The Best 10 Game Soundtracks of the 8-Bit Era

It’s easy to take video game music for granted these days. A good score interacts with the players, and soars during cutscenes and gets low and vampy during sneaky bits. The music coming out of modern games is every bit as worthy of awards as film and television scores.

But it wasn’t always that way.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, systems could produce a beep or a boop, but not both, and certainly not simultaneously.

It wasn’t until the Intellivision came along that home game music was even really possible. Still, much of that game music was constrained to introductions, level changes or victories. With a few exceptions, in-game music didn’t really hit until the Commodore 64 came along, and later became firmly entrenched by the powerhouse that was the NES.

Back then, it took guts to be a composer for games. You were limited to between 2 and 4 sounds playing at one time, and forget decent sounding drums — most systems used short, controlled bursts of static for that. But composers adapted, and came up with some great stuff using creative workarounds.

And, man, is there a lot of it. But we’ve done our homework here at Geek6, so you can copy off of it mercilessly in exchange for not giving us a wedgie and shoving us into the tuba locker again.

Keep in mind that this list leaves off some sentimental favorites (there’s no Contra). It’s not about the best games, or even the most fondly-remembered tracks, but the BEST, most artfully produced and memorable music of the 8-bit age.

10. Blaster master (NES):

The music for this NES game is hugely underrated. Each world features a memorable track that either displays the glitz of the world or the danger and grittiness. The reason this narrowly made our Top 10 list, beating out contenders such as Castlevania, was for its sheer variety. Take a smell at this medley:

9. Super Mario Bros. (NES)

When you think of “video game music,” this is likely the first track that comes to mind. This was the game that showcased what the NES could do, and its music holds up well — it’s varied, and, in the case of the water worlds, very thematic. Sing the intro to the game along with us: “Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah, DAH? DAH.”

8. The Last V8 (C64):

You’ve probably never played this game; few people have, and for good reason — it was impossibly hard. But then noteworthly 8-bit musician Rob Hubbard crafted the soundtrack, which maxxed out what the Commodore’s little SID chip could crank out.

7. Snafu (Intellivision)

From hardcore pixel rock to polka, Snafu makes our list because it was one of the first home games to really use multi-channel sound. The game, a basic “box your opponent in” variant of Tron’s light cycles, wasn’t noteworthy, but when the battle got down to two players, the music kicked in, adding a lot more pressure and drama.

6. The Last Ninja (C64)

The Commodore’s SID chip is still in use by chip-hop musicians today, and the Last Ninja showcases why. It’s advanced use of ring modulation allowed creative folks to really get versatile. The Last Ninja is a great example of blending eastern scales with game-style rock and those trademark Commodore “card-shuffling” drums.

5. Robocop (C64)

Despite the Commodore’s inferior graphics and 3 voice sound (the Nintendo had 4 voices) the flexibility of the SID chip can be heard on this jam-worthy track. The biggest challenge — recreating drums — was overcome using staccato triangle waves — a novel approach. The tracks also give the sound of more than 3 simultaneous sounds by shifting between voices rapidly.

4. MegaMan 2 (NES)

There were a lot of MegaMan games. We don’t know how many, more than a dozen, maybe, go look it up; We just used “staccato triangle waves” in a sentence — what have you done today? Anyway, the games’ music was hugely memorable not just for a particular theme, but because of the overall stylistic linkage.

3. Duck Tales (NES)

This one gets us every time. Like most of the world, we’re suckers for any song that has a downward ticking scale as it’s chord structure — it gives it an anthem feel. While the track devolves into repetitive video game blather after a bit, the cool structure makes it memorable and fun to listen to.

2. The Legend of Zelda (NES)

Ranking only slightly behind Super Mario Bros., the Legend of Zelda had a thrumming bit of adventure at its core. Sure, it got repetitive fairly quickly, but it’s fluctuating tones made battling Octorocks all the more cool.

1. Metroid (NES)

Wow. Where do we begin. The soundtrack was programmed by the legendary ‘Hip’ Tanaka, and was hugely different from the other games of the mid 1980s. It was sparse, then full, eerie, then triumphant, and really helped paint the mood of the game. From the tinkly main theme to the cheerful Brinstar anthem, this was the first piece of video game music that you can truly call epic in its scope. To salute you, here’s the traditional rendition of the theme song, and a piano medly, just for your listening pleasure.

What did we miss? Let us know below: