How did you discover video game music existed outside of video games?

When I was a kid gaming in the SNES era, the most memorable music for me came from games like Megaman X and Super Metroid. With tunes this good, I think I always knew it just had to exist somewhere. Some years later I stumbled upon some MIDI versions, and while it was good for a while, I still wanted something more authentic.

By then I was really getting into the emulation scene and enjoying games which didn’t get a PAL release (Chrono Trigger), as well as fan translations of SFC titles (Tales of Phantasia, Romancing Saga 3, Dragon Quest VI etc.), and it was brought to my attention that there were more authentic formats like SPC and GYM (Sega Genesis -Phantasy Star IV).

This was mindblowing, but at that stage I didn’t have the knowledge to convert it to burn to a CD, but I found out about original and arranged soundtracks. That hunt led me to the I-Drives of GFA, and VGM in general.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Well, the game music bug bit me when I was very young and used to play with my NES. I especially liked Megaman music, something that still holds true these days.

It was around 1996 that I discovered that game music CDs actually existed. I was reading a game magazine and there were reviews for Squaresoft's latest RPGs, namely Secret of Evermore and Seiken Densetsu 3, and the reviewers commented about how good the music in those games was and how Square used to release the soundtracks to their games.

But it wasn't until I seriously got into the Internet, let's say, around 2001, that I finally put my sweaty hands on the real music. At first I could only find some amateur recordings of some games I liked. However, soon thereafter, there I was looking through some mIRC channels, hunting for games never released in Italy, and I happened to find some game music channels too. I couldn't believe it when I actually found those elusive Final Fantasy and Seiken Densetsu CDs I'd been dreaming about.

Eventually I found out about FTP servers and BitTorrent, and the real leeching began (too bad I have a modem that prevents me from forwarding ports, or I'd have the chance to share some of my collection, not to mention that it prevents me from entering a lot of servers)

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Starting from 1990 (elementary school) and throughout, a video game theme had never left my mind. It left me in a good mood all day for all of grade school. In fact, I have had a video game song in my mind every day of my life so far. It's like a winamp playlist on random. And right now, for no reason whatsoever, "Final Fantasy 8 - 114 Breezy.mp3" is playing in my mind... and I hadn't thought about FF8 all month.

In late high school, year 2000, I started to realize I liked VGM. Very strange that I never knew I liked it even though I had a song in my mind for A DECADE. I started to crave it and had purposely left songs on the video game and just sat there to listen. VGM started to become substantive to my world. Then I found vgmusic.com and downloaded all the MIDI's from all the games I'm familiar with and made that my primary playlist for a year.

But in 2001 I slowly found mp3 soundtracks and started building a collection. Within a short time I found gamingforce and downloaded more. With gamingforce moving to a forum, I heard about vgmcentral -- a hub on the DC++ program that contained people with VGM and is still kicking in 2007. Because of that I tripled my collection.

In the present day, my highest value is gamingforce.com because of the ability to request rips, make rips, share, and talk about the subject. I would be depressed if GFF was down forever because my collection of rips as games come out would halt.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I actually discovered it about nine years ago when I couldn't stop playing SaGa Frontier and pausing it just to hear the music. I wandered into the local import store and saw that they video game music. I promptly bought Seiken Densetsu 2 and SaGa Frontier. From then on, it was history.

How ya doing, buddy?

DISCLAIMER: This was typed out ahead of time and, looking back, is way longer than most posts in this thread will be. Additionally, I think it goes a bit outside the scope of the thread, that being discovery of VGM outside of gaming. What I've provided is effectively my history of interest in VGM, leading up to my discovery of published pressed OSTs. This post is long. Really long. I love sharing my love for VGM with the rest of Gamingforce as it's great to have like-minded people to completely geek out with over this stuff, but if you want to read this, bring plenty of spare time.

Okay. That said, here's the post as I originally wrote it.

God, I fucking love these threads. Memory lane is in the middle of a damn fine neighbourhood.

