Best Classic Game Soundtracks -- VGMusic.com Analysis

[Sauraen]

Hi everyone.

I just completed some analysis on the MIDI archive of vgmusic.com, and I thought some people might like to see the results.

The idea is that the best game soundtracks have the most fan activity surrounding them. Of course, there are several factors which may make this a flawed test (i.e. please read before flaming ):

• Time. People have had more time to make remixes of games that came out 20 years ago than those that came out a few months ago, so there will be more of those. This is why I added the fudge word "classic" to the title--the music from Mario Kart 8 is very good, but it's not classic yet. In 20 years if there's a lot of fan versions of it, it'll be classic. But of course fudging like that does not really solve the problem.
  
• To make matters worse, VGMusic hasn't updated their archive very much in the last few years, so even though there may be lots of fan sequences of a recent game, they're stuck in new-files and were not counted here.
  
• Game soundtracks from the NES era and before were quite limited in terms of extent. This forced composers to create many classic themes we still know and love, but it also means that the overall amount of music in those games was more limited, so fans had less to transcribe, arrange, and remix.
  
• Amount of fan interest in a game's music is also a function of the game's sales. The fact that there are more MIDIs from Super Mario World (109) than from Xenogears (89) is partly due to the latter almost being banned in the US and the former being included with every SNES sold, rather than a comment on the relative quality of the two soundtracks. Of course, one might argue that the same factor means SMW music is more "classic", i.e. more recognizable, than 'Gears music.
  

But enough apologizing... Here's some numbers.

Top 25 Classic Game Soundtracks by MIDI file count

409 Final Fantasy VI(III) (SNES)

300 Chrono Trigger (SNES)

268 Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)

255 Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

225 Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time (N64)

224 Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Genesis)

220 Pokémon Gold/Silver (Gameboy)

219 Final Fantasy VII (PS1)

205 Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess (Wii)

190 Mega Man X (SNES)

187 Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

180 Mega Man II (NES)

163 Mega Man III (NES)

155 Seiken Denetsu 3 (SNES)

155 Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis)

152 Sonic & Knuckles (Genesis)

150 Banjo-Tooie (N64)

149 Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow (Gameboy)

148 Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past (SNES)

148 Secret of Mana (SNES)

147 Donkey Kong 64 (N64)

145 Final Fantasy IV(II) (SNES)

143 Mega Man X3 (SNES)

143 Final Fantasy V (SNES)

140 Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening (Gameboy)

Those same games, sorted by total MIDI file size (bytes):

9853431 Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Genesis)

9765467 Final Fantasy VI(III) (SNES)

9601694 Chrono Trigger (SNES)

8819609 Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)

6884561 Final Fantasy VII (PS1)

6405816 Mega Man II (NES)

6258819 Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

5688082 Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time (N64)

5450615 Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

5435255 Secret of Mana (SNES)

4885811 Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis)

4879926 Sonic & Knuckles (Genesis)

4549548 Mega Man X (SNES)

4445798 Seiken Denetsu 3 (SNES)

4301888 Mega Man III (NES)

4090395 Donkey Kong 64 (N64)

3761928 Final Fantasy V (SNES)

3659936 Final Fantasy IV(II) (SNES)

3491620 Banjo-Tooie (N64)

3417080 Mega Man X3 (SNES)

3318629 Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past (SNES)

3205507 Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess (Wii)

2798945 Pokémon Gold/Silver (Gameboy)

2311946 Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow (Gameboy)

1577772 Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening (Gameboy)

If people are interested, I also have the MIDI counts for all the games in each of several popular series (so we can see which games in that series have the most "classic" soundtracks).

What do you all think? Is this a helpful way of looking at classic game music, or completely invalid? Are there any games that you feel deserve more attention? Please be respectful: all of these games' soundtracks are classic, none of them are bad, and of course personal opinions are just that.

[Kenogu Labz]

Pardon the bluntness, but why would you use VGMusic as the context for the survey and then post the findings to OverClocked ReMix? Could OC ReMix be used as a second source? What about other such sites for derivative works?

The main reason I ask is that VGMusic, while noteworthy, has a goal that feels naïve, at best. MIDI is a useful medium for transcription and notation, but I daresay the total number of MIDI-based arrangements and interpretations for a given soundtrack does not necessarily correlate with the full set of soundtrack aficionados. You're looking at a small and relatively niche subset of the game music listening and arrangement population and abstracting out to the entire population, a statistics no-no unless you can show that the subset is reasonably representative of the whole.

Also consider the size of the original soundtracks. Soundtracks with a larger number of songs would, by correlation, likely have a larger number of arrangements. You'd need to account for that in your calculations before the soundtracks can be compared against one another.

[Sauraen]

To be honest, I did the analysis for fun, to satisfy my own curiosity, and then I thought "where should I post this..." I don't have an account on the VGMusic forums (and I don't even know if they exist anymore), so this was my best choice.

