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A (Highly Incomplete) Ode to Video Game Music

In honor of Jim Guthrie‘s incredible new soundtrack to the game Sword & Sworcery for iPad 2, I couldn’t resist posting it here in its entirety, along with a couple others I love from the old days.

I don’t know much about Jim Guthrie besides that he is a Canadian singer/songwriter, but this music hits just the right balance of nostalgia and progressiveness. It makes me want to play the game, which is exactly the reaction you should have to video game music. Plus, I’m a huge sucker for puzzle games anyway.

I could never list all my favorite video game music (there’s just too much awesome), but I’m going to post a track from Neil D. Voss‘s score for The New Tetris because Sword & Sworcery reminded me of it so much. It may seem a little goofy until you realize it was composed in 1998. For that long ago, this is incredible sounding. This soundtrack was such a big deal IGN has an interview with him about the making of here.

And even further down the nostalgia rabbit hole, the greatest video game soundtrack of all time: Final Fantasy VI (or 3 on SNES) by Nobuo Uematsu.

The famous Boss Battle theme:

Orchestrated version of the saddest music in the game:

And the final boss theme, which has always sounded to me as if it was composed by a mad Japanese Bach genius.

What other video game soundtracks do you love? Please drop ‘em by in the comments!