It’s all the music from every SimWhatever game produced by Maxis (other than the sims), which is exactly the kind of dumb shit I’m here for. I’m going to try and listen to all of these and write a mini-review of each in alphabetical order, but feel free to contribute your own!!
SimLife (Microsoft Windows Version)
This is only first on the list because it has a space at the beginning of the name. Anyway, this is two minutes and fifty-eight seconds of music: a title song and seven short ditties. It’s incredibly slight but pretty cute. “All Die” reminds me of a song from Vertical Force:
Two 15 second intros that sound like they were probably over the Maxis logo. The DOS version sounds better to me weirdly. Anyway this is basically nothing.
Five minutes and Thirty-Three seconds of music split amongst 4 songs. These are as generic as they come, except the staff roll which is full of deeply irritating sound effects that I assume make more sense in context:
SimCoaster is the only one of these I played as a kid. To this day I love the way it looks. I even love the assistant character who’s always popping up to tell you what’s going on.
It’s a low-key and silly game for kids. It’s funny to watch the little plastic people trudge around your park being miserable and leaving tiny piles of puke everywhere because you set all your rides to the fastest speed possible.
Of course, listening to ambient BGMs out of context doesn’t do them justice. The Land of Invention music is mostly just subdued cartoon industrial noises with occasional lonely circus clown honks. In-game you don’t even notice how weird it is.
Okay I actually played this game as a kid, it was pretty cool. Definitely janky, not as cool as roller coaster tycoon, but you could ride the coasters!! so that was cool.
Also, it’s in the same series as
and they share a lot of similarities. Specifically, this game has Two hours and Twenty-Four minutes of music spread over just 5 tracks. Basically a single 1 minute title theme, and then 4 30-37 minute songs.
If I remember correctly, the music wasn’t just one long track in the game. Instead, it would build up slowly as your park got bigger and more popular. I really enjoyed the music in this game when I was a kid, so I’ll just go over all 4 songs here:
Lost Kingdom is a dinosaur themed park, and the music is lots of distant drums and other percussion and whatnot. What I love about this is that there is a melody, but it doesn’t kick in for a long time - 27-ish minutes in the MP3, and much longer when playing in game. So it’s this nice surprise for when you have a really nice park going.
Halloween World is much more straightforward - it has lots of “scary” sound effects and screams and shit playing over generic halloween music. It really picks up the tempo in just the last 5 minutes though, so that’s fun. Spirit Halloween did it worse, but the vibe is the same.
Space Zone is maybe the most interesting. Lots of samples (You are a robot) and I think I heard a speak n spell at one point. Certainly the most electronic sounding, and is maybe the most Ambient Music For Cool Kids track. But still kinda dives all in on the theremins and UFO noises near the end.
Wonder Land is very, like, Ambient Hums + Cheesy Flutes for the first 15 minutes or so. It’s not bad, but not interesting. It picks up halfway or so and starts adding percussion and a little melody. And it’s in fact the same melody as Lost Kingdom, so that’s a nice callback. It’s great in the game because the melody will peek through the ambience for a while, then eventually become the main focus. This is the most memorable music in the game for me. It still kinda sucks at the end though when there are a lot of slide whistles.
Two songs, about three minutes in length. Kind of a neat melody and stereo effects but mostly unremarkable. Not anything to write home about by any means.
Forgive me for combining these two, but it’s just different sound cards. The melodies are the same, alright?
Approximately Nine and a Half minutes of music spread over twenty-nine tracks - in other words, lots of short ditties again. They’re fine! Are they interesting to listen to? Not really, unfortunately.
But I will say, the Victory tune is pretty nice. Here it is on a third, unidentified sound card:
The second episode of SNExploration was about this game in particular. I am very fond of it because I played it as a kid, and it started (or fueled) my deep love of ants. I love ants to this day!! This little yellow ant made me feel like any of us…could be ants…
But that’s to say nothing of the music, which unfortunately is pretty cheesy. It’s got its charms though.
