How a Cool Video Game Sounded in 1988

Does everyone suffer from the strange syndrome in which the duration of a memory has little correlation to the significance of the event that caused it? I’ll assume everyone does. I would rather that I’m not the only one whose memory works like an unsorted junk drawer. So, then, just this week that weird memory thing that we all suffer from put into my head some video game music that I hadn’t heard since the late 80s. Here, you put it in your head now:

It’s from Wizards & Warriors II, a game that I completed but which never really grabbed me like your Marios and your Mega Mans. In fact, only re-examining it now do I realized that it was developed by the crew that would eventually make the Donkey Kong Country games, which I loved. It’s the same composer, in fact, and I feel like you can hear some similarities with this opening ditty and some of the tracks from those Donkey Kong games, which often sounded somehow more epic and less cartoony than a game about banana-grabbing simians should have merited.

I lack the musical know-how to state whether this track exhibits a higher-level of compositional quality than most video game music and therefore that is why I remember it, but it nonetheless starts playing in my head every three or four years or so. I wonder how long this will continue.

At least I’m not the only one who remembered it. Dana Harris, a composer, reworked it with updated technology to give it an older sound.

In the second version, it occasionally sounds like Prokofiev’s “Montagues and Capulets,” no?

Sudden bursts of video game music nostalgia, previously:

• The Glittering Futuristic Skyline of 1988
• Pixelated Stars on a Six-Zero Sky
• The Pixies and the War on Drugs
• Ric Ocasek Gave Me the Chills in the Weirdest Possible Way

Chariots of Kong

Worth noting: The composer of the Donkey Kong Country games owes a debt to to Vangelis’s “Antarctica,” at least for Donkey Kong Country 2’s Arctic Abyss stage. Compare:

If not for the sonic similarity, then that each were created to soundtrack beautiful, frozen lands.