i fit a chord over melody notes but it sounds too stable/consonant, so i end up moving the bass note 1 tone down and spelling out like a full 11 chord
#6 The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Island In The Sky
SS gets a lot of flack for how empty the sky is but a silver lining is the liminal feeling u get when visiting the islands, which often have nothing but a hole, tree, treasure chest on them. That feeling of taking a break by yourself in a quiet spot with not much to do and knowing you’ll move on soon, comes across in the song’s sparsity (new favourite concept BongoTap) too. It’s a pretty, lydian tune with a melody that jumps along sparkly wide intervals, with a key change onto the natural 4th, aka the first note outside the scale on the dark side, and then restating the same melody/chords over that. Which makes it really vivid, subversive and out there. Not an idea I’ve seen in any song other than this one
#7 Braid – Lullaby Set
This is one of those immediate, moving ones. I like the fluid sense of timing, classical dymanics, the droning notes, that kinda thing. The piano comping is busy with details and counterpoint melodies, e.g. I love the first chorus at 0:35 where the repeated piano line ends in 3 different ways before moving to the ending melody. Fits a very quiet, solitary game about bending time
#8 The Speed Rumbler – Sharp Shooting
Another one from the Zack and Wiki Bonelich minigame. This is pretty mad for a blues. Has these chaotic changes and I love the part at 0:59 where it starts chucking triplets about and then does that major-key turnaround. Shit’s hype. Great fun to transcribe and show people back in the day
bit of “japanese”
The Speed Rumbler, known as Rush & Crash (ラッシュ アンド クラッシュ Rasshu ando Kurasshu) in Japan, is a 1986 Japanese arcade game that was released in North America a bit later the same year.
#9 FIFA Football 2004 – Fools Gold
total fakin cop-out m8, i literally found a list of music used in fifa games and picked the first track i love out of it lol
not much to say about fools gold, legendary rave track by the stone roses from madchester times. sick drum loop n that
i actually wanted to use a david holmes song from pro evolution soccer but then realised those games aren’t licensed 🤦 be playing Man Red vs London FC in them hahaha
#10 Undertale – Enemy Approaching
Quite like this cute arrangement. It feels like a mini–big band tune, with the staccatos, little polyrhythms introducing each line, and the call and response where the response goes off and does something quirky. A boldly and densely melodic OST on the whole, bit like Paper Mario 64, which is the kind of stuff that got me interested in music at all when I were a wee lad.
#11 Professor Layton And The Curious Village – The Plot Thickens!
This is on the same tip as the mega man 2 song i linked, as in, a dorian melody that targets that standout brightest note in a very spooky, or poignant, way. I like how it goes into a bit of two-chord vamp with lots of swing and bass and accordion and Poirot™️ vibes, but then comes back out into a really still part with nothing but that spooky melody
#12 Ōkami – Ushiwaka’s Appearance
Boy do I have a sad story for you haha. This song on the face of it, almost the same as the one i just linked before – dorian tune with a prominent solo melody part. I have a thing for those, right, so it makes sense that this is the only song I remember from this game. I played it in 2009 but my disc broke about halfway thru, and I was just too small to reason about it, like… I bought it for £10, and I could just get another. Instead, I was emailing tech support cos I was dumb and I let it slip away. This Ghibli-themed Zelda game, better than any Zelda game, left such a strong impression on me that I’d call it my second-fave game after pm64/ttyd despite only half-completing it. But as I grew older and less escapist/tolerant of long engrossing adventures, I found myself suppressing memories of this game cos not finishing it made me so sad, and this tune is about the only memory that filters thru sometimes.
#13 Kid Icarus – Overworld
Kid Icarus, particularly from Smash games, set a strong aesthetic impression on me with like the airiness and stateliness of its music. This tune’s a good example with cool phrygian dominant melodies, which is a scale most often used in heavy metal. I found a Brainfeeder album called Golden Skies by Mono/Poly that really pushes this aesthetic in an experimental electronic setting. The game is typical brutal NES stuff that I could never get into, however :)
#14 Sonic and the Secret Rings – Let The Speed Mend It
This game has a fun arabic theme and OST. Another song in phrygdom scale, actually quite directly merging its common uses in heavy metal and in arabic/indian music. Ig it mostly sounds like linkin park, but has fun extra colours with the sitar melody, and also bass music actually in the drums, with a dnb break cut up with fun bits of half-time. The story and visual flow of the game were cool enuff to forgive the cheeks controls
#15 Paper Mario – Freeze!
