8 tunes from video game soundtracks that sound like club bangers

Video games and dance music have always been linked. In the 1990s, the global mainstreaming of dance music coincided with the popularity of fourth and fifth generation home gaming consoles like the Sega Mega Drive (or ‘Genesis’, as it was known in North America) and Sony PlayStation. This link was most prominently reflected in the soundtracks to the games themselves: Streets of Rage 2 incorporated elements of house and techno into its compositions, Wipeout licensed tracks by Leftfield, the Chemical Brothers, and Orbital, introducing young gamers to rave and big beat sounds long before they were old enough to hear them in an actual club.

The relationship went both ways: the pioneering acid group Phuture sampled the video game Altered Beast on their track “Rise From Your Grave”, while the Japanese artist Soichi Terada was a respected house DJ before he was producing video game soundtracks like Ape Escape. Maybe the formal qualities of dance music just made sense for video games: simple, rhythmic, repetitive, and produced using the most futuristic machine technology on the market.

Nick Dwyer has been archiving the history of video game music with his Diggin’ in the Carts series of podcasts and videos for years now. His latest project is a mixtape with French DJ and record label boss Teki Latex called Teki and Nick’s Mixtape Quest Adventure, which makes explicit links between video game music and modern club sounds. The mixtape blends 73 tracks from popular and lesser-known video game series with contemporary dance music instrumentals and hip hop acapellas. Where else can you hear Final Fantasy, Migos, and DJ Q in one place?

Dwyer first met Teki Latex in 2017 when he was a guest on the Diggin’ in the Carts podcast. This led to a live b2b set at Red Bull festival in Paris the next year, and now their new mix, which was recorded live between the two. Dwyer dug into his archive of 200,000 video game soundtracks for the mix, and there are a number of exclusive instrumental and vocal tracks in there, too, including from Hyperdub’s Kode9 (who previously worked with Dwyer on a Diggin’ in the Carts album), Japanese producer Foodman, UK grime MC Jammz, and dream-pop artist Wednesday Campanella, among others.

Coinciding with the release of Teki and Nick’s Mixtape Quest Adventure, Teki Latex and Nick Dwyer dug through the history of video game music to select a handful of tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place on a club sound system today.

E.fugu, “Final Boss” from Fatal Labyrinth (Sega Mega Drive, 1990)

Nick Dwyer: So ridiculously cold, this one, and easily one of my favourites plucked from the icy, icy depths of the FM-synth-drenched trench of Mega Drive music. Channeling some serious Dopplereffekt cold war nuclear energy, if someone told me that Gerald Donald was behind the mysterious Sega composer alias E.Fugu, I would believe it. Like many have noted over recent years, this whole era of Japanese video game music was awash with Trojan horses, and while we weren’t aware of it when we were eight years old, it’s these ever-so-tough final boss battles that would be preparing us for a future of decades-later Drexciya gun-finger salutes.

Chris Huelsbeck, “The Wall” from Turrican II: The Final Fight (Commodore Amiga, 1991)

Teki Latex: The Amiga classic Turrican II has influenced a lot of musicians in the underground world. There’s even a Mumdance and Logos track called “Turrican 2”. This one particular track is a slow and sexy warm-upper that works pretty well in the middle of a dark Italo-disco or new wave set. It’s slightly gothic, but conveys a feeling of hope and adventure. I remember opening my set with it in the notorious dark/slow disco temple La Dame Noir in Marseille and it went off.

Hitoshi Sakimoto, “Round 3-4” from Super Back to the Future II (Super Nintendo Entertainment System, 1993)

Nick Dwyer: Like every other future Japanese VGM superstar that hit their teens in the early/mid-80s, there were two things that propelled a young Hitoshi Sakimoto in the direction of video game music composition: Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Namco’s Video Game Music album, which featured arranged versions of golden era Namco arcade music and marked the watershed moment that the genre was held up as an artform unto itself. At the centre of both projects was one Haruomi Hosono, whose influence on the evolution of Japanese video game music cannot be understated.

In Sakimoto’s early career, you could hear the influence of Hosono throughout his work – he loved Yellow Magic Orchestra, or ‘YMO’, so much that his early pseudonym was ‘YmoH.S’ – and “Round 3-4”, lifted from the Super Famicom Back to the Future II game, would have fit right in on albums like Philharmony or on YMO’s peak dancefloor electronic eccentricism.

