Songs that make you think of games

Input Tune of the Fatman
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Sometimes I hear a song and it perfectly encapsulates a feeling a game gives me, so here is a thread to catalog this. These don’t necessarily even sound like the game, but they feel like the game to me. Add your own please!

Anodyne = Purple Moss by Malibu Ken i.e. Aesop Rock and Tobacco

Anodyne is a sad game about poking at your own psyche and realizing your brain is in a state of decay, filled with weird garbage. Indulging in your worst urges and just wallowing in your own shit, poking at the edges of a personality that you’ve alienated yourself from. As many criticisms as I leveled at it, it was most successful at depicting a decaying and strange place, and imbuing a real sense of alienation.

I talk like it hurts to talk
Mascot of Murphy’s Law
From the claw game at the Walt Whitman mall
to the worst curb cuts of the urban sprawl

I love the tone set by these opening lyrics. Just a miserable sap who can’t win at claw games and falls over a lot. Great shit.

Like a lot of Aesop Rock this is a very introspective song that is pretty self-indulgent as well. I guess it’s also about moving from the east coast to Portland based on the fact that the Empire Builder is a route from Chicago to Portland, where Aesop lives right now. But I dunno, Genius lyrics is pretty fucking stupid

Anyway, it really has a feeling of being a piece of shit trying to figure out why you suck so bad, and basically deciding to fuck off and sit in a lawn chair and watch everything decay

Never mistook for a bird or a plane
Mistook for a hearse in the rain

What a melodramatic nerd. It’s so good.

More later as they re-occur to me

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this song def has an Earthbound vibe to me:

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triplet beats at the end there kneading my brain into mush

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this intro always reminded me of Knytt Stories

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Lunar Lander

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Any game & watch game

Actually almost any fantastic plastic machine song makes me think about lcd games

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Always makes me think of Star Fox once the tempo picks up

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This reminds me of something very specific but I can’t put my finger on it. That bass at the beginning in particular makes me think of…something…

but in any case this sounds like a fight in no more heroes or something

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Whilst riding on a milk truck and hearing, for perhaps the hundredth time on the local classic rock station, “Rock the Casbah” I suddenly realized that the piano grove sort of reminds me of a c-list Mega Man stage theme.

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I think about scythe.wad when I hear cub

Also Hey QT reminds me of map 22

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i listened to this album a lot around the time i was playing Bloodborne and i feel like its melancholic, earthy atmosphere connected strongly with the imagery of the chalice dungeons, these silent, cavernous, husk-like tombs of an unknowable civilisation

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This sounds like great screen scrolling fight music.

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i also listened to this at the time and i can’t explain why but the intro really triggers recollections of the game as well. not clear scenes but small details like the way light reflects off muddy surfaces (such as in the cave in the woods), the pottery, the stonework around Byrgenwerth, or maybe items in the workshop?

i think there’s an odd microtone harmony at 0:46; that might be the trigger

returned to mind because of these reminding me of those two songs respectively

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