For me definitely The world ends with you. It completely shaped my modern taste in funk, pop, rap and hip hop. That and Jet set radio.
FFX back in the PS2 day’s was when I discovered I really love heavy metal.
Tony hawks pro skater series and gta vice city mostly
Tony Hawk Undergound 1 and 2 for me, someone made a Spotify playlist for their soundtracks and I use it on at least a weekly basis
Love fist
Ah, I used to just drive around like a normal driver listening to the radio stations in GTA vice City. Damn they were so good
The stations were just MP3 files on the game disc. I burned them to an audio CD and had them in my car.
Libertycityhardcore!
Libertycityhardcore!
Libertycityhardcore!
Fuck!
You!
And then My War plays
Do the Guitar Hero games count? Because those
Yeah, I didn’t listen to a ton of music before Guitar Hero, it legitimately broadened my horizons
lol… genuinely, DOOM. I grew up with just the radio and a mom who made weird and arbitrary rules about music so my music exposure was terrible. I found a journal from when I was ten talking about how excited I was to listen to the “top ten soft rock hits” of the week with Delilah. Hearing DOOM and going omfg this ROCKS!! made me realize there was other music out there, big music, epic sounds, distortion, heavvvvvy sounds I love it all, I’m also a bass head as it turns out. DOOM opened the door and I’ve spent my adult life exploring all the different kinds of music I never got exposed to as a kid.
Quake was amazing for that. I had the CD. It was a tiny data track for the game and the rest was the NIN soundtrack as an ordinary audio CD and the game played it automatically.
Chrono Trigger.
If you put the install disk for Warcraft 2 in a cd player, you had a kick ass orchestral soundtrack.
Fallout Soundtrack is the only reason I know who the ink spots are.
Both let me appreciate styles I had never given a chance.
put the install disk for Warcraft 2 in a cd player,
I forgot about that! My mind was blown that you could use the same disk for mac and pc.
Came looking for Fallout! I don’t know about you but before Fallout3 I kind of had the impression that catchy music began with rock and roll in the 50s. Fallout’s 1940s music was quite an education and a great jumping off point to find more pre-rock and proto-rock music. These days my oldies playlist is one of my favourites. For anyone curious check out the Ink spots, Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller and The Platters; Not to mention all of the great big band and jazz music from that era!
I honestly think FF7 made get into classical music and contemporary composers.
Pick any game in the Final Fantasy series. For me it was the overworld in FF6 and the battle songs from VII and VIII. I Also really vibed with the Uncharted games, which used an orchestra of interesting folk instruments to create a really cool musical soundscape for adventure.
Gotta pick my first, FFX. To Zanarkand is still one of the best ways to open a game.
FF9, Vamo’ alla Flamenco taught me I really like spanish guitar.
Queen Brahne was not impressed.
100 nobles were impressed
That and Gerudo Valley from Ocarina of Time.
StarCraft’s iconic Terran soundtrack is the earliest game where the music really got me hooked into that 80’s synth rock/metal. Of course there’s also Mick Gordon’s Doom soundtracks, but that came in later and I was already listening to metal by that time.
SC 2 Heaven’s Devils is also a certified banger
Damn, I can’t believe Halo CE hasn’t been mentioned yet. That game was a musical awakening for the entire industry.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, Kingdom Hearts II, and GTA San Andreas all come to mind. Also a more recently Lethal League and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Mass Effect 1’s credit outro song led to a rabbit hole of me getting into electronic music over the next six months. It’s not even super dancey but it was enough lol
Everything from Supergiant is fantastic, worth a listen even if you don’t play the games. Also, Burnout Revenge had such a good soundtrack. Completely shaped my preference for music in highschool.
Bastion’s entire soundtrack was amazing, but the end credits song (especially the live jam version they released on their channel later) has been stuck in my head ever since the game came out.
Tony Hawks proskater.
Diablo/Diablo 2
Though this tune isn’t quite part of their soundtrack (that I know of), it highly resembles their style on this otherwise hidden track…
Dawn Of Tears - Blood On Verona (Hidden track timestamp 11:43)…
D1’s main theme (edit: the town theme) hit me so hard as a kid
I still stay for a while and listen
Came here to rave about those two as well! I remember whiling away my downtime at school reading Mat Uelman’s liner notes on the old Battle.net website and finally waking up to how video games didn’t need their soundtrack to fit in a neat little “box” of low-fidelity synth loops (though I still love that style)
One of the tracks had a comment from him about how he relishes any opportunity to break the rules of the genre he’s composing for. The quote was something along the lines of “More lasers in Hell. Hell needs lasers!” It just stuck with me for decades since
