I Made You This Rad Mix Tape Bro

When I was a kid I owned a lot of video game soundtracks. I mean, I suppose I still do, but the point is that back in middle and high school I listened to them pretty much exclusively. We had a five-disc CD changer in the living room, and that’s where the computer was, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to load it up with Nintendo songs and wear away an afternoon with them.

I did the same thing with MIDI playlists of course.

The sad ending to this story is that my step-father could never appreciate the majesty of chiptunes, and would quickly get fed up listening to it. Sometimes he would make a compromise, matching me disc-for-disc in the changer by putting a Beatles album in alongside the soundtrack to Mario Kart 64. Other times he would shut it off altogether, muttering something about it being his house and damn kids etc.

For some reason it never occurred to me to buy headphones.

Anyway, I was living on my own at the height of the Gamecube/PS2 era, and I decided to capitalize on the old “vidja games ain’t real music” in-joke by making a mix CD full of tracks from video games that sounded like honest-to-god real music. In fact, that’s pretty much what I called it:

I know that cover looks like something designed by your 6-year-old nephew, but I assure you I was well into my 20s when I came up with it.

I had forgotten all about this CD (which must have been a gag gift for Christmas) until my step-dad dragged it back out of the closet the other night while we were over there visiting. We listened to the whole thing and I think it still holds up fairly well as something you could show to a music lover to say, “See? Game music is real music!”

I think my goals for selecting the tracks I did were to get a wide variety of styles, sticking to things with real instrumentation rather than samples/chiptunes, and avoiding Japanese lyrics altogether. Here’s the final track list, complete with YouTube links:

1. “Feedback” – Guilty Gear XX
2. “Snake Eater” – Metal Gear Solid 3
3. “Voyager” – Final Fantasy XI
4. “Hyrule Temple” – Super Smash Bros. Melee
5. “Main Theme” – Metal Gear Solid 2
6. “Que Sera Sera” – Katamari Damacy
7. “Fun and Mini-games” – Beyond Good & Evil
8. “Memory of Lightwaves” – Final Fantasy X-2
9. “Rainbow Road” – Mario Kart Double Dash
10. “Brave Sword, Braver Soul” – Soul Calibur II
11. “La Mer” – Suikoden IV
12. “Hikari (Orchestral Version)” – Kingdom Hearts
13. “PowerOne” – Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
14. “At Zanarkand” – Final Fantasy X

I had space left on the disc, so there’s a hidden fifteenth track which is just seven or eight minutes of “Pressing Issues with Maurice Chavez” from one of the talk radio stations in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

In conclusion, it makes me feel really, really old that games like FF10-2 and Suikoden IV have apparently been out long enough for me to have used their resources in a fun little project which was then completely forgotten about. Next you people will be telling me we’re up to double-digit Mega Man games.