There’s something great about original soundtracks for games and movies. As we find in The Silent Place, a horror film where sound isn’t just for jump scares but a major component for the film’s premise, sound is extremely important for visual works. The soundtrack for Mad Max: Fury Road sets a completely different mood than How to Train your Dragon‘s OST does. Of course, music in film is very precise, stuck to a certain scene for a certain amount of time. If the same song comes up again, it’s typically a theme for a character or an homage to something it’s connected to. For games, music is a little more dynamic as the medium is more dynamic.
You’ll still get character themes, introductions to a theme that will be drawn on later, but you’ll also get repeating tracks for locations and battle. One of the important jobs of the soundtrack in a game is to keep player’s entertained when you’re not doing much, and it doesn’t have to keep you extremely entertained to keep you going.
Imagine it like this: you’re walking down a road. You can see your end point far off in the distance, and you just have to keep walking a straight line until you get there. Maybe someone with their dog will walk by for a moment, or you can watch a car fade into the distance. You’ll still be stuck walking a fairly uninteresting road.
These metaphorical roads exist in plenty of games, but we either miss them or don’t care and that’s large in part to the music. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent running around in Skyrim of the Fallout games doing nothing but running to my next objective because I don’t have a fast travel point near it. Sometimes there are enemies I either fight or run until they stop following me, but it’s a pretty boring walk that would be exceptionally more boring without ambient music or Fallout’s music radios.
Go ahead and listen to the original soundtracks below and listen to how different they sound. If you know the games associated, either replay the game or try to think back on which track is associated with what: background music for an action or if it’s meant to keep your attention when you need a little help.
Video Games Deconstructed 