Video Game Music.

This is how much of a geek I am: I like listening to video game music, independently of playing the game that the music appears in. I also listen to game music from games I have never played or have never made it through. I have a bunch of CDs with game music on them, and there is game music in my iPod and iTunes. For awhile, most game music was not in mp3 format, so you couldn't burn it to a CD or listen in Winamp (this is way before iTunes) without lovingly converting it to mp3. This took a long time of sitting in front of the computer, and I did dozens of soundtracks this way, which I still have. Lastly, most of my favorite soundtracks are from the 16 bit era and before, as I never had a Playstation or Sega Dreamcast or anything from the mid to late 90s.

I think a lot of the appeal for me is nostalgia. I played a lot of these games when life was uncomplicated and I didn't have any worries. But some of the music is very beautiful. I have the Secret of Mana game for the SNES, but I didn't get very far into it. I found the music for it (under its Japanese name, Seiken Densetsu) on Usenet, and it's probably one of my favorite soundtracks ever.



Nowadays you can find a lot of these soundtracks in mp3 on various torrent sites, but I try to stay away from those. I'm also too lazy these days to convert the files to mp3, but I will make one exception. Back when I was in the thick of gaming music, there was one soundtrack I was dying to have, because it was one of my favorites and I had logged a lot of hours playing it. Unfortunately, no one had ripped the files from the game back then. I tried to learn how to do it myself, but laziness pervaded. On a whim, this morning I went to a game music site I haven't been to in a number of years, and sure enough, someone had ripped the soundtrack in my absence. I downloaded it and listened to it, and it made me very happy. What game was it? Why, Monopoly for the NES of course. I told you I was a geek!