PC-98 chiptunes and DOS trackers:
- "Theme of Broadway", Einosuke Nagao and BA. M [Tomonori Minami]
"Compile" is/was a scrappy Japanese game company that accidentally hit it huge with "Puyo Puyo". For years they ran a "magazine" called "Disc Station", a monthly-published floppy full of demos and small prototype games. This FM-core song ("BGM 00" in the game files), is from a PC-98 Disc Station cut: "Broadway Legend Ellena", a "PaRappa"-like very early rhythm game about the legend that a girl who wanna get a chance with her DANCE be cool.
- "11 notes on sand", Heatbeat
This is a really fun .mod tracker jam that was uploaded to themodarchive in 1999 (I don't know if it's actually older than that; the only metadata in the file is the address of a P.O. Box in Finland).
Straight up funk music, this is a joyous mix of live-sounding keyboard solos and some silly, strange sample torturing, organ sounds bent so they sound like a PDP-8 is gently singing to you by modulating the speed of its tape reels. I think the first time I listened to this I actually burst out laughing.
- "Chaos Funk", Lizardking
Some extremely earnest chiptune-y (not chiptune, it's a .xm/mod) electro funk music, with an incredibly fun organ solo on the chorus.
This is from the year 2004 and is by Lizardking, an excellent tracker artist. It is hard to decide, listening to this, if you want to be dancing or racing a car through a Playstation 1 cityscape. Please select your vehicle. No stop dancing on the car roof you have to select a vehicle
- "I have found my peace.", One Shot
Think about MODs (or XMs, or ITs). I think we think of these as Old Tech. But they're like, samples, right? And you can do wild sound design with just samples; samples can be anything. Samplers are the basis of some of the most sonically creative music of my lifetime.
Here's a 2023 tracker piece which mangles some violin-synth samples to make ghostly, alien space music. Like you're on a space station and suddenly you realize space is made entirely of ghosts (of aliens). YouTube summary: "3 am vibez :)"
- Stage 1 (Geograph Seal), Hiroyuki Saegusa
In the USA, FM is the sound of early-90s PC gaming, showing up in those fancy SoundBlaster and AdLib cards. In Japanese domestic PCs however the Yamaha chip family that powered those sound cards showed up earlier and in lower-end hardware, and endured later, making it just the sound of PC gaming from the 80s on. (By the time FM faded away, so had the distinction between the Japanese domestic PC market and the international PC market in the first place.)
…So the places Japanese devs took FM were different. Here's a hard-driving FM track from a "Star Fox"-like 3D mecha game from 1994, for the Sharp X68000.
⬇️ Click below for more tracker tunes and Wii elevator music from hell ⬇️