I remember first really noticing VGM in the Commodore 64 version of "Aliens." The title screen theme and Level 1-Dropship Landing theme were what really caught my ear. I also remember listening to them years and years later (only a couple years ago in fact) and realizing that they were ancient, scratchy-as-fuck chiptunes. But hell, I didn't care. Still don't. That was some catchy shit.

After that came Phantasy Star 3. For some reason, the (overly simplistic now that I look back on it) dungeon theme really stuck with me, and I found myself humming it throughout the day in school, much to the chagrin of the girl sitting next to me. (Thinking back on that, I think she was kinda hot...for a 9 year old. And goddamn I hope the pervy police don't read that sentence out of context).

So anyway, pissing off the classmates by humming PS3 dungeon music later gave way to the brilliant idea of making mixtapes of VGM as it came on. This was, needless to say, an imperfect science at best considering that A. I needed to time my recordings exactly so that they would start with the in-game music and B. it consisted of putting a tape recorder up to the monaural TV speaker in my room. Still, kicked ass for the time. I remember recording a whole damn tape of nothing but "Thray" from Phantasy Star IV by leaving the game at the scene in Molcum where you first meet Rune.

After that it was...I admit it...Final Fantasy 7. Did the same thing with "One Winged Angel" as I did with "Thray" due to the sheer novelty factor of bombastic choir music in a game. (Side note: that wasn't the first time I'd heard it, as to this day "Consumite Furore" of Sierra's 1995 horror game Phantasmagoria remains among my favourite VGM tracks, and it used choirs singing Latin lyrics to much greater, more haunting, and more intelligible effect. MORE INTELLIGIBLE. GODAWFUL LYRICS OF O.W.A. I AM LOOKING AT YOU.) I still remember my vacation with my family up to House on the Rock in Wisconsin. Bored to tears by the car ride and still below driving age, I played my 2-sided OWA tape to myself over and over and over.

Hmm, and I wondered why I can't stand that song/boss/game/franchise anymore. GEE LET ME THINK.

After that I was officially hooked on VGM. I'd do anything in my power to get ahold of it in any way, shape, or form. For a good, solid few months this primarily meant downloading MIDI files from vgmusic.com, playing them on my old IBM PS/2 as it was way too slow to handle MP3 (which I didn't even know existed at the time). I still hit that site up once in while, as some people have done some truly impressive things with MIDI that I wouldn't have thought possible.

The year was 1999. The name of the place...was Babylon *ducks tomatoes*

...Five. *ducks more rotten vegetables*.

Seriously, though, the year was 1999. I was 16. Final Fantasy 8 was released and marked the pinnacle of my now-long-dead-and-buried Squaresoft fandom. I still hold that game's soundtrack in high regard, likely always will. I had just gotten a new computer from my dad. An HP Pavilion--not impressive by any objective means, especially considering the state of HP in the late 90s, but its 466MHz Pentium 2-based Celeron (I know, I know) was a huge step up from the 486 (I assume, I don't even know what that thing was running) and 8MB of RAM in the old PS/2. Best of all was the fact that it had a 10GB hard disk and could run Sonique, which meant...drum roll please...

*drum roll*

Thanks.

Which meant...MP3 TIME!

Conveniently, at just about the same time, I discovered ffnet.net and its then-still-intact MP3 archive replete with the entire FF8 soundtrack, samples from FF9, samples from other games, and more shit I can't even remember. I downloaded and blasted so much of that music while I was closing up shop at night at my first job. Of course, the office had a T1 line and I had shitty 56K at home, in a pre-flash-drive era and with no CD-RW on my work PC and no Zip drive or anything else on my home system. So I wound up sampling the whole OST at work and then downloading the "best of the best" at home when every last kilobyte had to count.

Somewhere around that time I also found this weird site that hosted a bunch of game soundtracks on this online storage service called IDrive. Dunno what that shit was all about.

