Riding on the heels of our last episode (MAGWest Panel), Gene co-hosts with us once again for a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive themed Expansion Pack. We’ve got a lot of great music and hopefully some new stuff that you might have missed!
Track List:
- 0:00:00 “Lively Town” (Shining Force II)
- Motoaki Takenouchi
- 0:08:25 “Thought of the Holy” (Warsong)
- Hiroshi Fujioka, Noriyuki Iwadare, Isao Mizoguchi
- 0:15:08 “Climbing the Temple” (X-Men 2: Clone Wars)
- Kurt Harland
- 0:23:08 “Let’s Plow” (Skitchin’)
- Jeff van Dyck
- 0:30:35 “Plague Factory” (The Ooze)
- Howard Drossin
- 0:38:25 “Act 1: The Void of Space” (Verytex)
- Hitoshi Sakimoto, Masaharu Iwata, Yoshio Furukawa
- 0:44:26 “Technocity Type – Stage 5-2” (Rocket Knight Adventures)
- Masanori Ouchi, Aki Hata, Michiru Yamane, Masanori Adachi, Hiroshi Kobayashi
- 0:50:44 “Sound Test No. 4” (ATP Tour Championship Tennis)
- Hikoshi Hashimoto
- 1:00:40 “Arab Rock 1” (Aladdin)
- Donald Griffin
- 1:08:28 “Scarab of Glory No. 1 / Sakuraba Fight BGM 3” (The Hybrid Front)
- Naofumi Hataya, Junko Shiratsu, Sachio Ogawa
- 1:14:28 “Lose Theme” (Kiss Shot)
- Naofumi Hataya, Hiroshi Kubota
- 1:19:45 “Gotham By Night” (Adventures of Batman & Robin)
- Jesper Kyd
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38:36 — 167.8MB)
That Arab Rock 1 tune at 1:00:30… clearly inspired by Cold Tea by Andy Lee Robinson, see https://goo.gl/images/7SbE7w
Holy crap, yeah. Wow great catch!
Loved the episode. Warsong, Shining Force II and Hybrid Front are definitely getting added to my vgm playlist :) Hybrid Front is just crazy good… What a find! Verytex is already one of my absolute favorites. Indeed it almost sounds like it couldn’t be created by the YM soundchip – too smooth!
Wow, what a great selection of tracks! Gene was a great addition to the show; hopefully he has a sister that you can invite on next time you do a Genesis-centric episode(“Gene-Sis”). Seriously though, he made some great choices, he had some interesting insights, and he fit in perfectly with the flow and conversational style of the show.
Information Society is best known for the song Pure Energy, which came out in the mid-80’s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ijAYN9zVnwg Yeah, it is a few years early for you guys, but it’s good stuff.
Motoaki Takenouchi’s music is wonderful. I’ve actually never played any of the Shining Force games, although I’m familiar with the music. I played a little of Shining in the Darkness, and I played Landstalker to death. His music sounds to me like early Disney films. If they ever made a Snow White Genesis game, he would be the one to score it.
Jeff Van Dyck is a swell fellow. He was interviewed on Legacy Music Hour episode 21, and he had some insightful things to say about composing on the Genesis. By the time he came to EA, sampling was becoming popular in the music industry and at least for Western composers, the SNES setup was really preferred to the endless fiddling required with FM. EA figured out how to get three samples to play on the Genesis simultaneously…..to quote him more accurately, “Programmer Kevin Pakel(sp?)” made it so Van Dyck could have a “Bass drum, a snare drum, and a guitar sample at the same time.”
He’d alternate open guitar strings and a guitar chug, and alternate hihat and bass drum and snare to get the rest of the beat. Listening on in the LMH interview, Brent broke down the channels. It seems that all 3 samples are coming from the sample channel(channel 6, right?), and the bass guitar and the hihat/ride are FM-based.
Hitoshi Sakimoto’s Terpsichorean driver is incredible. Even music composed by others using his drivers sounds amazing, and is one of the reasons I feel like sound designers should get more credit than they do.
That Rocket Knight Adventures track is amazing! It’s the only track on this episode I haven’t heard before. I’ll have to download the OST immediately.
I just listened to the ATP Tennis OST for the first time this week. Great stuff! Incidentally, Hashimoto also did Racing Hero and A.B. Cop for Sega’s arcade division, Whip Rush for the Genesis, and others.
When Gene talks about “swing” in Genesis music, I think he’s referring to that shuffle beat and style that’s kind of epitomized in Spring Yard Zone for Sonic 1. I don’t personally think there was anything in FM hardware or Genesis hardware that facilitated that kind of sound, because the vast majority of Genesis and FM music doesn’t sound like that. My own guess is that Sonic’s music was incredibly influential, so when Japanese composers wanted to make MD music post-Sonic, they used the game as an inspiration of what good music could be. But that’s just my own guess.
Man, so many great tracks! Thanks again for the awesome music!
To correct myself, the programmer’s name is “Kevin Pickell”.
Hey Nathan, thank you for the response and detailed breakdown. With these expansion pack episodes, I don’t always have time to do deep research about the composers so the info about Jeff Van Dyck is welcome. Glad you liked the episode, these are always a lot of fun.
In response to the “swing”, I’ve just noticed that compositions tend to lend themselves really well to that in FM and it could be a combination of things like the popularity of games like Sonic. I also suspect part of it has to do with the envelopes and timbres lend themselves to Jazz, Funk, and so forth. It tends to be fairly common nowadays within the FM chiptune community. I mean there’s three fantastic FM albums from Ubiktune, many of which feature that sort of style funky style.
I thumbs up this comment LOL