I’ve largely been sticking with the LucasArts adventure game soundtracks these last few weeks, as they’re great background music for work (and are very inspirational when doing creative stuff). Fate of Atlantis has always been a favourite for music as well as a favourite game.
It probably has my favourite depiction of Atlantis of all time, and that’s saying something! The music reminds me of many happy hours in my younger years, exploring the beautifully pixellated Atlantean corridors. I really need to pull the game out for another playthrough sometime soon.
This week’s playlist pick is a tribute to Geth, who has recently been wearing a too-big pair of pyjama bottoms with a crotch that hangs roughly at the same height as his knees. It’s been making me laugh, anyway.
I love my Monkey Island soundtrack playlist with all the original tracks from the games, but it can sometimes get a bit distracting when a more upbeat tune comes on and I’m trying to work. However, a couple of weeks ago, The International House of Mojo linked to some chilled-out ambient versions of some of the tracks on YouTube, and they’ve been my work soundtrack ever since. Great stuff.
Each of the Monkey Island ambience videos lasts about an hour, but the themes around Scabb Island in Monkey Island 2 are probably my very favourite out of all the music in the games. An hour is nowhere near long enough for me to get fed up of it!
Everyone has a favourite Saturday morning cartoon theme song. This is mine, and it appears on many of my Spotify playlists, including my running one. Many happy memories of cartoon-watching in childhood (funnily enough, while The Raccoons was a perfectly passable and entertaining cartoon, the theme tune was the best part!).
I used this song to test the way music works for Adventuron games earlier this week, so it currently also feels like a victory song. Jam game released tonight and I will link to it tomorrow!
I’ve been in a ‘soundtrack’ mood recently, which has coincided well with the most recent piece of excitement in Duran Duran world – Nick Rhodes’ latest side project with Wendy Bevan, Astronomia, released last week.
This album – a series of soundscapes themed around the planet Saturn – has provided a lovely array of background chill for my working afternoons recently. Can’t listen to party tunes all the time!
There’s a few new music releases I’ve been excited about this week, including Horror Show, the new EP from The Midnight. I gave it a first listen on Saturday and was charmed by this cover of Patti Smith’s classic ‘Because The Night’. It’s now made its way into my ‘synthwave favourites’ playlist!
The whole EP is good quality synthwave as ever from The Midnight so it might provide a few more playlist picks over the next few weeks!
I’ve been venturing back to more modern times for my pop playlist this week. I’m considerably behind with the UK charts (hence why there haven’t been any New Hits Friday posts or Now! reviews for a LONG time… I’ll get back to them eventually). Still, it’s been nice to enjoy a few favourites from my 2010s list over the last few days. Not every single pop song was awful in the 2010s! Just… most of them.
Geth has been watching The Simpsons on Disney Plus recently and has reached the episodes from around 2009/2010. As such, I’m getting fairly major nostalgia for pop music from early 2010, which was when, after many years of being Too Goff (TM), I started following the chart again as part of a slightly pretentious project to study ‘cultural history in the making’ for an entire decade. Side note: I can’t believe that at age twenty-five, I already felt far too old and out of touch for pop music when listening to the charts. It really is a teenager’s game.
Anyway, this offering from late 2009 has been in my head for a fortnight now due to being featured in the opening sequence of a Simpsons episode that Geth put on twice (he fell asleep the first time it was on). Enjoy!
(By the way, I’m sure you’re all aware that the song is nothing to do with the TikTok app, which is a far more recent source of societal decline.)
I’ve been working on both of my ’80s chart playlists this week: my ‘proper’ one, which is ongoing as part of my decade-long video-watching project (explained last week), and my ‘holding playlist’ for favourite tracks I’m yet to get to. Strangely, given that it’s only the alphabet that separates them, the two lists seem to have slightly different tones; the first seems to contain more serious tracks, while the second is more frothy. Maybe it’s just the particular tunes that seem to be coming up regularly at the moment!
An exception to the trend is one of my favourite tracks by a band from the latter half of the alphabet, Soft Cell. ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ is beautiful and epic and not at all frothy, and I was privileged to see it performed live when Geth and I saw Marc Almond at Electric Dreams 2018 (though I was less impressed by the audience members wearing inflatable pink flamingoes, as I feel the song deserves a little more reverence).
The video is early ’80s perfection and I’m always disappointed when nightclubs don’t look like this. Not that I go to nightclubs that often these days, even in non-pandemic times!
I have a mega-playlist on Spotify for ’80s chart hits that I like. Because I want it to be comprehensive, I’ve been working (on and off) since about 2012 on a project where I watch the video of every single track that was ever a UK chart hit in the ’80s… in band alphabetical order. It’s a long project (it took me about two years just to compile the complete list) and I’ve only made it to the letter ‘J’ so far in terms of watching the videos and adding the best ones to my Spotify playlist.
