Videogame Soundtrack Download
Carlos Beirise
A gamerip is a collection of music that has been extracted directly from the game, and sometimes it has been tagged with correct song names and numbers, and the songs have been looped for a better listening experience. Some gamerips are so good, they function as soundtracks.
An original soundtrack or OST is an album that has been either physically or digitally released by the game's developers. These albums have correct track lengths, loops, track names and numbers, but often are incomplete, as representing every sound in a game can be cumbersome.
Some enjoy a game's music so much, that they want to create their own take on it. These are uploaded as either arrangements, remixes or unofficial soundtracks. Some arrangements are official, as they are done by the game's creators.
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This is a list of video game soundtracks that multiple publications, such as video game journalism and music journalism publications, have considered to be among the best of all time. The game soundtracks listed here are included on at least three separate "best/greatest of all time" lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods and platforms). Achievements are separately noted.
As recent attention in Associated Press stories[1] and a New York Times[2] article attest, videogame studies is beginning to emerge from its murky status as an "academic ghetto." Videogames provide rich opportunity for interdisciplinary study, but at least one aspect of videogames remains to a large extent unrecognized for its impact on the game player. While the game industry invests heavily in the creation of music, and nostalgic themes from early games resonate powerfully with mature gamers, music in videogames has so far remained a tangential footnote to preliminary studies that attempt to account for the medium within the academy. While game studies is becoming increasingly assimilated into current strains of academic discourse, "grand unified theories" of games fail to account for the ways by which the musical soundtrack of a game affects the user's experience and creates a seamless impression of gameplay.
This essay builds on a small body of critical writing dealing with videogame music including Mathew Belinkie's (1999) useful history of game music, online at the Video Game Music Archive (www.vgmusic.com), David Bessell's (2002) chapter in Screenplay: cinema/videogame/interface and Paul Weir's dissertation on sound design and structural approaches to music in games. Robert Bowen has also provided an insightful analysis of Atari 2600 games as musical products themselves, mapping musical structure onto the sound effects and programming capabilities of the console. Belinkie's paper is a rich history of the most influential composers working in videogames, and though Bessell's chapter provides an interesting analysis of several games, his approach fails to take game type into consideration and instead compares and contrasts three games of wildly different type and structure without significant contextualization to make his argument useful beyond itself.
In this essay, I attempt to develop a workable theory of videogame music that approaches the question of music as a part of the narrative component of games. While I intend to steer clear of the ludology versus narratology debate, certain assumptions and allowances must be made in my approach that will ultimately favour one side; but, as the necessarily limited scope of this inquiry requires a certain focus, I hope to move quickly beyond the meta-critical questions paralyzing certain conversations in the field.[3] Accordingly, my argument is that cognitive theories of perception and questions of immersion versus engagement as a means of understanding "flow" or pleasurability in games allows for a richer understanding of the complex communication involved in videogame music.
It is important that the videogame medium adopts certain roles for music from prior narrative media. Specifically, early cartoon music and horror films established certain tropes that videogames rely on today. Furthermore, studies of the relationship between audial and visual elements in older media (for example, film) prove useful for understanding game music because certain basic ideas (for example, diegetic versus non-diegetic musical sound) apply to videogames. Experiments that analyze how viewers interpret purely visual media versus combined visual and aural media are helpful for exploring the cognitive processes involved. The interactive element of videogames requires its own analysis, so a combination of theories of "flow" with these earlier studies of visual/aural media lead to a pair of concepts that describe two common functions of music. Specifically instances of musical sound in videogames generally follow one of two trajectories: to expand the concept of a game's fictional world or to draw the player forward through the sequence of gameplay. One way to think about these functions is by analogy to the metaphor and metonymic behaviours of language described by Roman Jakobson in the context of a paradigmatic/syntagmatic model of communication. [4]
Obviously, these two functions are interrelated, but some games may have a preponderance of one or the other. Tetris, for example, has very little in the way of fictional space. Though there is an extent to which all games have a rhythm of alternation between "safety" and "danger," it is necessary to limit this initial argument to certain game types. I hope to show that these concepts actually provide a way of distinguishing game types and that they correspond to recognizable generic distinctions in games; but, for the purposes of this argument, I focus on the platform and survival horror genres . [5]
Also, by "videogame music" I generally mean the parts of the soundtrack that are pre-composed and recorded for playback to accompany specific locations or events in the game. The differences between game music and game sound can be subtle, especially if the music has an "industrial" style (that is, incorporating mechanical sounds as part of the music) as in American McGee's Alice (2000) or Silent Hill (1999)< or if the sound is ambient as in Silent Hill's "school" levels. Therefore, I often conflate the two for purposes of brevity and relevance. There are some important ways in which videogame sound deserves an entire analysis of its own, but the broad strokes of my current argument apply generally to sound as well.
The music/sound problem is further complicated by a distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music in that the diegetic music functions similarly to the incidental diegetic sounds that populate an environment. Sue Morris writes that sound in first-person shooter (FPS) games is used "to provide an audio complement to action on the screen . . . and to create a sense of a real physical space" (Morris, 2002). A successful player, Morris argues, must perceive the game's space in 360 degrees, most of which are provided as audial information through a player's speakers or headphones; music playing on a radio in the game world, for example, fits well into this purpose of implying space through sound. The character of the music is inconsequential to its function as a location-specific sound. My argument is more appropriate for non-diegetic music, but many of the sounds a player hears are also not generated "from" any visually represented object. In practice, the combined term "musical sound" may be the most appropriately inclusive label. In other words, my argument applies to many instances of game sound as well as game music.
Comparing games and films at all is a controversial approach, but it may be worth pointing out some of the basic points of similarity from which we can derive a useful model of analysis. The key, fundamental overlap between videogames and films is the fact that films and videogames basically rely on both aural and visual cues to convey a sense of a consistent diegesis or gameworld. But a more appropriate and useful comparison comes in the relationship between videogames and animation. Paul Ward (2002) puts forth an interesting argument about games as a form of animation in that both games and animation strive for a form of representation that is more appropriately termed "emulation" rather than "simulation" in that both the game and the animated film rely on similar production techniques. Significantly, both the game's interactive world and the diegesis presented by the animated film respond to the characters in a manner that can only be believed if it is not realistic. Paradoxically, the amazement we feel at the level of detail presented in the environment of the characters may draw us into the alternate reality as a spectacle of technology, [6] but the actual dimensions of the represented world are not dependent on their referent, reality, but on the capabilities and narrative goals of the characters. Gaps between ledges in the worlds of Tomb Raider are spaced exactly according to the abilities of Lara Croft and are not imitating the product of erosion or other natural causes. In both cases, animated film and game animation, timed musical cues and sound effects typically suggest a responsive, narrative-specific environment aimed at either immersing the viewer/user in the spectacle of storytelling or engaging the viewer/user in the kinesthetic emulation of problem solving in a narrativized context.
Studies of cognition and animation suggest that objects are perceived as alive and exhibiting anthropomorphic behaviour when their motions are accompanied by a synchronized soundtrack (Cohen, 2000). This phenomenon relates to Chion's (1994) poetic description of the sublime incorporation of sound into the space of the animation, and the two observations (Chion's theory and Cohen's research) are linked because, for Chion, one of the key functions of sound is to aid in an audience's perception of a spatial diegesis. The cartoon character acting in the space of the animation relies on musical accentuation to make the illusion compelling, and the result is that the musical cues and non-musical sound effects instill objects with even more life than the simple appearance of figures in motion.
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