Wow, the flutter on this tape deck is awf...wait, that's a digital recording?? Yeah, I had some fun with the vibrato effects in Turbosound FM (old tracker by shiru that mostly became subsumed by VGM Music Maker).
The first time I played skyroads I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old. I was spending a little bit of time at my dad's work and got the opportunity to play it on his computer, and it captured my mind for a very long time, despite not actually remembering what the game was called. It was easy to understand, actually quite difficult to master, and very visually compelling with its early-3D (think flat-shaded polygons) aesthetic. It took me a very long time to discover the game, and I stumbled across it half-accidentlally, when I learned about the freeware clone game Tasty Static, and learned it was inspired by Skyroads. This would have probably been around 1997 or so.
When I finally learned this, I got back into playing it, and it was of course just as fun as I remembered. And for the first time I got to hear the music! It was pretty catchy, an interesting mix of somber and electrifying.
The game is freeware, and so is its soundtrack, including, importantly, the original Amiga oktalyzer modules that formed the basis of the game, which meant I had access to, effectively, the original score defining the music. It was thus fairly easy to port the track over to the tracker that I was using, and since the percussion used in these modules sounded a lot like percussion that the Yamaha FM chips of the day could render pretty effectively (I had an old PSR keyboard with percussion loops that sounded like these) I figured I could get something that sounded like the original, but cleaner. I decided to go a little farther, and up the intensity. The bass is significantly thumpier.
This is song 3 of the soundtrack; stages didn't have specific tracks, but each time you switched stages the game would play one of the 8 'road' songs, in sequence. So the third time you played a stage from the menu you would hear this song.
The track dates back to around 2009 or so, right in the middle of undergrad, probably when I was a junior, so it's actually one of the oldest tracks I have in my collection. I'm quite impressed at the quality of the percussion, in retrospect, since it can be hard to get good, intense FM drums, and TFM didn't support the PCM DAC on the 2612 (since it technically wasn't a 2612 tracker but a 2203 -- the FM expansion chip used in the Atari ST).