8-bit era soundtracks
 

My brother and I were talking about older video game soundtracks, and he feels that a lot of early soundtracks could get away with dinny and discordant messes, but the true standout soundtracks in the early days had to stand solely on the strength of their compositions because of technological limitations. I thought about it for a while and figured that he was probably right. Games like Crystalis, the NES Final Fantasies, and to a lesser extent, the Dragon Quest series all have memorable tunes here and there that still get stuck in my head.

Not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but what were some of the "standout" 8-bit era soundtracks for you?

I guess this would apply to Gameboy songs as well, which could be interesting to me since I usually mute Gameboy games when I play them.

I would have to say Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, Sky Shark and you can't forget Konami's Contra and uhh.. the mother of all NES songs/soundtrack.. Super Mario Bros.

Megaman 2. I don't know if you've heard of the band the Minibosses, but they do a medley of the tunes in Megaman 2. It's not a game I'm good at but my brother has played through this game many times and the music I like. All the tunes I can hum along to.

I've never had an NES, so I don't know a lot about these old 8-bit NES-soundtracks. But I've had an GB and I must say I liked a lot of these old stuff (and I still like) so I would like to mention the music from:
-DuckTales I & II
-Tiny Toons I & II
-Seiken Densetsu
-Kirby's Dreamland I & II
-Donkey Kong Land I

-The first VGM track I felt in love with was Alfred Chicken's Boss music (GB version, the SNES version sucks) and I think my favourite GB soundtrack from the games I've played comes from "Trip World". The game itself wasn't that great, because it was much too easy but it have outstanding music and a lot of other things which you don't saw on much GB games (like a lot of animations, great graphics and some graphic effects, something like a movie intro, big sprites etc)

I actually enjoy 8-bit music quite a bit. Indeed, the compositions had to be strong because of the limitations at the time. I think that composing today could also be challenging though.. Just because there's more options doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be easier to create something that people want to hear. The 8-bit era had a sort of forced conformity (which could be challenging in its own way), but the freedom of modern technology could also make things difficult. Just a thought for discussion. =o

The games already mentioned (the ones I know about, anyway) in this thread have great music. Megaman games (Megaman 2, specifically) stand out to me, personally. Minibosses do some nice ROCKIN' renditions of the themes, but nothing really beats the originals. Kirby's Adventure also had some awesome catchy tunes.

old GameBoy got a 4-Bit sound processor, making it even more limited. So you'll won't get that many good songs on GameBoy except the classical Kirby, Mario ect stuff (+FPI's list of course) than in comparison to 8 oder 16 bit stuff.

I just read this on wikipedia (translated)

Need to get on that tomorrow. Ew.

some of the best 8-Bit composers are Keiichi Suzuki and Tanaka Hirokazu (Mother, Kirby, Dr.Mario) but there are also some good other out there

Then if ever you played it, you would have missed out on some of the best music GB had to offer in "The Castlevania Adventure" (or was it "Castlevania: The Adventure"?). You actually had to wear headphones to fully appreciate it since it made much use of the left and right channels.

Yeah, fair enough. I don't mean to insinuate that the advent of better quality synths or the inclusion of real instruments has made recent composers lax (not sure if you'd find anyone who would argue that), but for most early composers, I imagine that the compositions were pretty much all they had.

Newer technology broadens a composer's options so that they can fit the score with the game. So, say, a horror game can have a very atmospheric soundtrack that you probably couldn't achieve in the 8-bit era (someone here can probably provide an example that contradicts this. <_<), or the inclusion of a full orchestra could give a game's soundtrack an epic feel. Though, to be fair, epic songs could still be made with 8-bit technology. The instrumental quality just gives it an edge to me in that case.

A nice point about 8-bit era conformity. I'd hesitate to actually call it conformity, though. I do think composing in that era would be challenging because everyone in that period had access to the same basic materials to make their stuff. The challenge comes in creating something unique. I'm guessing that a composer's songs had to have something special and different from everyone else's to make it really stand out back then, or else it'd just be written off as generic 8-bit noise. This problem isn't really present nowadays.

Well, back on track.

I am not sure if this is 8-bits or not, I think it is. However, some of my favorite soundtrack of all time were those sound system impaired video game soundtracks. I really love the music from the SNES system the best. I would say my favorite soundtracks of all time are the Chrono Trigger soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu, the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past by Koji Kondo, Final Fantasy II by Nobuo Uematsu , and the SEcret of Mana soundtrack by Hiroki Kikuta. I love these games and soundtracks. I still have all of the games and the SNES system and play them every once in a while. Great Memories. I can also remember all of the songs and how to hum them about 10 years later. That is a good sign that the soundtrack was good. :)

Sorry, that's 16-bit. 8-bit is stuff like NES, Master System, and Game Boy.

There are a lot of good compositions made for Commodore 64. Although they sound different than NES as most C64 composers are from western countries and most NES composers from Japan.

Here are few good examples:
ACE II
Delta
Ocean Loader 4 (not an ingame music really, it's a loading music of some Ocean's games)
Traz

Oh, and you can play those files with this:
http://www.gsldata.se/c64/spw

Oh well then my favorite 8-bit soundtracks are Super Mario Land and Tetris and Dr. Mario and definitely Zelda and Pokemon all from the Gameboy. Then I like the Mario soundtrack from the NES system.

Stuff not mentioned:
NES
Castlevanias
Wolverine
Pictionary
Solstice
Treasure Master
Silver Surfer
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
Darkwing Duck
Ducktales

C64
Ghouls 'n Ghosts
Gauntlet 3
Bionic Commando

I love listening to NES tunes. Some games that have awesome melodies:

Batman (Stage 1 song was recently in SotW)
Castlevania I, II, & III
Ninja Gaiden

Solstice and Treasure Master (both composed by Tim Follin) also have some really good tunes.

And as for Game Boy games, a few that stood out to me:

Kirby's Dream Land
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land

I love the old ending themes. They all had this "feel good" feel and were generally very catchy. Listening to them immediately brings back lots of memories of good times. :)

Phantasy Star has a few great tunes in it. The Zillion tunes are catchy, and I'm partial to Golvellius and Miracle Warriors.

I've got a few from PS and Zillion posted in this article:
http://videolamer.com/index.php/31
/useful spam

Mega Man Series....nuff said

Although I know Kairyu and a lot of other people on this board do not like it.

Super Mario Bros obviously. The themes become immortal in gamer's mind who play the games in their childhood. Also... tetris?

What? No mention of Fortified Zone for Game Boy?

I guess it's unsurprising (given that FZ was kind of an obscure game), but the game's music was catchy as hell regardless.

These NES games also had good music (in my opinion):

Contra: Hard Corps
GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor
Shatterhand
Xexyz

Mario
Contra

all have memorable music. :D