How's about I do a thread of weird MP3s I have kicking around my HDD? I actually lost a bunch of these and was really stressed out when it happened, because they're hard to find. I recovered some of them recently, however, so may as well spread them out here, too.

Let's open with this: the song "Oh Angel" from the dub of Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture. It's an incredibly cheesy, goofy song, and for that reason it holds a special place in my heart. What's notable about this version is that every MP3 I've ever found on the internet was a very old mono recording. This one is stereo, courtesy of Discotek Media's bluray remaster from a few years ago. I recorded this myself from a streaming version, so it's possible that if/when I get the actual bluray, I can grab an even higher quality version.

Man. If I include images with every single one of these it's going to make a very large-feeling post.

Anyway! My primary experience with Phantasy Star Online was playing a pirated version of PSO Version 2 on PC with my friends. It was a "rip" version, which was a term to denote versions that were stripped down to their bare essentials. Usually that meant removing things like full motion video and digital audio (recorded music, etc.) and maybe even recompressing assets to make them even smaller (and thus, easier to download for people who may still be on 56k dialup). For example, a "rip" version of GTA3 deleted the entire radio system and dropped all the voiced dialog to 8khz, squashing the game down to be under 300mb.

For the rip version of PSOv2, it replaced all of the music with blank files -- which were just WAVs, if you can believe it. But that meant once the game was installed, I could use a regular ol' WAV editor (Goldwave being my choice) to customize and replace the soundtrack with whatever I wanted. What I replaced with what could be its own entire thread, but long story short, I happened upon this frankly amazing remix of the Pioneer 2 music and decided to use that for... well, Pioneer 2 (though I trimmed out the bongo drum intro).

To this day the original Pioneer 2 song sounds strange and bizarre to me, because this is my Pioneer 2. I heard this remix on loop for hundreds of hours and never got sick of it.

Sega Vintage Collection: ToeJam & Earl for Xbox Live arcade contained a brand new song on the game selection menu. Unlike some of Sega's efforts to make new Genesis-style music, this sounded so authentic that I didn't even realize it was a new composition until I ended up looking at the actual TJ&E soundtracks later on. I believe there were two new menu themes, one for both the first and second games, but I only have this one on me right now, which I think was for the first game.

No idea who the composer even was. I'm not sure it was listed anywhere.

e: For the future posterity of this thread, @Beancatte has pointed out a composer known as Chibi-Tech is possibly the culprit here.

e2: @phatscout confirmed on Twitter that yes, Chibi-Tech is the composer here, and there's even an album that came out recently featuring these songs!

(Also looks like there's a bug right now where replies aren't retaining audio metadata.)

The intro videos to the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine demo discs were legendary. They contained no dialog and were usually only a few seconds long, but you always looked forward to each one. The closest thing they ever had to a character was the "space hot rod," which appeared across a selection of different videos, flying through futuristic cities and competing in drag races.

The very first one holds a special place in my heart -- showcasing the "launch" of the space hot rod. A platform raises out of some industrial machinery, loading the car in to a launch bay where it blasts off into the unknown. The song that played during this, and over the demo disc's entire game selection menu, was some really generic rock & roll riff, seen here, but it holds a special nostalgic place in my heart.

OPM eventually "killed off" the space hot rod in the lamest possible way. Shortly before the launch of the Playstation 2, one of the demo disc intro videos depicted the car picking a fight with a train, nudging and tailgating it. The train then reveals a huge set of rocket boosters, blasting through the hot rod and turning it to shrapnel.

Never did like that.

As you can imagine, there aren't tons of MP3s of this song floating around out there. I had to rip this one myself.

This is one of those songs I downloaded way back in the days of Napster and Kazaa and it has somehow survived in to my current music collection. This is tagged to a band called "The Darwins" but the name is generic enough that searching them nowadays returns absolutely no results outside of a ZeldaUniverse.net post about this song from 2005. For all I know, I could be one of the last dozen people on earth with this in their possession.

This song has been kind of a crummy earworm for me for a long time. In an upcoming video, I reference a specific line of dialog from the original Legend of Zelda, when in truth, I'm actually referencing the opening lyric of this song. I forced myself to double check that "the secret is in the tree at the dead end" was actual text in Zelda 1 (it is!)

I've always been jealous of people who just seem to be able to pick up and start making music out of the blue despite not really having any musical inclinations beforehand. Such was the case with an old friend of mine, Malcolm Brown, who just started putting original music into his games when we were teenagers like it was nothing.

Here's an early work of his -- he took a bunch of Sonic Adventure sounds I'd ripped (back when that was very difficult to do) and made a little song out of them. When my main music library was lost in a HDD crash a couple years ago, this was one of the first songs I was worried about losing. I just think it's neat.