Music from Games: 5. Barber’s Adagio For Strings

This is the last in my current short series of Music from Games, and for me the most powerful.

The game in question was the 1999 PC strategy game, Homeworld. The situation is that you are commanding a huge starship, and guiding various smaller ships to accomplish missions. The fist couple of missions are to get used to the controls, harvest some resources, and then test your jump drive by going to a prearranged point where one of your ships has been travelling ahead of time to meet you. When you get there, you find it has been destroyed, and an ambush is waiting for you. You rush back to your home planet to find it under attack… on fire… all life extinguished.

The music accompanying this scene is a choral arrangement (known as ‘Agnus Dei’) of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

I couldn’t imagine a more apt use of this music, nor any moment in a game that could be more poignant.

The string version too is beautiful and emotionally powerful, but for me the choral arrangement will remain for a long time the most heartbreakingly beautiful piece of music in a computer game. It was also used in the film Platoon in 1986, which I didn’t see until several years later, but again the music is just as moving in that film.