Soundtrack Sunday
Welcome to Soundtrack Sunday, where a member of the PC Gamer team takes a look at a soundtrack from one of their favourite games—or a broader look at videogame music as a whole—offering their thoughts or asking for yours!
I was born to do one thing in this life, and that’s to incessantly annoy everyone around me with my earworm flavour of the month. You know, those song soundbites that involuntarily bury into your brain before vomiting their way out of your mouth for hours, days, or even weeks on end.
Phil Savage
Just for the sheer number of songs lodged permanently in my head, Frank Klepacki is the master. The industrial heavy Command & Conquer soundtracks are laser targeted to my tastes—I’ve had regular Hell March flashbacks for almost 30 years. But even the weird stuff sticks around: the West Coast hip-hop riff of C&C Thang; the butt rock adjacent Just Do it Up; and of course the bit in Target where a guy just repeats “I’m a mechanical man” over and over again.
Almost all of us will experience an earworm at some point in our lives, and there’s a good chance at least one of them will be a song from a videogame. I mean, next to regular ol’ music, videogame soundtracks are some of the stuff we’ll listen to the most. Hell, I’ll go days or weeks where I’m almost exclusively hearing game music—it makes for great relaxation/working playlists—so I’m bound to pick up a MIDI melody or two.
While the song my brain latches onto switches out on the reg, the one that by far makes the most regular appearance is Persona 5’s Beneath the Mask. Something about the way Lyn sings that song is ripe for sticking with me for extended periods of time—maybe the gentleness of it, or the sheer exposure I’ve had to it through my many playthroughs of that game.
It especially loves to linger in the noggin when the weather outside gets a little gloomy. I think my brain associates real-life rain with the dreary days spent in Leblanc Café, and Shoji Meguro’s penning of a more delicate version to reflect the wet weather. At this point I’ve practically trained myself to whack that song on every time a grey cloud threatens to dampen the world outside my window.
Watch On
But what makes a song catchy and delightfully (or frustratingly) earwormable is different for everyone. So what is that one videogame song that always gets stuck in your head? Are you guilty of walking around your home belting out “SNAAAKE EEAAATERRR” unprompted, or have the first few notes of Megalovania lived rent-free in your head for years despite never having touched Undertale?
Let us know what videogame song always gets stuck in your head and be sure to tell us why.
Read the full article here
