Ever since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Gran Turismo pushed the idea of licensed music in video games to new levels, I’ve been a sucker for a good soundtrack. I already have a fascination with musical scores as it is, but the right choice of song in a game can create hugely memorable moments. I obsessed over The Mad Capsule Markets because of THPS 3, played Rod Stewart’s Young Turks to death after hearing it as I piloted a helicopter around San Andreas, and found renewed love for Guns N’ Roses’ Paradise City thanks to Burnout Paradise. Playing Fallout 4, and actually listening to the radio stations this time (mainly because it has more than three songs; I’m looking at you, Fallout 3), I realised I was quite enjoying the 40’s and 50’s tracks it has on offer immensely. I mean, how can you not enjoy offing Feral Ghouls to tunes as head-bobbingly cool as this?
This naturally led to me thinking if there were any other good soundtracks recently, and you know what? There have been some really good ones in 2015. The first real standout being Dontnod’s time-twisting episodic indie drama Life is Strange. I lost count of the times the choice of music matched up perfectly with the emotions I’d felt during the game (and my, it did quite the job of toying with my emotions). Syd Matters contributed with two of my favorite songs in the game, and I knew nothing of them until Life is Strange. The game’s indie film style and soundtrack worked together in perfect harmony to produce one of the year’s most interesting titles. Just look at the intro sequence below and try to deny it works perfectly.
Current industry leaders in episodic storytelling; Telltale Games teamed with Gearbox to make a series based on the Borderlands franchise, and that ludicrous setup gave us the wittiest, most quotable game of the year in Tales from the Borderlands. The soundtrack though? Just spectacular in the way it mixes sound and vision. Take the penultimate episode’s intro sequence that uses the uplifting indie pop of Twin Shadow’s Back to the Top as a backdrop to the events on screen (SPOILER WARNING for the video below).
But this was no one off, as each episode utilised the soundtrack in such ways. Like Life is Strange it didn’t go for popular music, rather songs that worked with the game. It carried on the fine tradition of Borderlands intro sequences too.
A game that did use popular music, and executed its use brilliantly was, of course, The Phantom Pain; Hideo Kojima’s supposed final dalliance with the Metal Gear Solid series. Being set in the 80’s gave Kojima free reign to grab some pop classics to add a sheen of lunatic nonsense to a series practically varnished in a good twenty coats of it as you could sneak about, knocking out enemy soldiers to the warblings of Kajagoogoo. Yet the best use of 80’s music came in the opening credits as the relatively obscure Midge Ure cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World played over Snake awaking in his hospital bed after a nine year coma.
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The track’s offbeat stabs of synth really plays up to that notion of disorientation that both you and Snake are affected by at the start. Later on though, you’ll forget all about that as you fulton a bear to the catchy beat of Hall and Oates’ Maneater.
It’s nice to see that, in a year where Rockstar haven’t released anything, there are other games around to take up the mantle of great soundtrack usage. Rocket League could be added to the list easily with its beepy, boopy tunes, OlliOlli 2 also had a notable contribution and hell, even the worst game of the year has a redeeming feature in the form of its RZA-curated hip-hop soundtrack.
So here’s hoping 2016 provides us with more soundtracks to remember, the benchmark to beat is probably still going to be this though…