All other commenters are wrong. There is not, nor will there ever be, a greater videogame soundtrack than Katamari Damacy. Fight me.
My favorite track is definitely the Wacky Workbench Past theme. If I ever somehow acquire the tools and knowledge to remix music, that shall be my target. (The Past themes weren’t redbook audio except in the PC port, though.)
And as long as I’m posting here again, I might as well plug Earthbound and 8-Bit Big Band. (These guys deserve orders of magnitude more views.)
Shadow of the Beast, such a good score! Good call!
And there’s the dubstep remixes.
Great little game, just a shame the developer was a complete asshole.
The various scores from jessica curry (dear esther, everybody’s gone to the rapture, amnesia: a machine for pigs) have been great.
I love how they refreshed the classic sonic soundtrack for mania and mixed some of the tunes from various games in the series.
Couple of other obvious choices…
Not to forget that they got Yes to wright a song for the game, which played over the end credits in the original version (the recently released remaster doesn’t include it for reasons of licensing difficulty)
Even Devo made a video game and released an album of it.
And as far as VGM / chiptunes goes I’ve got to go with Sega’s ToeJam & Earl.
This is the correct answer.
I mean, I dig the KD soundtrack, but the thread title’s “some great video game soundtracks”, not “the best video game soundtrack”.
Jet Set Radio (Jet Grind Radio in North America) is the first game in the series.
That is super-cool!
The funky Jelly Defense soundtrack, with its delightfully smoov non-language vocals, is just joyfully silly. Totally addicting.
Another good game if you like a funky soundtrack full of juicy conlang nonsense is Beyond Good and Evil
For me, it begins and ends here:
Every track had a great score.
Edit: Sega Gensis scores in general were magic to me, like the great NES soundtracks but ~deeper~. While Road Rash was king, I loved the music from the original Sonic, Golden Axe II, Ecco the Dolphin, and Chakan: The Forever Man.
Yep. Great call, that had an amazing soundtrack as well.
So did the US release of Crazy Taxi. Made me a Bad Religion fan.
And Re: Game Soundtracks, there is a whole series of game soundtracks that have limited vinyl releases now.
Game soundtracks make up a large portion of my, admittedly meager, vinyl collection. Speaking of which the Panzer Dragoon Saga 20th Anniversary arrangement is fantastic:
I’m here for Katamari too.
Late to the party, but these are some of my favourites: