Reading these items, you may notice a similarity between the pieces that I’ve picked – they are all very sad pieces.
I love music from many other games as well, from atmospheric (UFO Enemy Unknown, Bejeweled 2), themed (Outlaws), Powerful (World of Warcraft series), Energising (Speedball 2, Bejeweled 2 again), and many more, which include the upbeat and major.
The pieces that have really moved me, and have kept with me and formed part of my musical being, they would seem to be the beautiful yet sorrowful ones. One day I hope to work out what this actually means!
I hope later also to write a series on emotion in games. It’s hard to believe that there are still people who aren’t ready to accept games as an art form!
Feel free to reply and comment with suggestions of your own favourite musical moments from games (and suggestions to check out!) if you have them! Thanks for reading!
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That reminds me of one of my favourite game tunes from the past. Shadow of the Beast had a wonderfully sad, haunting sound, using an ‘instrument’ sound close to pan pipes as I remember it.
Although I also have strangely fond memories of playing the original arcade version of Splatterhouse with its background tune that used the classic guitar riff from Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’. Rock on dude!
Oh … and my all-time favourite … Xenon 2 Megablast … awesome game tune, but I seem to remember that the Bitmap Brothers neglected to license it.
Indeed, awesome Bomb The Bass track (with the bassline from Assault On Precint 13)… the Wikipedia article on Xenon 2 lists the BB’s as having worked with Tim Simenon… a.k.a. Bomb The Bass… so maybe the licensing wasn’t as murky as rumoured!
Where do I start? There have been so many great soundtracks over the years that bring back fond memories; I’ll list a couple that still inspire me
The original C&C from 1995 totally blew me away when I first played the game. I loved the combination of heavy industrial guitar with electric synth and then switching to the more eerie slower tracks. This mix of songs in the game just seemed to fit so well and has definitely created a legacy in the C&C series.
Check out http://www.frankklepacki.com/ he did the music for Dune II back in 91 and then progressed to do a few of the C&C soundtracks (Before EA bought out Westwood Studios) he’s a really nice buy btw and I was well chuffed when he personally responded to a few questions I asked him many years ago.
A few personal favourites would be: “Prepare for battle” which as the name suggests had an epic build up before the guitar kicks in and “Full Stop” which I always played when in the midst of battle (Warning: These tracks contain Heavy Synth/Guitar so don’t have your headphones/speakers too loud
). If you go to the above link he has a player on his site that has most of the music he has done including the tracks above 
Just to mix it up from the heavier stuff I posted above another classic favourite of mine was the original Diablo theme from Tristram the starting town. The song is so moving and inspiring yet fitting to the plight of the town. I Love the acoustic guitar sound (12 string I presume?) and can sit and listen to this track for hours.
The track can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8