You raise some good points. It would absolutely be a better analysis with more sites included. Fortunately, I don't have to do any work for everyone to see the numbers for OC ReMix, djpretzel already did the work, and you can see the current totals at http://ocremix.org/games/?&offset=0&sort=mixcountdesc , pasted below for comparison:

Top 25 Classic Game Soundtracks by OC ReMix Count

123 Chrono Trigger (SNES)

118 Final Fantasy VI(III) (SNES)

106 Final Fantasy VII (PS1)

71 Mega Man II (NES)

52 Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)

49 Final Fantasy IV(II) (SNES)

47 Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)

43 Super Metroid (SNES)

42 Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES)

40 Street Fighter II (Arcade)

39 Xenogears (PS1)

37 Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (Genesis)

36 Final Fantasy (NES)

34 Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

33 Mega Man 3 (NES)

32 Wild Arms (PS1)

31 Secret of Mana (SNES)

30 Chrono Cross (PS1)

30 Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

30 Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis)

30 Super Mario Bros. (NES)

28 Final Fantasy X (PS2)

27 Castlevania (NES)

27 Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening (Gameboy)

24 Mega Man 9 (Wii)

Pretty similar, aren't they?

It would be even better to do the same thing with Youtube, but since the content is not nearly as well-organized, it would be much harder to gather the data. (I believe zircon's "Monstrous Turtles!" is in first place for views with several hundred thousand across all the reposts, but do we count views or uploads or some combination? If we combine the scores from various sites, how do we weight them?)

That said, there's a couple reasons I think the VGMusic archive is better suited for this kind of (admittedly naive) analysis:

• The sample size is roughly ten times larger than that of OC ReMix.
  
• Since MIDIs are easier to produce than professional-quality MP3s, and even given that difference the quality standards there are significantly lower, a greater variety of people are able to contribute to VGMusic, and so it reflects a larger portion of the fanbase.
  
• Producing an entire album for one game definitely is a show of fan support/popularity, but it also causes people to tend to work on remixes for that game, so I'm not quite sure how having albums for games affects OC ReMix's counts. There is no such lumping for VGMusic, each file is a separate work, which makes the statistics more uniform (though not necessarily more correct).
  

I'm not sure how one would determine which site is more of a niche for video game music fans. OC ReMix definitely is more popular now, but I don't think that was the case ten years ago.

As far as the size of the soundtracks, that doesn't seem to me to be a problem. If we have two soundtracks, all with songs of the same "quality" (by whatever standard), but one is 20 songs and the other is 40, I'd be happy to say that the second is twice as good as the first, since it has twice as much "good stuff".

Edited August 12, 2014 by Sauraen

[Liontamer]

Needs some Remix.Kwed.Org and DoD analysis. Good luck tracking down all the Touhou in the Japanese scene, too. You should do all of 'em!

[Arrow]

As someone who got his start at vgmusic.com (and someone who you can directly blame for 33 of those 190 Mega Man X MIDI files skewing the statistics here), I found this very interesting and am glad you put that together. I do agree that doing a similar analysis with stuff from other sites would be cool too, albeit not nearly as easy.

Also, Twilight Princess scoring so high was a surprise. I mean, obvious love for Zelda, but TP in particular, over LttP at that?

The main reason I ask is that VGMusic, while noteworthy, has a goal that feels naïve, at best.

Let's be fair now; it wasn't a naive goal when that site started 18 years ago.

[Kenogu Labz]

As someone who got his start at vgmusic.com (and someone who you can directly blame for 33 of those 190 Mega Man X MIDI files skewing the statistics here), I found this very interesting and am glad you put that together. I do agree that doing a similar analysis with stuff from other sites would be cool too, albeit not nearly as easy.

Also, Twilight Princess scoring so high was a surprise. I mean, obvious love for Zelda, but TP in particular, over LttP at that?

Let's be fair now; it wasn't a naive goal when that site started 18 years ago.

Oh, definitely agreed. And it does still have use as a transcription catalogue of sorts. The arrangements can get in the way at that point, though.

I've even made a contribution there at one point. No, I will never say which one it is. It's horrifying.

As far as the size of the soundtracks, that doesn't seem to me to be a problem. If we have two soundtracks, all with songs of the same "quality" (by whatever standard), but one is 20 songs and the other is 40, I'd be happy to say that the second is twice as good as the first, since it has twice as much "good stuff".

You could probably make the comparison more consistent by a ratio of soundtrack count to arrangement count, or by average arrangements-per-song ratio. Both could give you slightly different conclusions.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Kenogu Labz

[Sauraen]

Needs some Remix.Kwed.Org and DoD analysis. Good luck tracking down all the Touhou in the Japanese scene, too. You should do all of 'em!

This might be a dumb question, but do you have a list of other fan-game-music-arrangement sites? C64 is definitely cool but is more of a niche; Dwelling of Duels's archive is unfortunately not organized by game.

As someone who got his start at vgmusic.com (and someone who you can directly blame for 33 of those 190 Mega Man X MIDI files skewing the statistics here), I found this very interesting and am glad you put that together.

Oh man! Jarel Jones! I've been listening to your MIDIs for almost ten years! It's amazing the people you meet on these forums.

Also, Twilight Princess scoring so high was a surprise. I mean, obvious love for Zelda, but TP in particular, over LttP at that?

The game had its flaws, but the soundtrack was not one of them. I'd be comfortable saying LttP's is more classic, in so far as every major tune is well-known in the game music community; but when I think of a soundtrack that's thematic and episodic, that's full of classic references and top-notch composing, and that embellishes cutscenes and other moments with original material consistently throughout the game, Koji Kondo's final masterpiece has to take the cake. It made even 2006's virtual instruments sound amazing, not to mention today's (ZREO's Twilight Symphony)! I admit to some fan bias here, but still, I'm glad to see it getting the love it deserves.