Tracks like Wanderstop Part 2, Earl Grey Part 2, Cinnamon Part 3, and The Forest are good places to start--it's three and a half hours long, so there's a lot to comb through.
A remix of Mice on Venus [0] is one of the few things that can make me cry on cue. There is something so powerful about it.
Doesn’t help it is often used in Technoblade tributes because of this video. [1]
>This month I contacted Luis Clemente on the freelance website Fiverr and he delivered an absolutely amazing soundtrack for Joker Poker. Really knocked it out of the park. I was very nervous about this because it was (at the time) the only money I had spent or planned to spend on the game.
Have there been that many big names in the space? Nobuo Uematsu for JRPGs, Jeremy Soule, Yasunori Mitsuda....who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original) was by Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer (personally, I think the end of Contingency sounds a lot like The Dark Knight)
- Wikipedia says that both of them also helped with Crysis 2
- Lorne Balfe did Assassin’s Creed 3
EDIT: Spotify reminds me that Harry Gregson-Williams did some of the Metal Gear Solids.
I'd say that like Minecraft's music, it's good enough that it could almost have carried the game on its own.
Some indie games have licensed indie music, but generally I think it's hard to convince "big names" to make music for small games, unless they're already video game composers.
Not sure if that counts, but I suspect ZUN (Touhou) and Toby Fox (Undertale) are recognised by more people for their music than for their games. A lot of people have heard e.g. Megalovania, Spider Dance, Bad Apple, UN Owen was Her, or Flowering Nights, but don't know a single about the games they are from other than the name.
Halo 2 had Steve Vai but not really composing.
Mario Kart 8 and the new one had lots of established apanese fusion players.
I'd also recommend...
Gareth Coker (Ori & the Blind Forest)
"9999999" from the Portal 2 Soundtrack: Songs to Test By (composed by a Valve staffer)
Brian Tyler's Far Cry 3 is also a great listen (sure, he's a film composer but I like it)
Many of those hits, of famous people still around the industry, were coded while working part-time on their teens, trying to sell their creations via magazines or the local publishers.
If anybody is curious: https://lena.fyi/
The Celeste soundtrack is wonderful: https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/album/celeste-original...
It wasn't until I switched to Linux (Zorin) as my daily driver last month that I noticed this. Despite the initial adjustment pains, every time I open my laptop I now feel a sense of calm and stillness. My computer is exactly how I left it. It asks for my approval before doing things. It has no corporate agenda.
Although he also often gets the nag screen to upgrade to Win 11. That should also not be possible for him, but with Microsoft, you never know.
You can also play in multiplayer by going to server.properties of your server and setting online-mode=false
The launchers for Linux are readily available, too.
So no, I don't buy the "they'd have to go through lawyers" excuse. They could still have had blanket licenses for using the music in all sorts of ways, they just wouldn't own it.
Once the movie was released and they updated the game to add movie related content, this feature stopped working. Now to play multiplayer cross platform LAN, you have to pay for M$ servers you don’t use.
You couldn’t even load your world locally on the XBox if it was marked for multiplayer unless you had an Xbox Live account, meaning you got locked out of your world.
Fortunately you can edit the world setting to remove the multiplayer option to recover, but this was not documented at the time encountered.
Then, the account migration window closed, and Mojang accounts stopped working. Now I and thousands of others can't play the game we paid good money for.
Fuck Notch and Microsoft both.
If you haven’t heard it, listen to Sweden or Aria Math.
It also an issue that the reason c418 didn't get to keep doing the Minecraft music, was that he refused to do it on "work for hire, sign over all the rights" terms.
As for c418, you're privileged as an artist when you get to keep your rights and make decent money. That was a very smart strategic move. Microsoft could've responded in any number of ways, but keeping the music + hiring new artists doesn't even sound like a bad compromise; these artists deserve the exposure, even if they can't match c418.
(Trivia: Eno did the win95 startup sound)
Maybe the movie made a good chunk for him too.
Curious what the offer was, it likely was higher since Microsoft just wanted to have clear ownership over the entire IP.
