Top Gaming Soundtracks
When gaming meets music; magic happens. This crossover between two cultures resonates long after you put the controller down.
Here are five of the best adrenaline fuelled, fist pumping soundtracks to rock your freakin’ socks off.
Need for Speed Underground. (PC, PS2, XBOX 2003)
Barroom doom doom dum da dum da dadoom. If you were in the suburbs in 2003 and heard a white guy singing this it was a safe bet they had just finished a session of NFSU.
Whether you were getting low with Lil Jon or asking for no quarter with Fuel this game’s soundtrack was the ‘nit. There’s nothing quite like tearing down the home straight to Rob Zombie’s Two Lane Blacktop as you launch over the checkered line in first place. Pwoar! Someone give me a smoke.
Now I could be wrong about this but I’m 99% sure that Skeet is some kind of winter sport.
GTA San Andreas (PC, PS2, XBOX 2004)
Who didn’t love cruising around San Andreas tuning in K-DST and hearing DJ Tommy Smith aka Axl Rose drive you home; and Radio X’s Sage sounded sexy too.
You stole, you murdered, you Grand Theft Auto’d to the sounds of wailing guitars and big hair metal.
Never has running over old ladies and punching hookers sounded so good. And the game ain’t bad either. Aaayeoooh!
Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX (PS, PC 2000)
Now I can’t Freestyle BMX , but if I could, it would sound like this.
Sublime’s, ‘What I Got’ sums up a generation. A time when you could grind and superman your way to freestyle heaven and the only thing you’d scrape were the tips of your thumbs. Bliss.
Apocalypse (PS 1998)
1998 was the year of the Bruce Willis/Ben Affleck gangbuster, Armageddon. It was also the year of similarly themed/named, Neversoft / Bruce Willis Playstation game Apocalypse.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived home from the video store to find that I would not be wooing Liv Tyler and saving the Earth but instead blasting my way through the Four Horseman…and saving the Earth.
Playstation’s Apocalypse was good for two reasons. Bruce Willis and the music. The game features live-action music videos from System of a Down and Poe that appear on gigantic futuristic billboards. Some years later SOAD went on to become the hottest band in the world. Was this because of 1998′s Apocalypse? Probably not. But it still rocked. Yipeekayay motherf#cker. Okay, now I’m really confused.
Rock N Roll Racing. (SNES 1993)
Olaf, slams into first!
I have to say this was one of my first loves. A lot of my childhood was spent hotting up my futuristic hovercraft, firing missiles and dodging mines to the sound of Black Sabbath, George Thorogood and Steppenwolf. I had no idea who they were at the time but gee they sounded great.
The guys behind RNRR, Silicon & Synapse went on to form a little know production house called Blizzard. Never heard of them myself but I hear they do good things.
Honourable mentions: Fifa (Every song you hear on the radio BEFORE it’s on the radio) Mario Bros (Doop doo doop doo doo doo doo) Command & Conquer (I’m a Mechanical Man) Diablo (The guitar & whistle in Tristram get me every time. Strum. Strum. Woooooooooooooooooo)
So that raps things up. (See what I did there.) There have been some truly inspired soundtracks in gaming. These are some of my faves. What’s yours?