Fifty-Three minutes of music split up over 29 tracks, these are much meatier than the previous two versionf of SimAnt I talked about. Every environment gets its own song, and there are lots of songs for menus and the like.
It all sounds, to me, like ants doing a little dance. So in that way it’s successful. I particularly like the beautiful morning vibes of the title track:
And there are several songs I swear to god I’d never heard before despite playing this game to death. In The Woods is extremely charming, and I love its little sentimental melody:
I also love that they baked in insect and animal sounds to the music. It’s a lovely little soundtrack despite, again, being pretty cheesy. I don’t think it’ll get much listening time outside of this context for me though.
What in god’s name is this music? It has Lyrics?? They’re mostly about Partying??? I’m so confused.
18 songs, 21 minutes. The immediate standouts are BGM 1, which is the song about partying:
and BGM 6, which has this wonderful sample of someone sternly saying “CRIME”:
The song titled “Sim City” is also very much a lyrical song talking about building a city, but also partying:
It’s really intensely weird! What the hell was going on here? I think this comment says it best:
IT also appears this game had a Wild West mode, a Medieval mode, and a Future mode. At least, this is the obvious takeaway from all the songs that are badly synthesized bluegrass with horse sounds, badly synthesized bard music with horse sounds, and shiny future music. Also, they’re called Western city, Medieval City and Future City, so that’s also telling.
Anyway this is absolutely the weirdest one so far, and that’s after a 37 minute track that’s mostly drums for 27 minutes.
like, ghouls and ghosts has that Tim Follin Amiga soundtrack that is just Different Music. But SimCity is that happening three or four times for the same game.
One 4 and a half minute song of MIDI jazz. It’s not bad at all but I don’t think it’s doing anything remarkable. I couldn’t find a youtube version of the one I have so here it is hosted on my site instead:
For being the first game in the series I suppose this is not a bad start.
Now here’s the real sicko shit. This game was mostly completed but never released - it was supposed to come out simultaneously with the SNES version. It was rediscovered in 2017 and the ROM was dumped in 2018. Which is super cool!
But who cares about the game, what I care about is new Soyo Oka music!!!
That’s right, this game had a full soundtrack and it was different melodies from the SNES version (except in one case). So that means that this was totally unheard music from one of the best VGM composers of all time, and specifically a person who composed very little music.
So yeah, it’s pretty good! Around 30 minutes of music over 10 songs, although some of them loop in this collection several times so it’s more like 15 minutes of original music. I’m particularly fond of a few songs here, specifically the Capital tune:
(timestamped)
It’s very simple and effective and atmospheric, much like the SNES game. Overall the tunes in this are much more mellow than the SNES game, and they’re quite lovely. Certainly the best soundtrack we’ve heard so far.
How much left is there to say about this soundtrack or game? It’s good! It’s one of the Canonical SNES Games! Everyone loves it.
I also love it! I think this soundtrack works really well with whatever that SNES Echo is - I assume it’s some default effect on the SNES sound chip. The chamber music sound of the Town song is so nice and pleasant. The Capital song has that wonderful intro that sounds a bit like a Breaking News segment, but slowed down, then transitions into this etherea wandering melody. And it never loops the breaking news segment either!
I’m also shocked at how much music is in this game. This game spoiled me for later Sim games because it had different music for basically every menu. The budget song in particular stands out to me. It’s so sentimental and un-budget-like!
Basically a masterpiece. Gonna be hard to top for the rest of this collection.
SimCity 2000 (MS-DOS Version: Sound Blaster Pro 2, Roland MT-32, and General MIDI)
None of this stood out to me, even with the different soundfonts. Maybe if it hit a nostalgia button then I would like it more, but I don’t even know if that’s true. Hard to describe, it got no hooks in me at all.
Tax and Money is probably my favorite though, it is pretty dope:
Looking forward to the PS1 version of this game though, since it seems like the songs are similar BUT more differenter, also.