As such, I sometimes get a bit of a craving for hits by bands who are further along in the alphabet, and have a separate ‘holding’ playlist for this purpose! Pet Shop Boys are one of these bands and also one of my favourite acts of the era. I bought tickets for myself and Geth to go and see them in concert in 2020; the gig was postponed first to 2021 and now to 2022, so I need to be patient for that one!
In recent months (since about November) their 1988 number one ‘Heart’ has been a frequent late-night craving for me. I LOVE that intro. Makes me want to dance! (I don’t, as Geth has usually gone to bed by that point and my loud trampling would probably wake him up. Chair-dancing is fair game though.)
The video is a daft story about a wedding and vampires. ’80s videos were the best.
As I discussed last week, I’ve not been listening to music in a focused way recently, so I surprised myself a bit last night when I found myself on Spotify, working on my playlists again. I have probably 50-odd playlists on Spotify as my music taste is fairly eclectic, but I hadn’t realised I’d never put together a videogame soundtrack playlist before (other than a specific one for Monkey Island soundtracks). Videogame soundtracks feature frequently on my earworm playlists, as both Geth and I play a lot of videogames and the music is often very catchy, so it’s about time I start collecting my favourites together!
I started this process last night, but it’ll be a little more involved than most Spotify playlist creation processes as most of my favourite videogame soundtracks aren’t on Spotify. As such, I’ll have to track them down separately and store them in my local files in order to put the playlist together. This could be a bit of a long project as a result, but it’d be a great playlist to have, so I will persevere.
I have a lot of favourites, but here are five special tunes that have soundtracked my gaming life (and my life in general as a result).
‘Candion’ (Jazz Jackrabbit: Holiday Hare ’95, 1995)
An unseasonal Christmas example to start off with! Having spent about five years obsessively playing PC platformers – starting with Hunchy on the BBC Micro when I was very young and still spectacularly bad at videogames, then moving onto early ’90s offerings such as Jason Storm (I first played it on a black and white screen!), Word Rescue and Hocus Pocus – I spent pretty much all of 1994 and 1995 playing Jazz Jackrabbit, a Sonic-a-like for the PC. Every single one of the soundtrack tunes for the game’s thirty-odd levels brings back so many memories, but it’s this gorgeous MIDI rendition of ‘Carol Of The Bells’ from the game’s second set of Christmas-themed levels that stands out most for me.
‘Type A’ (Tetris, 1989)
I didn’t get a Nintendo Game Boy until 1997, a good eight years after the system had first come out. My younger brother Malcolm was fairly console-obsessed and spent most of the first half of the ’90s unsuccessfully pestering my parents for a Game Boy and/or a Sega Mega Drive. We were both keen viewers of GamesMaster on Channel 4 at the time, and one of my main memories of it is the constant background refrain of ‘ohhh I wish I could play that…’ Of course, having watched the episodes again on YouTube with Geth in more recent years and realising how eye-watering the prices were for consoles and videogames at the time – £50 for a single game in 1993! That’s £105 in today’s money! – I now understand why my brother’s requests fell on deaf ears! I, on the other hand, was perfectly happy gaming on the PC – that is, until I went on a school trip to France in 1997 and had the opportunity to borrow my friend Fiona’s Game Boy during the long boring hours spent on the coach. Realising the usefulness of portability (Mum and Dad were/are keen travellers and so I spent a lot of my life in the backseat of a car at that point), I requested one for Christmas that year. The prices may have been more wallet-friendly by then, as I got my Game Boy – and so did Malcolm, who wasn’t about to miss out on his long-awaited handheld system now that his big sister was getting one.
I had a few games for the system, including, of course, Tetris, which I believe was bundled with every Game Boy ever sold. I always appreciated the fact that you could choose from a selection of background music, something I don’t remember seeing in any other game of any era (I’m sure other examples exist but I’ve not come across them personally!). While I remember preferring the slightly classical-sounding ‘Type C’ when I was playing the game back in the ’90s, it’s the iconic ‘Type A’ that has seared itself into my brain for the rest of eternity.
Addendum: I can’t talk about the Tetris music without linking to the amazing ‘Russian history’ version!