Finally, the summer before my 4th, final, and most hellish year of high school, I lost my OST virginity. My mom's office was 4 doors down from a small mom-n-pop independent game store. I'd stopped in now and then but was always underwhelmed by their selection of "normal" games. See, my limited and youthful mind wasn't aware of the wide world of imports, boxsets, models, action figures, etc. based on video games. Yeah, I think it too nowadays: dumbass kid.

So anyway, I stopped in one day and what did I see? The tall, slender case of the "official" (Official Hong Kong Edition, that is) Final Fantasy 8 OST. Gold. Motherfucking GOLD. With every last penny I could scrounge up from what I'd earned at my degrading, thankless, soul sucking, but still-really-fucking-good-for-a-16-year-old library IT job I slapped $40 in cold, hard cash down on the counter and snapped that sucker right up. As an added bonus, I found out that it came packaged with a bootleg Samurai Shodown soundtrack and some J-pop singer's CD too. AND Disc 3 was conveniently missing the grating, screechy "Eyes On Me" which I despised at the time (I hadn't yet heard the nails-on-chalkboard Suteki Da Ne and so EOM was pretty horrid for lack of that updated basis of comparison). Bootlegs fucking rule.

I took it home and immediately popped it in the stereo. I giggled like a 13-year-old schoolbitch when Liberi Fatali rang like a carillon bell from my Dad's custom surround-sound speaker system. I was hooked in a whole new way.

From that point I'd go on something of a minor buying spree of soundtracks, all from the local retailer as my mom was seriously paranoid of online shopping at the time and I had no means of ordering online by myself. Of course, the vast majority of what I got from them were bootlegs, but they all had the tracklists intact, so what did I give a shit?

VGM would have a particularly profound impact on me over the course of a hellish 7 months of high school (thank $DEITY for early graduation). It became a refuge of sorts, something that was only mine and that nobody else could taint by association as they were all wrapped up in the latest teen-rock schlock of the era or in Sailor Moon soundtracks to really take an interest in VGM. It kept me sane through the worst parts of the ensuing months--instrumental pieces to form a soundtrack to life as I knew it, a kind of pseudo-escapist psychological defense mechanism by which I could view my circumstances as less than real--and stayed with me after I left my high-school hell and went on to a better job and a college where I was finally a stranger. At that point, it was no longer as necessary for its calming effects and psychological cushioning, but I'll be damned if it didn't make great background music for lonely, dull weekends in the office.

About 2 years later, after I had padded my collection more via online ordering, my good ol' local indie retailer (now closed and out of business, god damn you GameStop), and Gamingforce FTPs, I discovered Direct Connect.

The rest, as they say, is history. And so was the free space on my hard drive.

FELIPE NO

Me, a lot different.

It started with me first being interested in the music from the Legend of Zelda. I was fascinated by the number of midi files made for it, and after a little bit of playing around, I ended up finding http://www.vgmusic.com/ . So, I stayed there listening to midi files for approximately 2 months or so, before I ended up finding OC Remix and VG Mix, which I was also extremely interested in.

Flash 1 year into the future, and here I am, playing around IRC when I find #gamemp3s and #gamemp3 on dal.net. At around the same time, I end up finding gamingforce audio (when there were mp3 downloads). I end up starting a MEAGER collection of gaming music for about 5 months, before I leave for another 1-2 years.

At the same time I started collecting anime music, I slowly collected more game music again. After another 6 months, I became more elitist in terms of quality, and ever since, I've been collecting as much game/anime music as possible.

I'm also a quality whore... three years and counting, with more than 250GB of anime/game music now.

How ya doing, buddy?

I was listening to VGM on Nintendo for years, but it wasn't until I saw a way to buy the Secret of Mana soundtrack, did I even know VGM was on CDs. At that point I thought it was some American thing, but I remember the advertisements in the back of of video game magazine. Oh the ridiculous prices.... I made some purchases when I could get money, but then I discovered this place.

Jam it back in, in the dark.