The GTA 5 soundtrack release and my favourite in-game music

Earlier this month, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 became the first video game to rake in sales worth US $1 billion in the first couple of days of its release. This is also the only title in the GTA franchise to have an original soundtrack, which comes bundled with 2 CDs of licensed music. The album became available for purchase on iTunes earlier this week, and, looking at the list of artists featured, is likely to sell very well.

GTA 5

Not that I’m not a fan of GTA, but I think Halo soundtracks deserve the same kind of fandom. Especially the Halo 4 one, which, spanning 2 hours 30 minutes, is undoubtedly one of the most hypnotic, trance-inducing pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I want to cry and laugh and kill someone and fall asleep all at the same time listening to that soundtrack. Which, ironically, is what GTA is all about.

But why stop at Halo? There’re at least 4 other games I can think of whose soundtracks I am a huge fan of, probably more than the games themselves. They’re spread out over a period of 20 years and span widely different genres, but they’re united by one common, binding denominator: they’re all phenomenal works of music.

Here they are:

Bareknuckle (also known as ‘Streets of Rage’): Fans remember the title track from this chiptune masterpiece, composed by Japanese film composer Yuzo Koshiro, as resembling ‘Sadness’ by Enigma. It’s truly miraculous how Koshiro created such subtle varieties with sounds, synths and rhythms in 1990 out of nothing but those wonky chiptune machines. The music is downright funky, dangerously groovy, and has some amazing rhythm syncopations interspersed with deep bass lines and suave chill. It’s safe to say that with this album Koshiro lays the foundation for all contemporary dub, progressive house and psytrance. Maybe not, but it does sound a lot like a mix of all of these.

Streets of rage

3 Eyes Boy: Adapted from the popular romance manga of the same name (of which, too, I used to be a big fan), this is, when I think about it now, one of the more tripped out games I’ve owned as a kid. It has naked gypsies running around, meditating monkeys throwing bananas like boomerangs, levitating masks floating left and right, and you as a bald, angry boy shooting arrows from your third eye. And the music – buoyant, bouncy 8-bit melodies looped with screechy, wobbly Skrillex-like sound effects – take the trip to another level. A trip I used to enjoy even as a small kid.

3 eyes boy 

Heavenly Sword: The British-Indian musician Nitin Sawhney composed the soundtrack to this 2007 Ninja Theory game, published by Sony Entertainment for the PlayStation 3. Sawhney, a prolific film composer, produces a rousing operatic score of stunning rhythmic intensity. The ethereal far-East flavoured flute and guitar pieces lend a new dimension to the fictional world that the game depicts. The 24 tracks flow into each other seamlessly to create a magical 2-hour listening experience.

Heavenly sword

Heavy Rain: This game has a gloomy plotline – a man in search of his lost son comes across a police officer, a detective and a prostitute over a string of rainy days and finds out they’re all somehow involved in his son’s mysterious disappearance. And the music couldn’t complement it better. Composed by the late Normand Corbell (who won a BAFTA for it), the songs are dark, melancholic and emotional, played on a very minimal arrangement of the piano, violins and double bass. In the end when the son is found, the music is so intense the father’s triumph is literally palpable.

Heavy rain

So, as I wait for my copy of the GTA 5 soundtrack to download – which, by the way, I’m going to love considering it features music by Tangerine Dream, Neon Indian, Yeasayer and Simple Minds among other artistes – I would like for you to list some of your favourite game soundtracks from over the years.

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Reposted from the Berklee Intermediaries blog. 

International cassette store day

The Saturday before last, September 7, was International Cassette Store Day. It’s when record labels in major cities around the world get together with local music stores and display their collection of old, rare tapes. Like vinyl collectors, there’s also a large bunch of people that collect tapes. While some people are wildly enthusiastic about it, others fear that this regressive trend might end us up back in the Stone Age. 

Me… I don’t really much care about the difference in album art quality between tape and vinyl, or the plastic-y feel of cassettes versus the tusk-like smoothness of the vinyl. I’m just a regular person with an iPod that has a 60-hour battery life, which enables him to listen to decent-quality music for a large number of hours. That, right there, makes me happy. There should be a day for that too. Well, there is… they call it ‘every day.’

So, these music stores, back in the day they were everywhere. There was a small one on the ground floor of my apartment building. Most of my collection, the maestros of the era – Boyzone and Michael Learns To Rock – has been acquired from there.

This store, Music Mania, did good business through the 90s, until CDs got affordable and CD players replaced cassette decks. With time, everyone we knew had one… except the owner of Music Mania. He turned out to be a cassette geek and refused to throw tapes out and get CDs. Within a couple of years the store went under and the owner shut shop.

On its last day of operation I went there to have a last browse. They were packing up and putting stuff in boxes. I walked over to the rack that held all my favourite music. The owner came and stood next to me, saying, “Take all the tapes you want. Won’t be needing these anymore.”

I have never left a music store with 48 cassettes. Without having paid for the plastic bag even. The tapes all stuffed into it, I scampered out of there for fear that the guy would change his mind. Luckily he didn’t, but a lot of passers-by sure did give me weird looks.

I went back home, grabbed an old Walkman and threw on one tape after another. My now modest collection sat right by my dad’s, on the cabinet above the TV, perfectly in view for any guest that came in, just as my dad liked it.

That evening, totally unexpectedly, the love of my life sauntered into my living room like a fairy at a half past ten.

This girl, my next-door neighbour, had been my love interest for 5 years running. How exactly I fell in love with her I know not, for it happened sometime during the other 5 years of my life. For a 10 year old, I was precocious in matters of love. And I would prove it to her tonight.

It was her birthday and she had had to spend the entire day at her grandparents’. We’ve all been 10, and a 10-year-old needs a house party with cake and school friends to wind down from a hard day. But she hadn’t got one. It was time to swoop in. I asked her to meet me on the terrace in 10 minutes.

I gathered all my tapes and ran upstairs with my Walkman. She came 30 minutes later, saying her mum had forced her to eat dinner. Then I took her to the edge of the parapet, and we sat down, watching the city skyline in silence. I handed her one end of the earphone and put the other in my ear, and pressed the play button.

“We got a little world of our own, I tell you things that no one else knows,

I let you be where no one else goes, what am I doing without you.”

It was her favourite song of the time, ‘World Of Our Own’ by Westlife. The song ended, and for a moment she didn’t know how to react. Then, smiling – and surprising both herself and me – she leaned forward and gave me a hug. Honestly, I was both ecstatic and crushed. I’d hoped it would be a kiss. But what the hell.

I reached into my bag and put all my cassettes in front of her. I told her about my recent acquisition and that she could have half of it as a gift from me… any 24 she liked. Over the next 10 minutes we sifted through the tapes, and she chose just the ones I liked best.

I wished her a happy birthday and we called it a night. I came back home a happy boy… well, man.

It was the 7th of September, known today as International Cassette Store Day.

And if I were ever to miss tapes, this would be the reason why. 

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Wrote this short last week for the Berklee Intermediaries blog. 

All characters, incidents and everything else mentioned in the story is purely fictional and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. No, really.