‘The Swamp’ (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, 1991)
However, on the odd occasion that I wasn’t in the backseat of a car, the second half of the ’90s (and all of the ’00s… and to some extent the ’10s and ’20s and presumably every decade for the rest of my life) were all about LucasArts graphical adventure games. In 1997 (clearly a big year in gaming for us), Malcolm bought a magazine with a demo for The Curse Of Monkey Island, sending us both down an adventure game rabbithole from which I have yet to emerge nearly quarter of a century later. I’ve played many, many classics from the ’80s and ’90s, as well as a lot of great adventure games that have been made in more modern times, but the Monkey Island series will always be the greatest in my eyes. The soundtracks – an inspired blend of Caribbean reggae and more traditional ‘pirate’ genres such as English hornpipe, composed by Michael Land – are so brilliant that I have a whole separate playlist for them, as mentioned above, so it’s hard to pick a favourite track. However, the one that I think I’ve always loved the most is ‘The Swamp’, a spooky epic from the second entry in the series. It’s like a thousand memories in one.
I’m generally a late adopter of console and handheld systems. In my case it’s because I have such a backlog of old games that I don’t mind waiting a while to play the new ones (exceptions over the last year have included Paper Mario: The Origami King as I bought into the hype, Beyond A Steel Sky as I’d been excited about it for years, and Bravely Default II (arriving Friday! so excited!) as the previous entries were my favourite 3DS games ever. Geth is the same, which has probably been for the best this last year; I think we would have been inordinately stressed if we’d tried to partake in the PS5 / XBOX Series X launch palaver. I’d still like to get one or the other, but I’m happy to wait for a couple of years!
As such, I only got my first 3DS* in early 2014, three years after it had come out. Geth and I had been avid Wii gamers since the turn of the decade, but the Wii seemed like it was dying a death, as the official Nintendo magazine focused more and more on 3DS games. These 3DS games sounded REALLY good, and so I bought my 3DS for my 29th birthday. It was my first handheld since the Game Boy Colour (something I still almost regret buying** as I never actually bought any games for it, just used it to make my old Game Boy games look slightly more colourful. I only bought one because Malcolm spent the entirety of our 1999 summer holiday in France trying to find an affordable one in the supermarkets, and by the end of the holiday I wanted one too. Don’t buy into the hype!).
I love the 3DS and still play it a lot, even though I’ve got a Switch Lite too now. The system has provided what are now some of my favourite games of all time, such as the first two Bravely games, Fire Emblem: Awakening, and of course the brilliant Ace Attorney series, which was my first introduction to Japanese visual novel-style adventure gaming.
The Ace Attorney soundtracks are fantastic. The games were originally released in the early ’00s in Japan before being upgraded for worldwide release on the 3DS a decade later, and so the music is still very MIDI-sounding and retro. All the tracks are great, but my favourite is the character theme for Dick Gumshoe. (He’s not my favourite character but he has far and away the best music!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25cwwqrp8EI
*I’m now on my second. My first one died bravely in battle (like, literally in the middle of a Bravely Default battle) in 2016. That was a bad day.
**Almost, but not quite. Due to the vagaries of cartridge decay, my copy of Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land now refuses to play on my Game Boy, but plays perfectly on my Game Boy Colour. My Game Boy is still fine with my other cartridges, so it’s just one of those technical mysteries!
‘Leaving Earth’ (Mass Effect 3, 2012)
Around the same time as I was enjoying the Ace Attorney games for the first time, I finally got round to playing the Mass Effect series.
I mentioned earlier in this post that Geth and I are late console adopters, but we’re not as bad as we used to be. Back in the early ’10s, we waited a whole console generation so that we could pick up an XBOX 360 for cheap when the XBOX One came out in 2013. As such, we didn’t own the Mass Effect games until then, and though I watched Geth doing a couple of playthroughs in 2014, I didn’t get round to playing them myself until the following summer.
Mass Effect was a huge and important gaming experience for me. It was what inspired me to start running (because I watched Commander Shepard running around the universe and thought ‘I’d like to be able to run forever, too’). It shifted my expectations and perceived baselines around videogames, and has become a major comparison point for me when I’m evaluating new ones. Unlike the other games on this list, however, I wouldn’t say that the Mass Effect soundtrack is uniformly brilliant or even that memorable. It’s one particular track – ‘Leaving Earth’ from Mass Effect 3 – that stands out so much that it will always be one of my all-time favourites.
I always find it lovely that ‘Leaving Earth’ – along with many other soundtrack classics – was composed by Clint Mansell, who in the late ’80s and early ’90s was in Pop Will Eat Itself, one of the greebo bands loved by a teenage Geth back in the day. Greebo and epic soundtracks are worlds apart to me, but maybe not as much as I think!
In closer-to-home musical news: the Zoom band night I was attending on Wednesdays has come to an end for now 🙁 However, I intend to keep doing a bit of ukulele practice at the same time every Wednesday so that I don’t get out of the habit again. Maybe I’ll start learning some of my favourite videogame soundtracks on ukulele!