I think this (ice-themed boss) is a sick composition. The two things that really stand out are its polytonality (aspects ranging across 5 modes over the same root) and the call-and-response in both the harmony and the dynamics. The whole thing alternates gracefully between dark and light harmony and between dense/menacing vs airy/icy instrumentation, and the two sync up well too. At its darkest, it’s a dense synth doing like a random walk of semitones over an intense natural minor bassline, and at its lightest the bassline drops out into a fading drumroll with an ethereal synth doing a lydian chord. Yeah lots to talk about in this one but damn was I impressed revisiting it. A lot of ideas in not many notes. The song that first got me into this idea of clashing a minor bassline with a major melody was neat little rows by elbow; it shares a vibe with this song thence.
tbh i wanted to save pm64 for later but boss music on the whole kinda sounds alike and isn’t my thing yet this game almost uniquely among ones i know is packed with sick boss tunes so i had to get it to carry the category. pm64 is my fave ever ost
#16 Plok! – A Line In The Sand
An even sicker composition, this one sounds like a prog rocker could’ve written it, and it rly pushed the boat out on 16-bit tech. There’s so much movement in the song that it’s like it’s soloing itself haha. I love the use of 7/8, changes in rhythm, beat displacements, volume modulation, and the sense of swing that comes from all those. Love the chord and key changes in the first part too, and my fave part is the big cadence at 0:29 that’s paired with the bass dropping out. Shoutouts to the summoningsalt video that put me onto this 1
#17 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Forest Temple
A true ambient track, with an ebb and flow of prominence of the agitated lafter melody on top of the bright droning chords. The melody falsely fades away near the end, yet holds on and comes back stronger, becoming a really insistent single note that goes lower in pitch than before. A reflection of how your deepest fears of the unknown sporadically, viscerally cut thru the unstable unsettled calmness you find yourself in after a shock that uprooted everything you once knew
#18 Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island – Underground
Born in 1995 peepoComfy. I first heard this song in an SMW clone I played as I transitioned from flash games to Nintendo games round age 11… it was used for a nighttime starry-sky level, so I still have that association with the twinkling chimes and the rising pipe melody, which resembles like, a comet. Moody and pretty melodies
#19 Doctor P – Tetris
man said it’s tetris
fr tho one of the funniest things about brostep is ppl always lament how the americans came and ruined dubstep but we always fucked with dr p bitd cos he straightforwardly beat them at their own game anyway
#20 Super Mario Kart – Rainbow Road
This stands out compared to later rainbow roads cos of some really harsh bright harmonies that aren’t softened/watered down by excessive accompaniment – mostly just a staticky drum groove + staccato bass + eerie slightly-detuned synths. It weaves in the trademark sweet dark harmonies of later rainbow roads yet always resolves back to that weird, forceful, abstract bright sound. The MK7 remix has lovely uncompressed drums but I picked the original cos of the sick garbled drums in the turnaround (0:54) and how they add to the dynamics there. This whole sound, especially in that part, is a lot like David Bowie’s Low.
#21 WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! – Paper Plane
I used to mald to this… the further you get, the more of the song you hear, but you have to be a god to even get far enuff for it to start repeating. The further you get, the more you get slapped by all these annoying fugue melodies to add to the game’s innate stress lol. But the opening part is solitary and whimsical, a nice distraction from the usual pace and style of WarioWare.
#22 The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap – Minish Village
I watched a late-night Minish Cap playthru once and immediately vibed with this when it was encountered. The chords are always moving towards fuzzy, bright resolutions, and alternating bright/dark is something I have a thing for generally. The synth bass is also rly cool and modern-sounding, jumping around big intervals on the turnarounds.
