The use of Classical Music in Computer Games.

Cafe Society
1

I am currently listening to a track - Requiem - Dies Irae (that’s what it’s called on this CD but the name is unfamiliar) which is reminding me, and making me miss an ‘old’ game in which it was one of many classical pieces used as the soundtrack. That game was Wargasm. And the use of classical music (particularly the pieces chosen) was a master stroke. It made thundering towards your target seem so… purposeful

What other games has the use of classical music in the soundtrack been effective (assuming such things exist)

2

The best example I can come up with at the moment was “Adagio for Strings” in Homeworld (spoiler for the very beginning): When you come back from your first and only hyperdrive test to find your entire home planet in ruins.

3

There’s a series of space shooter games called “Parodius” that never made it outside of Japan. The games are really quirky and bizarre parodies of the Gradius series, and most of the level music is face-paced arrangements of classical music, which just adds to the weirdness. Controlling a laser-shooting octopus through a planet of flying cat submarines to “Stars and Stripes Forever” probably ranks as one of the strangest video gaming moments I’ve experienced.

4

In the old, old, OLD game Spy’s Demise, Brahms’s Hungarian Dance #5 played throughout. I still can’t listen to that piece without seeing my little fedoraed buddy hopping in and out of elevators…

5

Whoops! I forgot another one.

Tetris has a playloop of “classical” pieces.

6

Here’s a really old one, but the Atari 2600’s game “Mountain King” played, as you might guess, Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”.

7

I loves me some Parodius.

I think the best ones were the remixes of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and The William Tell Overture. And by far the weirdest Parodius was Sexy Parodius; released for PSX, Saturn, and arcade.

8

What, no mention of Gyruss and its use of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor?