Video Game Music Tier List: All-Time Top Ten Retro Consoles.

[Music]
he's bigger faster and stronger too he's the first member video games were a huge part of my life past tense i'm now 42 years old i'm not gonna tell you they're a huge part of my life now or that they're gonna be in the future tense but the one aspect of playing video games that still means something to me that i can still positively appreciate to this day is the music you know a couple months ago i had a conversation with tommy talarico we talked a lot about veganism we taught a lot about politics we talked about the history of video games but i said to him look whenever i go back to play video games from my childhood whether that's out of curiosity or nostalgia i find myself sitting there thinking how can anyone waste five minutes of their time with this tedious pointless repetitive task like if you were paying me money to play zillion for the sega master system you couldn't compel me to do it today i'd rather work at starbucks i'd rather work at mcdonald's i'd rather i'd rather work in the warehouse for amazon.com then sit here and play zillion for the sega master system even if i were being paid to do it it's shockingly meaningless to go back and play those video games today that you remember but but the aspect of video games that for me still really has it it's aged well it's still really old today it's going back and hearing that music again and a lot of the time when i hear that music i can hear the beginnings of my own interest in hip-hop music and funk music and soul even in jazz for many of us the main way we learned about music was through video games and we started playing video games long before we began dancing or singing or learning to play musical instruments ourselves and here's the thing when i look back at the super nintendo let me tell you i put it right at the bottom of my tier list so i'm letting you know here by putting this first in the video i have some very strongly held opinions and coming back to tommy talarico you can directly compare award-winning soundtracks he made that were ported to both the genesis and the super nintendo and i would say that in every single case it's the genesis soundtrack that's better [Music] you know what this isn't comparative the music on the super nintendo is trash period you don't have to compare it to the genesis you don't have to compare it to anything else i would even say that the original 8-bit nintendo entertainment system or if you really want to say the original original famicom in japan that had better music than the super nintendo [Music] and i've got to tell you today if you're going through the library of greatest hits of the most outstanding soundtracks the most outstanding music for the nes it is so much deeper it is so much more impressive than music on the super nintendo now with that having been said the library of games for the nintendo and famicom for the 8-bit systems it's such a huge library of game that i have to admit the percentage of those games that have an outstanding or great soundtrack it's very small do [Music] at this point already i think you have a sense of what a strongly opinionated tier list this is gonna be you won't be surprised to hear that for me the genesis is very close to the top rank a on the tier list you tell me if you can name a single other video game that has stood the test of time the way toe jam in earl hats where that soundtrack today you could play it on the radio and it wasn't just influenced by funk music it wasn't just influenced by what was going on in hip-hop and rap music it was influential it was influential for a whole generation of hip-hop artists who grew up playing toe jam and roll long before they learned to dance or long before they learned to scratch records on a turntable or uh went on to make music themselves so yeah the genesis from my perspective has an outstanding library of music and that has a lot to do with the fact that people like tommy talarico were working with gems software the actual specific editor and yeah if you dig around you're going to find that before that software came out even though the microchips were exactly the same the music you had coming off the genesis was remarkably awful it's a myth the tempo was shot it's just a mess some of you who are long-term viewers of the channel might expect me to put the neo geo really high on this tier list something you may not know the home console the neo go aes had only mono sound not stereo and it takes a hit for that further if you were going to judge this by the arcade version which isn't really a fair comparison the arcade machine you could pretty much never hear the music so music was not really snk corporation's focus or emphasis so then they end up quite a bit lower on the list than you might reasonably expect and i've put there the new neo geo system which lets you play the old games with hdmi and better sound output one level higher because the actual sound quality you're going to get out of an original neo geo aes console is actually really bad and not even in stereo as mentioned nevertheless when playing old games using the new hardware or using an emulator for neo geo often enough you're going to say wow i can't believe how amazing the music is [Music] bye [Music] people really did not appreciate what a great system neo geo was for music and again that's partly because you probably played these games standing upright in a pizzeria you know or in a barber shop and there was no way you could actually even hear the music you just hear characters shouting at each other in japanese and things exploding but the total number of games in the neo geo library is small and the total number of games with extraordinary or wonderful soundtracks is few oh and here's the next generation sega saturn and nintendo 64. and guess where they end up yes the music on saturn and n64 is really that bad [Music] yes i know you may have nostalgia you may have rose-colored glasses maybe specifically for the dulcet tones of mario 64. let me tell you this was the period of time when computer programmers suddenly had new options new possibilities there were new