#23 Osmos – Sickbay
osmos is a game themed after competing for survival in the abyss, equally resembling space and the deep ocean. it’s meant to be experienced with the same kind of presence as ambient music, which it features in its soundtrack. this piece by loscil has a wash of drones in a slow, moody i-IV progression, with an undulating low-pass filter on an unnerving idm-ish rhythm, and a regular ping, uncanny like the abyss, surfacing above the background. i like the piece “lucy dub” (also by loscil) from this ost a lot as well, for its cool minimalist-like phasing evoking an incidental, martial atmosphere
#24 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Dark World
The best song I’ll post, this one has been with me since I was 12. The basic idea in the composition is to do calls in a bright scale (C dorian) and responses in a dark scale (C minor), and then to develop the emotions with bold melodies, new chords, chords borrowed from an even brighter scale (C mixo)… one thing that highlights this is the basic motif (the one on the harmonica) showing up in all of the 3 modes i mentioned, at 0:00, 0:49 and 1:10. There’s a lot of this self-similarity across neighbouring keys and the way it flows from one to another is so subtle that I don’t pick up on it until I take it apart – the same happened when I transcribed ghost ship by matt calvert recently, one of my fave songs which I also find really evocative for reasons I couldn’t place before… coincidence…..
I have to say as well that the vibe of this arrangement (from Super Smash Bros. Brawl) is staggeringly different from the original (that’s what really shocked me as a kid). It’s all the same emotions but filtered thru a tense calm of folk instruments and rhythms rather than the regal melancholy of the original.
#25 Battletoads – Turbo Tunnel
shouts to gdq for this one again. pretty simple tune, pairs an energetic scale with some bluesy melodies, bit of motorik, rising arpeggios and siren-like sounds. get gassed
#26 Star Fox – Corneria
I find these SNES arrangements quite captivating where there’s a short section with no backbeat and a cool theme, and then it segues thru many hard-rockish sections, mixing sparser and denser rhythms, all at a high 171bpm tempo. I like Mute City from F-Zero the same way (which is at 195bpm even).
#27 Mario Kart: Super Circuit – Bowser Castle
Cool metal tune again, fun uses of missing beats, half-time, polyrhythms, but the two melody sections were what stood out for me when I played Mario Kart Wii. This scale always sounds exotic, but I also like how one melody kind of opens the song and the other just intensely hovers, with a bit of chord movement only at the very end right before dissipating. The timbres of the lead instruments also flow into each other nicely.
#28 Super Mario Galaxy – Stardust Road
It was between this and PM64 for my fave vgm ost as a kid, and this is the song I tried to learn on the piano back then and is my enduring favourite now. It’s similar to Island in the Sky (my song #6), in that it’s based in a lydian scale that modulates onto root notes outside the scale on the dark side, and both tunes as a result have a floaty distant vibe interspersed with moments of melancholic loneliness, soundtracking explorations of sparse, liminal spaces (space junk galaxy and empty islands in the sky respectively). The floatiness also comes thru the pings and whistles, and quiet echoed melodies – the one at 0:38 copies the main melody except in a darker mode, which is really nice – and the dynamics of the flourishes in the transitions, and the movements into I-II progressions (which are characteristic of lydian) in different keys on different instruments, are quite rousing.
#29 Super Mario 64 – Ultimate Bowser
I really enjoyed learning this one as a solo piano piece when I was 13. It’s a classical piece based on toccata (machine-gun of notes) and fugue (repeating motifs in different registers and voices) techniques, but the fun part for me was the ascending and descending arpeggios, and the call-and-response between a minor scale and a diminished one. A bit grandiose and a bit organ-horror haha.
#30 The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD – Staff Credits
The main Wind Waker theme is a cute pair of major melodies in 3/4 with triplets (9/8 kinda vibe) and swing, which is a kinda skippy rhythm, and they start a beat early so they skip even morrreee. But the twist the credits add (in the first 2 mins) is new, increasingly-prominent chord movements and dynamics (like bass voices), which reharmonise the melody and give it a grand nostalgic feeling, saying farewell to your trip, or to watching a good speedrun, which is how I came to know these games and hold them dear.