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you got game (music) #2


Picture the scene if you will...

It's the early 90's, precise year unclear but possibly 1992? A young boy comes home from school to find that most special of surprises awaits him but not all is as it seems. For you see said boy was indeed myself, and the gift in question was a machine that could play video games but there was a catch... Was it the Nintendo Entertainment System I hear you ask? A Game Boy perhaps? A Sega Mega Drive? A Jaguar even? No my friends it was none of those, for you see I grew up in a family that was not flush with cash so I had to make do with what I got.

What I got was a hand-me-down Amstrad CPC 464. 

Now the full story of this feels like a tale for another time, which feels strangely appropriate as the machine itself felt like it was of another time even all the way back then. Chunky monitor, blocky keyboard, built-in cassette player. That would be the cassette player for the games that came on cassette mind you. Games that required you to wait five to ten minutes to load in before you could play them no less. To say I had mixed feelings about this machine at the time would be something of an understatement but looking back, I do feel a certain nostalgia for it's many foibles. Which is to say it definitely has its moments.

Which brings me to the subject of this entry, the 1988 video game adaptation of one of the finest films of our time, Robocop. More specifically the version of this game ported to the 8-bit home computer generation of the time. Even more specifically this brings me to the soundtrack of said ports, composed by prolific videogame composer Jonathan Dunn. It's a soundtrack that has since taken on something of an iconic status in the years since and as someone who played it at the time, I'm inclined to agree.

There's the iconic intro theme I've linked into above which makes full and inventive use of the limited sound hardware of the time. Listening back to this in 2023, it certainly sounds like it would slot right into the chiptune renaissance of recent years. It's a quality piece of game music that has stood the test of time and still gets infrequent shout outs from those who shout out about classic video game music, see a recent episode of the Get Played podcast for an example of this.. Incidentally when searching for the above track I came across the slightly richer version done for the Game Boy port and it's still a winner!

Good as it is, another standout effort here would eclipse it for me and would remain lodged in my brain for all time. Outside of the Super Mario Bros theme tune, I can't think of any other examples of video game music making such an impression on me as this track did. To this day I remain entirely at one with it whenever I bring it up on Youtube for a listen. Here I refer to the track that plays over the first level of the game, a catchy composition that I feel doesn't get all the recognition it deserves...


A mechanical beat with a catchy rhythm and a hint of the tragic about it. Yeah this is the good stuff for me as far as video game music goes. I genuinely feel it punches well above it's weight given the technological limits of the time, not to mention the low expectations one might associate with video game tie-ins. This one stuck out to me as a young gamer and even now I feel like it does a lot with a little, a masterful economy of sound if you will.  So yeah props to you Jonathan Dunn and the Robocop video game soundtrack of 1988, I salute you!

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