Hiroshi Kawaguchi, “Statts” from Sword of Vermilion (Sega Mega Drive, 1989)

Teki Latex: This track is actually in the mixtape. When Nick sent me this, I remember thinking immediately, “This is like a rap/trap beat that could have come out this year,” with a bit of 16-bit medievalism thrown in there. Sword of Vermilion came out in 1989, and every track from it sounds like a prototype version of grime, or something out of Hudson Mohawke’s discography. I really wish someone sampled or rapped over “Statts”, but in the meantime, I dropped Slim Thug’s verse from “Still Tippin” over it and it worked perfectly.

Yuzo Koshiro, “Spin on the Bridge” from Streets of Rage II (Sega Mega Drive, 1992)

Nick Dwyer: What can be said about this soundtrack and its influence on an entire generation that hasn’t already been said? There’s really only a handful of titles in the history of video games where the soundtrack is more famous than the game itself and, without doubt, this is up there at the top of them. Born out of Yuzo Koshiro and his good friend Motohiro Kawashima’s late night adventures to legendary early 90s Tokyo club Yellow, the duo would spend their nights on the dancefloor soaking up house and techno from Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin, and by day, tirelessly work at authentically recreating the music they were hearing within the confines of the Mega Drive sound chip. 

Although it’s the serious nod to Kevin Saunderson on “Go Straight”, that gets the most attention on this soundtrack, “Spin on the Bridge” is remarkable given the year that it was created and the limitations of the Yamaha YM2612 sound chip. One of the most incredible things I’ve witnessed since the Diggin’ in the Carts project began was Yuzo and Motohiro performing at the Paris Diggin’ in the Carts show – coincidently, where Teki and I laid down the foundations for the mixtape – and this track smashing the place silly. Serious salute to those two, for they are proper Rave Superheroes.

Manabu Namiki, “Underwater Rampart” from Battle Garegga (Arcade, 1996)

Teki Latex: I remember playing this game on an arcade machine in a bar when I was young. It was probably one of the first times I would hear proper rave music at the time. I would spend every summer at my dad’s in small towns in Auvergne back in the day. In these towns back then, bar owners clearly didn’t care about underage kids playing on the arcade machines like they would in, say, Paris or most other places, so I would spend a lot of my days (and all of my cash) playing games in bars. Even as I grew up and stayed in those same bars for pre-club drinks, the arcade machines remained, and the music emanating from them was a part of the background. If you observe it from a sociological, naturalistic point of view, it’s almost like video game music as field recordings.

Hiroshi Okubo, “Lighting Luge” from Rage Racer (Sony PlayStation, 1996)

Nick Dwyer: By the time the mid-90s hit, I was a young teenager living in New Zealand, and I had fallen so fucking absolutely deep into jungle music it was bordering on a sickness. From the age of 15, I worked in various record shops as a jungle/drum & bass buyer, memorising the catalogue numbers of records and taking trainspotting to Olympic levels of dedication. And, like most other teenagers around the world that were getting their heads belted in the best possible ways to the twin explosions of dance culture and the next generation gaming experience, there was nothing more delightful than playing games like Wipeout and hearing some Blue Note-era Photek, or Namco racing games and getting a dose of manic junglism blaring out of the living room TV. 

Yuzo and Motohiro weren’t the only two Japanese video game composers spending their nights at Yellow and other Tokyo nightclubs that were championing cutting edge dance music, and it seems the Namco Sound Team, especially, were hell-bent on bringing the energy of the exploding London-born sound to millions through their titles. This cut from Rage Racer has to be bigged up, as it sounds like it’s ripped right from a ’95 Randall AWOL session.

Tsuyoshi Matsushima, “Rally Mode Theme B” from Puyo Puyo 2 (Sega Saturn, 1994)

Teki Latex: The brutal truth about my life as a gamer is that I suck at video games. I give up super easily after missing a platform twice, I get anxious in every dungeon, I’m incapable of playing a 3D game, I run into walls like a boomer, my absolute incapacity to play Mario Kart is a testimony to why I should never under any circumstance apply to get a driving license, etc. I love the aesthetics, visuals, graphics, and music of video games way more than I like playing the games themselves... with the recent exception of one game, Puyo Puyo. I can play Puyo Puyo with my eyes closed and relatively kick some ass, it’s become second nature to me. I get online during the night to battle korean Puyo players, and I actually win sometimes. This tune from Puyo Puyo 2 on the Sega Saturn is pure retrofuturistic Japonica Y2K funk (I just made that genre up).