Here are some songs that are, or could have been, from Video Games.
- "LENTIL2C33MOD 400Hz 23", Rzeczy
This song was produced from an NES sound chip, but doesn't sound anything like an NES because:
- It's got the wavetable channel from the Famicom Disk System;
- The sound chip has been overclocked to make possible synthesis techniques (like audio-rate PWM) a normal NES could have never done
The musician uses these powers to make some sick industrial-feeling… "electro breakcore"? I guess? EDM genre names are gibberish
- "Zone J" (Rescue Rangers), Harumi Fujita (Capcom)
Do you ever think about how there's a basically finite amount of music (only so many combinations of key, chord progression, arrangement), but our attribution/copyright systems assume each piece of music is written only once? So like what if someone wrote the most beautiful piano song ever, but it got stuck in a toothpaste commercial. Or what if one of the greatest electro-pop hooks ever wound up in the final level of an NES game for children and now it's just "retro game music" forever
- "Ultraviolet", gasman
Since discovering Stardust I've been watching a lot of ZX Spectrum demos; it's a neat demo platform because it CAN do near anything, but nothing's easy. This 2017 demo is a charming mix of bracingly earnest and legitimately hype, both in the visuals (which YouTube compression HATES) and the chiptune.
Incidentally, if you know how the ZX works, the still images at the end of the demo are the most technically impressive thing here.
- "Ufouria" title theme (iNES 0.9 glitched version), Naoki Kodaka (Sunsoft)
iNES 0.9 for Mac OS 9¹ had an audio bug that only affected a few games (including "Hebereke", aka "Ufouria") causing the noise and PCM² channels to be very loud and distorted. In my opinion, this improves the music tremendously, giving it a wild industrial/IDM flavor.
Ufouria is one of the very few NES games that got a release in Europe but not North America, so other than emulation there was no way to play it in the USA until 2010. Meaning the first time I played Ufouria it sounded like this, and I didn't know it was a bug. So this is the canonical soundtrack to me.
- "Parallax" loader music, Martin Galway (Sensible Software)
This is My Other Favorite C64 Song, besides Sanxion (composed by The Other C64 Composer Everyone Makes A Big Deal About, besides Rob Hubbard). This track contains no percussion whatsoever and just takes you on an epic 12-minute journey of every sound possible from grinding detuned saw waveforms, ending with a single 2-minute sound I cannot describe and which sounds different in every recording— as far as I can tell this song pushes the SID so hard it actually sounds different on different SID chip revisions.
(This version is actually slightly edited for time to fit an old YouTube time limit, but I think it's an improvement.)