REAL SONGS IN RETRO VIDEOGAMES

So, music composed for early videogames can be great. We all know that. Sometimes, however, games companies decided that what their latest title needed wasn't something new but something old. Very old, in some cases, but also pop tunes that weren't always... legally reproduced, shall we say. So, here are some real-life songs that ended up as the soundtrack to various retro videogames!

Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (MegaDrive / Genesis)

Michael Jackson is coming to get your kids! No, don't worry: he's going to save them from some vaguely-defined villain called Mr. Big. Yes, the unstoppable Jackson juggernaut even rolled over various videogame consoles in its quest to dominate the world. As the story goes, Jackson even worked for a time on the soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. That didn't quite pan out, but we did get to hear the King of Pop's tunes on the MegaDrive / Genesis in Moonwalker. Here's "Beat It", and very good it is too.

Revolution X (SNES)

Aerosmith joined the suprisingly long list of bands with videogames to their names with Revolution X, a sub-par lightgun game centered around the band's fight against an evil dictatorship. Hey, at least it isn't an Insane Clown Posse game.
Of course, Revolution X featured synthesised versions of many Aerosmith tracks, the best of the bunch probably being "Rag Doll" as featured in the SNES version's intro:

Plus, you get a nice burst of a muzak version of "Love in an Elevator" when you enter, you guessed it, an elevator:

Spider-Man (SNES)

More Aerosmith, this time with a recreation of Joe Perry's theme from the 90's Spider-Man cartoon. It features some of the most grating digitised speech since, well, the original version. Ah, the sound of saturday morning.

Highlander (C64)

I mentioned this in the "Queen References in Videogames" article already, but it's so good I'm going to wheel it out again. Here's Martin Galway's SID-tastic version of Queen's "A Kind of Magic", the theme from Highlander. Better than the original? Maybe not, but a hell of a lot easier to reproduce on the Commodore 64.

Wayne's World (SNES)

The Queen continues, and boy is it a step down from the Highlander theme. A company called Grey Matter developed an utterly appalling Wayne's World game. Wayne's World's most famous scene is the "headbanging to "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene. Guess what was shoehorned into the SNES game! Yes, one of the greatest rock songs ever written is thoroughly violated by the game's composer, resulting in a cacophony that sound like it's being played on a dot-matrix printer. Listen if you dare!

Wanted: Monty Mole (C64)

Ah, the Colonel Bogey March. A military march written in 1914, Colonel Bogey is familiar to many people as the theme from Bridge Over the River Kwai and familiar to even more people (that is, every British person) as a song about Hitler's testicles.

This one's pure, unrefined nostalgia for me: I think Monty Mole was the first videogame I ever owned. That the theme song allowed me to sing along with a song about Hitler's alleged monorchism was an added bonus.

Mikie (Arcade)

An early Konami game about being a dick at school, with your naughtiness mainly taking the form of pushing people off chairs with your arse. Oh, and the first stage's music - at about 0:20 in this video - is a (presumably unlicensed) version of the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night".

Parodius (Various)

More Konami madness, and I do not use the word "madness" lightly here. As you may well know, Parodius is a series of shooters that parody Gradius (you see what they did there?), taking the same basic gameplay and using it as a platform to get you fighing American eagles with star-spangled top hats and moais by the million. Most of the music is classical (and therefore public domain)... or at least it was until Konami put it through some machine they apparently have that infuses it with sherbert and Red Bull.

This is a personal favourite: "Hot Lips" from Sexy Parodius, a demented version of Jaques Offenbach's "The Galop from Orpheus in the Underworld". That's the can-can music to you and me, and never would I have believed it could have been such a perfect fit with a videogame about shooting things.

Rock n' Roll Racing (SNES)

It's a racing game. With rock 'n' roll. Yep. If you ever wondered what Blizzard used to do before dedicating themselves to the enslavement of millions of nerds via the dark sorcery that is World of Warcraft, now you know; they made awesome racing games. RnRR's main selling point, and reason for the title, was that it included versions of several real rock songs including Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf and best of all, Deep Purple's highly appropriate "Highway Star".

Simply wonderful.

Doom (PC)

It seems a lot of tracks from Doom were inspired by famous metal songs, and when I say inspired I mean copied. Here's some comparisons, in case you were wondering why shooting demons on Mars mad you think of James Hetfield. My favourite? "Bye Bye American Pie" from Doom II, which couldn't be any more "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains unless it was wearing a sandwich board that said "I AM THEM BONES BY ALICE IN CHAINS".

Ghostbusters (C64)

There are many videogame versions of the greatest song the 1980's gave us, but I think the Commodore 64 version is the best. Why? Because it sounds great, but most importantly the game displayed the lyrics with a little bouncing ball so you could sing along at home, and sing along you bloody well did.

As I recall, if you pressed a button at the appropriate time during the song, some digitised speech would warble "Ghostbusters!" at you. That, my friend, is the reason mankind was put on this earth.

Tetris (Game Boy)

Last and certainly not least, the Tetris A theme. You know the one I mean, right? Of course you do, you've got ears and haven't been living in an underground bunker since 1978. You may have thought that famous tune was created by Nintendo's crack team of earworm-developing musical scientists, but it is in fact a version of a Russian folk song called "Korobeiniki":

Very Russian indeed, and appropriately so. It was originally written in 1861, and when I finally get my time machine working the first thing I'm gonna do is grab a Game Boy, travel back to ninteenth-century Russia and show the guy who wrote this how his creation is going to be remembered for many, many years. I hope he's pleased.

