SimCity 3000 Unlimited
This soundtrack is really really good. The lead composer is Jerry Martin, who would go on to do the Very Good Soundtrack for The Sims, and it’s a step above anything that’s come before. Specifically, the production values are incredibly high and include tons of live performances. You can tell that people worked really really hard on this.
It comes in at just under 2 hours (!) of music split over 23 tracks, and varies from new-agey to electronica to jazz to big band and some other songs I’d be hard-pressed to put into any genre. Here are a few of the standout tracks to me:
Power Grid
Power Grid is definitely one of my favorites. The weird burbly sounds and the alien-sounding speech remind me very much of one of my other favorite sim-style games, Startopia (which also has a pretty good soundtrack). It develops very nicely as well, just like most of these tracks do, and it never gets old to listen to.
Magic City
I previously wrote about my fondness for the track Magic City:
“Relentless optimism about urban living” is the vibe for most of these in one way or another, and Magic City is probably the best track to represent this. I love how it builds to these beautiful crescendos and then dips back into valleys of almost new-age calmness. The way that it repeats single notes over a long period of time, then shifts them all at once is just…dazzling.
Sim Broadway
This is another beautifully optimistic track, and it reminds me a lot of Monopoly Tycoon’s 30’s era music but like…better. I love the cheeky…marimba? Whatever that is. But yeah just a light and airy track in the revered tradition of City Music i.e. Rhapsody In Blue Forever
So yeah, another high watermark after the SNES SimCity OST. Hugely impressive work here.
Also for some reason it has the title track to SimCity 2000 which almost made me lose my mind, like it was specifically trolling me. But otherwise it’s great.