Gaming's Most Bizarre Soundtracks Of All Time
The rare occasions when video games come out with soundtracks that are undeniable masterpieces, that's either because of unexpected turns of fate or because the composers were seemingly taking a lot of inspiration from pre-existing masterpieces. Mediocre video game soundtracks are relatively common, but soundtracks so bad they'll make you feel they could only have been the result of some troll uploading fake music on youtube are just as rare as the top-level stuff.
The very first known instance in video game history of a soundtrack too bad to be believed is that of CrazyBus. It seems to have been inspired by that time when all of the composer's 56 phones went off at once, but it's actually the result of the game's developers not being deterred from making a soundtrack despite not knowing the first thing about music.
Then there's a classic. Who doesn't love the awesome main title from DOOM? Cool, then perhaps you'd like to know that DOOM's Sega Genesis 32x port seems to have a rendition of the theme played by an orchestra where all of the instruments are butts.
Then there's the soundtrack for Resident Evil Director's Cut, which sounds incomparably to the soundtrack for the original version of the game.
This, uh, sound, has an equally beautiful story behind it. Capcom decided to hire Mamoru Samuragochi, a legendary deaf composer to do the score. Please don't jump to the conclusion that this is the only possible outcome when you get a deaf guy to make your music – turns out Samuragochi wasn't really deaf… nor the guy making the good music he was known for. He'd been using a ghostwriter all along, or at least for all of his non Resident Evil-related work.
The composer of PS2's Evergrace was happy with the music's quality, but seemingly not with its quantity, so every song in the OST feels like 3 unrelated tracks played at the same time.
Deadly Premonition's title soundtrack is just a guy casually stroking at a guitar and the lyrics are equally elaborate, some times they go “la la la”, but then they hit you with a “lalala la la” out of nowhere. Riveting stuff.
When it comes to bizarre soundtracks, nothing can beat the bizarreness of a terrible game that somehow pulls off a glorious soundtrack. Back in the early ‘90s, a visionary by the name of Randy Scott thought he should port the megahit DOOM for the very promising 3DO console. There was one problem, though: Randy had thought that making a game work on a completely different platform would only have required copying and pasting the files, so the surprise here isn't that he ended up creating the worst DOOM port of all time – it's that he ended up creating a working game at all. 3DO's DOOM did, however, feature the best rendition of the DOOM soundtrack of its time.
At least if you don't count Metallica's original version.
Top Image: Bethesda