And that's it for this installment. There are many, many more instances of real songs being used in retro videogames, so maybe there'll be a part two to this article. As for the mean time, I promise I won't tell anyone you were singing along to the Ghostbusters theme.

QUEEN REFERENCES IN VIDEOGAMES

If the fact that I run a website that consists of me rambling on about them hasn't clued you in, I love videogames. I also love the music Britain's premier classic rock band, the incomparable Queen. And do you know who else loves videogames and Queen? The Japanese. Queen were pretty successful in Japan, and some of that success translated into the greatest compliment a band can receive: a reference or two in a videogame! So, here's a look at some of Queen's appearances in the wild world of digital entertainment.

Ogre Battle series

Quest's series of strategy RPGs goes all-out with the Queen reference, and names the entire series after the song of the same name from the album Queen II. That's fine by me, it's a great song. However, the designer of Ogre Battle, Yasumi Matsuno, obviously decided that he was such a big Queen fan that one reference in the title wasn't enough, so he gave it the subtitle The March of the Black Queen. "The March of the Black Queen" is another song on the Queen II album.

Matsuno wasn't done there, though: the next game in the series, the Final Fantasy Tactics­-style Tactics Ogre, it was given the subtitle "Let Us Cling Together". "Teo Torriatte" is a track from Queen's 1976 album A Day at the Races, and it's unusual for being partly sung in Japanese. "Teo Torriatte" was translated (rather wonderfully, if you ask me) as "Let us cling together". So there you have it: Queen and Ogre Battle, together in perfect harmony. There's even an area in Ogre Battle called the Rhyan Sea, named for the song "Seven Seas of Rhye".

Final Fantasy Tactics

One of my all-time favourite games, Final Fantasy Tactics gets a little extra sparkle from the fact that the fourth chapter of the game is entitled "Somebody to Love" in reference to the song of the same name that appears on the album A Day at the Races. You might be thinking "hey, the phrase 'somebody to love' is common enough that it isn't necessarily a Queen reference", and normally I'd agree with you; however, when you take into consideration the fact that FFT was directed by none other than Ogre Battle creator Yasumi Matsuno then, well, I think it's pretty much a definite.

Highlander

Not really an appearance by Queen as such, but the Highlander game that was produced for the home computers in 1986 featured a rather nice chiptune version of "A Kind of Magic" (well, the Commodore 64 version did, at least). Here, have a listen:

Was the game itself any good? Well, I've never played it, but by all accounts it's pretty terrible. Then again, it was a movie tie-in made by Ocean in the mid-eighties, so what did you expect?

Street Fighter series

First of all, that's boxing champion and all round classy English gentleman Dudley up there, sporting one of his alternate costumes from Super Street Fighter IV. It's quite clearly modelled on Freddie Mercury's iconic stage outfit from Queen's 1986 appearance at Wembley Stadium:

A great choice of Capcom's part, I must say. Still, that's not Street Fighter's only claim to a Queen connection. Here's Eagle, one of your opponents from the original Street Fighter.
He's a British bouncer and possible MI6 agent who (along with Birdie) is named after a golfing term. Originally, he seem to have been inspired by the bodyguard character from the Bruce Lee film Chinese Connection / Fist of Fury:

And then Eagle disappeared for fourteen years or so, until he reappeared as a playable character in Capcom vs SNK 2. However, he'd undergone a few changes, and he appeared to be turning into something of a Freddy Mercury impersonator. There are the physical aspects of his Mercury-dom, like his (admittedly not black) slicked-back hair and moustache. Then there's the fact that some of his win quotes, particularly in the Japanese version of CvS2, seem to imply that Eagle is gay - for example, after beating Cammy he tells her that he's "not interested in young ladies". Freddy Mercury was certainly bisexual (at least), so that's something else they have in common.

The real clincher is some of Eagle's in-battle voice clips. His taunt has him saying "No time for losers", which is a line from Queen's anthemic "We Are The Champions", and he also says "the show must go on" after winning. "The Show Must Go On" is a track from Queen's 1991 album Innuendo.

Guilty Gear series

Oh boy, we've hit the motherlode here. Guilty Gear is famous for being crammed full of nods to music in general and heavy metal in particular, with the name of pretty much every character and special move being a reference to some band or other. Queen is the big one, though: series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari is a huge Queen fan, and boy does it show. Pictured above is Sol Badguy, the main character of Guilty Gear and a walking bundle of Queen references. Sol's favourite activity, as listed on his character bio? Listening to Queen, particularly their Sheer Heart Attack album. His headband carries the phrase "Rock You", as in "We Will Rock You". His theme music is called "Keep Yourself Alive", which is the title of Queen's first ever single. His real name? Frederick, and his nickname is taken from Freddy Mercury's solo album Mr. Bad Guy.

Then there's vampire badass Slayer. He's named after the metal band of the same name, but most of his special moves - All Dead, Dead on Time, Under Pressure - share their name with Queen songs.
In fact, you could argue that all four members of Queen are represented in Guilty Gear. There's Sol "Frederick" Badguy for Freddie Mercury, May for Brian May (sorry, Dr. Brian May CBE), Johnny for John Deacon and Roger (Bridget's creepy teddybear thing) for Roger Taylor.

And that's Queen, in videogame form. Freddy might have sadly passed on, but it's nice to think that his spirit lives on in a giant dude with a fiery sword. I'm sure there's some little Queen-related videogame moments that I've missed, so if you can think of any that I've misses then please, drop me a note in the comments.