What songs do you associate with gaming memories?

[marurun]

Let me give you a little background for this topic. When I was in my senior year in high school I got a Mac to take to college because my college savings weren't big enough for anything else. Doom had recently come out on Mac and I was eager to play it. It actually ran OK on my Mac. But playing it with the music slowed things down. Why? Macs had digital audio capabilities, but everything had to be mixed in software. There were no Sound Blasters for Mac that would offload MIDI playback and what not. So turning on the music in Doom loaded the Quicktime MIDI player which then played the Doom tracks in softMIDI and sapped system resources, slowing down the game. Also, I didn't like the Doom music and thought it sounded like ass. So I turned off music and stuck a CD in the CD drive of the Mac so it would play that instead. Since I was playing Doom, I threw in a metal CD. It was a good enough match that I just listened to that one CD every time I played Doom. So now, when I see classic Doom being played, I immediately thing of Dream Theater's Images and Words album. And when I hear a track from Images and Words, my mind immediately goes to memories of playing Doom.

tl:dr Are there any games where you associate non-game albums or tracks with the game more than the game's OST? In my case, I associate Dream Theater's Images and Words with Doom, because I turned off the music in Doom and played with that CD in almost constantly.

[ElkinFencer10]

Ohhh yes. I associated Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory and Meteora albums intimately with War of the Monsters on PS2. My friend Sam and I would put those CDs on repeat and play War of the Monsters for HOURS in high school. I also associate My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade album with Runescape because that's what I'd usually listen to when I played that in middle and high school.

[BoneSnapDeez]

In the late 90s I got the Ultima Collection, which sparked my love for old CRPGs. I begin to look into many other franchises soon after: Wizardry, Might and Magic, and so on. Now, many games of this genre have no music. Some don't even have sound at all! So, for appropriate musical accompaniment I would listen to some dungeon synth or atmospheric black metal. I have a bunch of albums I would rotate, those are just examples. I continue the practice to this day, and it's much easier now that I can just load up an album on YouTube.

Generally, though, if the game does contain music (as most do), I never mute in-game music in favor of something else, unless I'm engaged in a lengthy RPG grind session.

[isiolia]

I did have a few albums that were typical choices for playing arena FPS games to back in college days - the Fight Club OST by the Dust Brothers, some of the earlier Skillet albums (Hey You, I Love Your Soul and Invincible, offhand), and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory (though moreso the Reanimation remix album for it) offhand. So I'd pretty well associate those with Unreal Tournament at least.

Earlier on, my brothers and I had our SNES hooked up to an Apple color monitor and a boombox. So, we had a occasional times where we'd play CDs instead of have the game audio. I can't remember what the actual music for Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues is, but I still remember playing it to some of the more upbeat parts of the Jurassic Park CD and laughing.


SE's (misguided) attempts to prevent hacking in the PC version of FFXI made it disconnect if the client lost fullscreen, which burned many of the earlier game tracks into my brain for insta-nostalgia anyway...but eventually, I turned the music down and started putting on streaming music via Winamp so that I wouldn't need to worry about it stopping. So, while I wouldn't necessarily identify quite a lot of earlier 2000s vocal trance music over the music in that game...I did end up leveling a lot of stuff while listening to it, prior to starting to use the Windower (and in-game macros instead of XML and now LUA scripting, so primitive ). Even many years of mostly playing without music has meant that I've got stuff I binge watched on the other monitor, or wound up being a go-to for a bit.

[Segata]

Title music to Mario Kart on SNES. it blankets me with nostalgia but not so much just for Mario Kart but SNES as a whole. That first day I got my SNES on my favorite B-day ever was the greatest feeling ever and I smile anytime I hear the title music for Mario Kart.

[ElkinFencer10]

Title music to Mario Kart on SNES. it blankets me with nostalgia but not so much just for Mario Kart but SNES as a whole. That first day I got my SNES on my favorite B-day ever was the greatest feeling ever and I smile anytime I hear the title music for Mario Kart.

Are there any games where you associate non-game albums or tracks with the game more than the game's OST?

We're talking non-gaming music, not game sound tracks.

[nullPointer]

Cool topic! Just as Bone mentioned, for the most part I listen to in-game music when and where available so as to get the 'full experience' of the game. Generally speaking the exceptions for this are RPGs that require moderate-to-lengthy grinding segments (so JRPGs as a general rule). Playing the first couple of Dragon Quest/Warrior games really forged and galvanized my love of Iron Maiden. There's just something about the about the epic sounding riffs & lyrics typical of many of those NWoBHM bands (and Iron Maiden in particular) that meshes perfectly with old school JRPGs (and that's 'New Wave of British Heavy Metal' for my non-metalhead friends - i.e. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Dio, Ozzy's early 80's output, etc.). So Iron Maiden and early Dragon Warrior are sort of inextricably linked in my mind.

Later on when I finally embarked on Final Fantasy VII (a number of years after release), I found Sing the Sorrow by AFI to be a wonderful soundtrack for grinding. That delicious mix of angsty pop-punk and emo really sums up the whole experience of FFVII for me, and a lot of the lyrics on that album could actually be about characters in FFVII (or hell, FFVIII for that matter as well). So in some ways that album might as well be a part of the official FFVII soundtrack in my mind.