Retro gaming enthusiasts might enjoy this little project I underwent last year (originally posted elsewhere but updated here). Feel free to skip the story and go straight the the "Links" section below for the youtube playlist. Enjoy!
It might be surprising to see that, out of 1513 OSTs (Original Sound Tracks), there are only 229 songs in the playlist. That's still almost 8 hours of music, but there are reasons for the relatively low track count
For one:
My goal was to uncover the lesser-known greats of SNES music
... and so I intentionally left out tracks from many of the AAA titles we already know and love. The soundtracks of games likes Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and Final Fantasy are what made me fall in love with video game music in the first place, but they would absolutely dominate and inflate the playlist overall. There are a few exceptions, like Kirby’s Dream Course and other spin-offs, which might be “known” but not often played, so I included them anyway because the tracks were just that good (no really, listen to those Kirby’s Dream Course tracks, they’re insane). There are also a few from games that are fairly popular (i.e. Secret of Mana) but I had never heard/played before.
Furthermore:
The harsh truth is that with so much music, only a small portion will really stand out from the overall average.
I decided early on that just “ok” tracks weren’t gonna cut it, only those that I’d honestly want to listen to again and again would get saved. The majority of OSTs in the archive were mediocre for sure, and only some I’d actually consider straight up “bad” or low-quality, but a couple reached the point of "so-bad-it’s-good" that I actually did include a few of their tracks in the playlist just for fun.
And the last (and most problematic) reason for the shorter-than-you’d-expect list is that it’s entirely subjective to my own preferences, so there are probably tracks that I skipped over which others might’ve thought were awesome, and conversely some of my favorites might make people wonder “why is this in here?” I will say, the majority of these games I have never played (especially the Japan-only releases), so nostalgia or story context was not a factor in my choices. More than likely something just tickled my ear, and sometimes its only a small section of the whole song (so don’t skip tracks too often, y’hear!)
That said, if you think I really goofed and missed something perfect for this list, let me know! I will admit (and sometimes regret) there were days when I was less-than-100% focused on the music as it was playing (either because of being in the “work zone” or just having a day where my head’s not in it), so there’s a real chance a good stuff slipped through the cracks. If you do finish the playlist, and still want more, go check out the full OST of your favorite tracks! In most cases if one song is good, there are at least a few more good ones surrounding it. Also, the reason for the spreadsheet below is so you can search for a particular composer in the list (or genre), and I know there’s a few composers that I really want to search up their more recent work after hearing their OSTs here.
Links
The “Best-of" youtube playlist is here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBiqp5EAfsuSmBLjFXBgzmdUTOz3PDW6D
Or, download a zip of all the mp3s here (not sure what's best for people so here's a couple options):
Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-Ljgjvx8T_YWWpwazhpdW9KLU0
MEGA: https://mega.nz/#!XEdg0Y6S
And Lastly, Why Did I Do This?
An extraordinary amount of time ended up going into this whole project, but I wouldn’t done it if I didn’t love the music from this era. Sure, there’s the nostalgia factor, but what actually jumpstarted the process was that my cousin and I had just started working on our own SNES-inspired puzzle game. I’ve written music in the past, but I knew that getting that perfect “SNES” sound would be vital for the game to feel right, so I figured why not just immerse myself in soundtracks while I work on art? (my cousin handles the programming side) Naturally, I started saving the tracks I liked, and here we are today. Work on our own game is still going strong, so if you’re curious, just google or look up Super Plexis in the app store!
Also, coming from a background working with audio, I did a bit of extra work balancing the levels of the mp3 exports for all the tracks. I noticed the first batch of saved tracks were relatively quiet compared to the rest of my music in my library (if I was shuffling my library, for instance, I’d constantly have to be adjusting my volume when SNES tracks came on) so I went through and equalized the volume levels into roughly the same range.
Some Data
Here’s a google doc spreadsheet with all the track info (title, game, composer, genre):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XqOoMVXfFqBkrXy6tI0sHu8OI7H63IGeCK9aC0i_jPQ/edit?usp=sharing
This should be handy for browsing the track info outside of the youtube playlist, or looking up only songs in a certain genre (I kinda just made up my own genre categories for each track). The “Archive ID" relates to the labeling system in snesmusic.org’s .spc (.rsn) files which require software for playback, something like Super Jukebox (which is what I used to listen/export all the WAV file of each track). If you want the full, raw archive of all the OSTs to browse for yourself, download it here: http://snesmusic.org/v2/torrent.php
(side note: in the mp3 archive linked above, I included the full OST .rsn file each track belonged to, in case you'd rather not dig through the whole archive)
Tracks saved: 229
Total music time: 07:54:35
Total OSTs (with “saved” tracks): 163
First track saved: July 31st, 2015
Last track saved: August 6th, 2016
Composers (Total within saved tracks): 224
Composers (Most OSTs): Katsuhiro Hayashi, Einosuke Nagao
Best Western Composer Name: John Pee
Best Japanese Composer Name: Toshiyuki "Gocky in Bose” Takine
Ratio of Western Composers to Japanese Composers: 1 to 5
Total “Rock”: 53
Total “Orchestral”: 15
Total “Upbeat”: 87
Total “Chill”: 52
Total “Jazzy”: 31
Total “Sad”: 16
Total “Uptempo”: 18
Total “Acoustic”: 9
Total “Dark”: 26
Total “Ragtime”: 2
Total “Funk”: 7
Total “Hip-Hop”: 3
Other Tid-bits of Info
Did you know Yoko Kanno (of anime OST fame: Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell) wrote music for a couple SFC games? I couldn’t believe it (search her name in the spreadsheet!)
The “Love Theme” from Down the World apparently had an issue with ripping samples, resulting in the “vocals” being a single sample of a woman saying “come” being used to play the melody. This is one of my favorite tracks because of how bizarre and humorous it is. I haven’t been able to find the original.
The one track from Boogerman I included uses a variety of fart sounds in the music, but you’ll have to turn up your bass to hear them!
A few tracks in the playlist are from unreleased SNES games (like The Shadow), and others still are "unused" tracks that were in the game files but never actually used.
Out of the already small number of Western composers in this list, 3 of them are named “David” and they all have last names ending with “W” (David Warhol, David Wise, David Whittaker)
A good number of composers have nicknames for themselves, some bizarre (like "Gocky in Bose” mentioned above) but others include: Lucky-7, BA.M, JOEDOWN, SUPERKENTA, and Pro-Mars.
Special thanks to the countless “Dumpers” who put together such an amazing list of OSTs with all the included meta-data which I relied on heavily for this project. You’ll see their names in their respective OSTs .spc files (in the archive) when opened in the spc player of your choice. Don’t know who you guys are, but thanks so much!
Call to Action!
Thanks for reading this far! It was labor of love getting all this out there, but I don’t plan to stop anytime soon! If you guys have any suggestions or notice any issues with the files/youtube videos/link please let me know. Should I go back and revisit the “mainstream” OSTs and pull out the best of the best there as well? It would be nice to be able to have the ultimate, complete playlist of all SNES/SFC games, not just the “hidden gems” I’ve listed here. Or maybe I can start down a new OST road exploring another console. We’ll see! Thanks again, and happy listening.
(p.s. I’d like to share this playlist/project with other forums as well, let me know if you have any suggestions for communities that would enjoy this sort of post)