I was wondering if anyone had a factual answer to this, but if someone wants to turn this into a dicussion, fine by me! I’m trying to figure out which NES game had the longest BGM (background music - aka the music that plays and loops over and over while you play a stage, explore the overworld, etc.) This excludes music from a title screen, cut scene or ending, since those songs a. are meant to match what is happening, as opposed to being ambiance, and b. don’t loop, which means that they have a specific ending to them…
so far the longest BGM I’ve found so far(which is the exact one I guessed it would be) is the Lord British theme from Ultima 3: Exodus. I always remembered that song going on and on and on before it repeated, but it’s actually only 1 minute and 37 seconds! It’s amazing how so many popular songs are actually only 30 seconds or so of original music!!
If anyone knows of a .nsf player that a. has a clock AND b. has the ability to stop the track rather than looping it, that would be extremely helpful for this research too.
I just double checked, Zelda 2 overworld is about 1:10 seconds including the intro which only plays on starting the game. (If you’re timing this yourself be careful because one of the sections loops before going into a fresh bit of music.)
Longest song from Zelda 2 is the Temple Theme, which runs 1:20 before looping. Strangely, Zelda 2 was the very first game I checked. Like the overworld, theme A repeats before theme B starts, so technically not all of that 1:20 is original stuff, but I’ll give stuff like that pass until it fully loops.
The Zelda 1 overworld theme, one of the most famous video game songs in history, is a whole 40 seconds! And the overworld theme from Super Mario Bros 1, undoubtablely THE most famous song in video game history (the Tetris theme isn’t original, so we can’t count that) is 1:28 (although it follows a ABCADCD pattern before fully looping)
I know that Shigesato Itoi talked about the difficulty the programmers had in fitting the music of Mother onto the cartridge. I don’t know offhand how long any single song from the game is, though.
The first game I thought of was Solstice. My friend and I weren’t any good at the game, but we plugged it in just to listen to the intro music. According to the youtube link, it’s about 2:55.
Some of the longest background songs in games that I’ve heard have been on the Commodore 64. For example, the song that plays in Delta when you enable the music clocks in at 11:21. To be fair, it’s more like 3 or 4 songs in a row, and there’s a lot of repetition (what else would you expect from music inspired by Philip Glass?), but it’s all played as one long song during the game. I can’t think of anything on the NES that compares to that.
You can hear part of the Delta in-game music and see some of the gameplay here.
Ah, good ole Solstice. I always loved the music from that game. The title screen song doesn’t qualify as a BGM since it doesn’t loop, but it actually goes on longer than the demo video does! However, the game’s actual BGM goes 1:56 before it loops, making it the new contender for longest BGM NES song.
Surprisingly, none of the NES Mega Man games have a BGM that runs longer than Gravity Man’s 1:22.
I wouldn’t be surprised by the C64 having longer songs, since music was one of the things the C64 was made for.
I was thinking that the classic Super Mario Bros. theme would have to be a contender, since it has three distinct parts, each of which repeat at least twice. It ends up running about 1:30.
Sorry for the necrobump-- and this is probably a really odd thread to come out of the woodwork for, but I was organizing a similar list a while back on another forum, but had a difficult time googling it and found this thread as a first result instead.
I figure I may as well share some of the longest ones I’ve found (trimming stuff under 2:30, because I started finding more and more of those). Of course these aren’t all “BGMs” though. Some title Screens and other stuff are in here too… who would’ve guessed that a stage select (something you usually don’t spend the most time on) would be at the top? What the hell.
The Mega Man 6 ending may be worth noting. It’s a bunch of individual tracks stitched together so it doesn’t really count, but it’s segments of stage themes connected by drum beats, that turns into ending credits. Sort of one long medley.
The longest I know of is Gordian Tomb. Track 2 is roughly 32 minutes long. I had to break it up into 4 parts to fit it on youtube!
