The Greatest Video Game Songs of All Time July 30, 2012

A video game is more than just a collection of action and story sequences, it’s a complete package that includes everything down to the sound effect of the footsteps. Music is an important part of that experience. The right music can take a moment and make it all the more powerful, and heard on its own, it can trigger the memory of the exact moment you heard it when you played the game.

With all that in mind I’m going to list what I think are the greatest video game songs of all time. But here’s the catch. I’m not counting any orchestral scores. Yes, I know that in plenty of cases orchestral scores are absolutely fantastic, but I’m going to save that for a different time. So that means that this list will only count original songs that were licensed specifically for individual games.

For the first one, I’m going to pick what is probably going to be the most obvious. It is at the top of pretty much everyone’s list for many reasons. It was the perfect melding of a video game song with an original artist, which both served to entertain at the completion of the game, as well as continue the story of the game after it’s completion.

I’m talking about what was probably the greatest song of 2007, from Portal, this is “Still Alive” by Jonathan Coulton.

Next I’m going to bring up (in as chronological an order as I can make it) the song that probably was the inspiration for this list.

You hear characters singing and performing parts of this song throughout the entire game. It’s almost as if during the course of the game’s timeframe the song is an extremely popular radio hit inside the game’s world. Everyone, from the janitor cleaning the walls to highly trained assassins have the song stuck in their heads. Finally, as the game’s conclusion rolls, the song starts to play in its entirety during the credits and we’ve come full circle.

From Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, this is “The Late Goodbye” by Poets of the Fall.

However this would not be the last time that a 3D Realms produced game would have a rocking licensed track to close their game. In 2006, they were producing a game in development by an outside studio that would revive a franchise that they had long since cancelled. In the end of the game, he was able to save his home planet but not his girl. I can’t think of a better song to wrap up the game’s story of and heritage, heartbreak and finally triumph.

From Prey, this is After Midnight Project with “Take Me Home”.

Backtracking a bit (hey, I only said I was going to TRY to be chronological) I want to talk a bit about a classic PC game that still holds up even today, and the main theme that was made specifically for it. I first became aware of it when I saw it performed on the Video Games Live Tour Level 2 Blu-Ray Disc as the song has long been a staple of the tour. Six years later the song actually won a Grammy. Why did it take that long? Because the awards organization does not consider a song produced for a video game, it only became eligible for consideration when the artist released it to CD.

From Civilization IV, here is the Grammy Award Winning song “Baba Yetu” by Christopher Tin.

In 2008 a new kind of game hit the PC and consoles by EA. It changed up the formula in a way that we hadn’t seen in gameplay before. You were playing as a freerunning courier with the ability to race across rooftops. With the game’s unique art style and gameplay, the tune was quite unique to the video game space, but it worked wonderfully as a main theme, and they did a pretty interesting music video for it as well.

From Mirror’s Edge, here’s “Still Alive” by Lisa Mikovsky.

And now we’re going to come full circle. In 2010 a video game came out that made probably some of the best use of licensed tracks that year. While they did have a lot of classic tracks like “Space Oddity” and “Coconut”, those were songs that have been around a long time. No, there were several unique tracks made by a band we have long been familiar with. This particular song would quickly become part of the band’s next album, so it is possible that the song may not have been made uniquely for the game, but seriously, you just can’t watch the song’s official music video and not see the game’s impact.

From Alan Wake, this is Poets of the Fall (again) with “War”.