things they could do like having continuous vocals and realistic instrumentation cd quality sound and the fact that they could do those things tended to overshadow the question of whether or not they should do those things that was a whole generation of better hardware but much worse dramatically worse soundtracks terrible music in video games and it's the generation with which i lost all interest in video games myself [Music] in the year 2020 and still in 2021 there has been a huge revival of interest in the formerly obscure pc engine exported to the united states as the turbo graphics 16 available in many different iterations the core graphics 2 the turbo duo etc etc with or without cd sound most of you never encountered this system when you were children so there is no nostalgia for it you're encountering it for the first time now now there's a retro mini console out there there are different ways to play the games through emulation and so on is the music that bad yes on the original 16-bit console the music really is that bad and the cd enhanced version of the console it basically encounters the same problem as the sega saturn and the n64 but the surprise entry in this competition is the lowly black and white nintendo game boy for me game boy stands out at the absolute top of this list some of you may have distant childhood memories of putting in the headphones to your game boy and now when you reflect on it you think the music couldn't have really been that good it couldn't have been i must have just been young i must have been naive i didn't have a sophisticated taste then go back and listen you will be astounded now this video has not been too burdened with lengthy excerpts from the soundtracks being contrasted here but i'm going to play for you now a significant portion of puyo puyo 2's main theme song and we're going to directly contrast the super nintendo version the sega genesis version and the game boy version and guess which one wins guess which one stands out as by far the best version of the soundtrack [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] done do [Music] [Music] do [Music] bye [Music] the portable game boy system had a terrible screen terrible controls it had a very simple version of z80 architecture and there were a lot of programmers around who knew how to get the most out of it and you knew how to make the best possible music on that very limited system but if there is one console that never ceases to amaze and astonish me where if you put on just any youtube video discussing this console with any set of random games from its past you will be astounded again and again at how much great music was gotten out of a limited chipset it is the commodore 64. commodore 64 stands at the absolute top of this list despite the fact that the games are absolutely incredibly awful the vast majority of games that come to 64 today are unplayable or they are only playable as kind of historical curiosities like oh isn't it amazing that they managed to make a version of the simpsons arcade game that works on commodore 64. and i am amazed it is amazing i think with such limited hardware that they did isn't it interesting that they managed to make a version of arkanoid for commodore 64 that managed to make a version of double dragon that all of these games had a highly inventive commodore 64 version struggling against the limits of that hardware but the one aspect the experience that lasts that still entertaining or even inspiring today is the music the music has aged unbelievably well so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] and yeah there is a hole in the middle of this list so i might as well poke in the system that i knew best from my own childhood here i would put the 8-bit sega master system there at rank d to be fair to the sega master system it is home to some of the greatest 8-bit games ever made and frankly some of the greatest video games of all time things like wonder boy 3 the dragon's trap however the number of those games is incredibly few the total number of games on the system is few and the number of games with excellent or outstanding soundtracks is very few also talk boss featuring words that kill my slang is editorial explicit material briefcase show lava stereo flow filming donna realty set the black people free [Music] in ending this video i just want to say that a friend of mine someone who's known me for many years and someone who knows that i feel that adults should not play video games not unless you're sitting down to play with your children or at any rate you should try to limit the number of hours you're spending on video games to being as close to zero as possible a friend of mine for many years admitted to me that he does in fact own a nintendo switch and he has in fact been playing each and every pokemon game that came out for the switch adding up to many dozens or many hundreds of hours i imagine and this has been a lifelong habit for him system to system throughout his adult years he's kept up with the pokemon series i'd say that if you're not willing to make the decision to quit video games outright i think you should reflect on how much your own life would improve if you picked a date on the calendar and said i am not going to play any video games made more recently than 1995. 1995 is in some ways an arbitrary year if you start looking at the history of video games you might uh feel that you need to nudge it ahead to 1997 or nudge it back to 1993 but as you reflect on this possibility how your own life would change how what you do with all the hours in the day you'd reclaimed by eliminating video games in your life think about how much better your life would be if instead of 1995 it were 1985. the truth is that the more you can limit yourself to playing graphically simple games games that were designed to be played in arcade for just 5 or 10 minutes rather than games that are designed to be played on a home console for 5 or 10 hours at a stretch the better your life will be if you can't achieve absolute zero gaming in your life i think you have to look at meaningful ways to limit video gaming both qualitatively and quantitatively