Five Video Game Songs So Terrible That They're Kind Of Great

16 November 2014 | 1:17 pm | Mitch Knox

Sorry for what comes next

The field of video games has come so far in the past few decades that it's sometimes easy to forget that there's always more work to be done.

Well, not if we're talking about the people typically deeply associated with video game culture — those dudes remind us there's work to be done every single day.

"Let's do this. Friendship Is Magic starts in twenty and I need to continue not shaving my monobrow."

I mean in more subtle areas, like the field of video game music. Truthfully, it's not that uncommon, even today, for a game's soundtrack to seem like it was just the last thing the people in the office could be bothered with dealing with; like it was a massive inconvenience that just had to be completed in order to make street date, so they lobbed it to Derek in Accounts Payable because he's always listening to an iPod and seems like he might be a "music guy".

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Still, in the past decade especially, game soundtracks have definitively shifted towards including "real" songs in their framework, often as a main theme or title screen jingle or, increasingly, in-game Easter eggs, but for every genius piece of melodic game-accompaniment like Still Alive, from Portal, or BioShock Infinite's Barbershop rendition of God Only Knows (suck it, BBC), there are at least five other songs so cringeworthy as to make you want to burn the entire stupid industry to the ground.

At least five.

petri alanko - welcome to the future (trials fusion)

Trials Fusion is a motorcycle-based platform racing/stunt game set in the year x-thousand, made specifically for people too scared, lazy or indifferent to learn how to ride a real motorcycle.

To help ease their transition into the world of adrenalin-charged death-biking, developer Ubisoft commissioned BAFTA-winning composer Petri Alanko to write the game's main theme music, which doubles as its menu music — which means that it doesn't matter how many BAFTAs you have, your song is going to be a repetitive piece of shit. You just didn't have to make it a synth-fuelled, European-space-rock-opera-shaped piece of shit.

It bears mentioning that the future in which Trials Fusion dumps you is deceptively dystopian — I wasn't kidding about the "death-biking" thing; at the end of every race, your rider invariably takes a fatal tumble off a cliff or into explosive barrels or whatever. So you're essentially just churning through rider after rider as you go through the game, sending each one to their inevitable, visually flashy doom so you can claim another medal and maybe beat that asshole from work who keeps pipping you on the leaderboard.

"NOT SO FAST NOW, ARE WE, HAROLD?"

Also, regardless of the fact that many lyrics sites (and Alanko himself, via the game's Audio Designer) claim otherwise, nothing will convince me those opening lines are not, "Welcome to the future! / Man! Machine! The future!" — which honestly gives the whole song an appropriately glistening sheen made entirely of not giving a fuck.

exile - indestructible (street fighter iv)

The best (and possibly only redeeming) thing about Indestructible is arguably its inherently polarising nature. In validating my decision to include it on this list, I discovered that, generally, fans of the game seem to either (unironically) love it and will actually lose touch with reality and attempt to conjure up a hadouken to hurl at you if you so much as giggle at it, or they hate it to the point of ritually muting the game until they're actually in one of the titular street fights, because you don't want to miss the hyper-realistic sounds of a 137-kilogram sumo wrestler getting sweaty with a malnourished spiritualist practising the most demented form of yoga in history.

"I don't— I don't know how to fight this." (Pic via Geeks Of Doom)

Even Capcom knew this song was awful — when they released Super Street Fighter IV in 2010, two years after SFIV's release, they added a bunch of features — new characters, a few aesthetic tweaks and such — but they took out one very obvious thing, and that was Exile's Indestructible.

To be fair, changing theme music in the Street Fighter franchise isn't unprecedented — but Super Street Fighter IV didn't change the theme so much as they just cut out the first minute-and-a-half of boppy cock-rock to cut straight to an extended re-cut of the amped-up second half of the original song, which is way better and far more in line with getting someone in the mood to do some streetside face-stompin' than however you want to describe what Exile pissed out.

unknown artist - rave rush (san francisco rush)

"Shit, I have a deadline on this theme song I haven't even started writing yet. OK. Think, man. I know it's, like, 1996 and technology hasn't really hit the standard where I can hire a super-sweet band like Exile to come and perform a proper song that can be recorded in full quality and fit on a game cartridge, but I also know (somehow) that GoldenEye will next year manage to use the relatively tame processing powers of the Nintendo 64 to recreate the Bond theme music with surprisingly capable polyphony, and in 2001 Conker's Bad Fur Day will blow everyone out of the water with its rich and varied soundtrack... Hmm. CONUNDRUM. I guess I could call Gary and tell him that I've dropped the ball and need more time to be able to create something worth his and his customers' money. That would be responsible. Wouldn't want to put out a game that we're less than happy with, right? Right...

"Buuut... I guess I could also just do a shitload of heroin and smash my face into an old MIDI keyboard programmed with nothing but arbitrary throat-howling and trumpet sounds for six hours and see what pops out."

mickey rourke - rogue warrior end credits rap

Hey, remember Rogue Warrior? The soul-crushingly awful Bethesda Studios-made game featuring Mickey Rourke as an annoyingly death-defying protagonist, and that I once described as being "as well-received as personalised photos of the company's CEO with his dick in customers' mouths while they slept"? ...Oh. No, no. That's OK. Don't worry about it. I write these things for fun.

And the many riches that journalism affords me.

Anyway, the only other notable thing about the mercifully short game — which, believe me, is otherwise unbearable — is its end credits, which also feature Rourke, but now he's goddamn rapping, opening with the hella streetwise line, "Fuckin' ninja-style," and then descending into a swirl of downtempo funk overlaid with Mickey cussing at the listener a whole bunch and ranting like a crazy old man about Commies getting in his way and probably having to murder them by shoving the sharpened blade of capitalism down their throats.

Side note: I honestly do not think I have ever heard a rapper use the word "Commie" before. (Is it fair to call Rourke a rapper in this context? "Someone who raps"? ...Eh, seems clunky. Moving on.)

Emerald Hill, Spike Shellcracker & Oscar Oberheim - king of the ring (Sonic The Hedgehogthe album)

What has four lines, pounds away for a little more than three minutes before collapsing on itself, and isn't the coked-up raver you brought home last night?

That's right: King Of The Christ-Humping Ring.

Although, if you did take home a coked-up raver last night, this is for you.

While not strictly a video-game song, in the sense that it didn't actually ever appear in a game, the Sonic The Hedgehog-themed King Of The Ring, taken from inexplicable release Sonic The Hedgehog — The Album, is simply too batshit insane to not acknowledge here. Never mind that the Sonic franchise has been responsible for some of the straight-up worst video game music in human historyKing Of The Ring was released as a legitimate single in 1997, which those of you who are old enough to recall will remember as a time positively littered with other "legitimate" songs that sounded exactly like this. It was as though dance-pop musicians had a collective aneurysm and suddenly decided that casually building up the beat to JACKHAMMER was the only trick they'd ever need.

Seriously, this song is the aural equivalent of being forced to watch Aqua get willingly fucked by the Vengaboys while every '90s trance DJ ever films it and jacks off into your eye. 

...Excuse me. I have a porno I need to pitch. 

bonus: crazy bus

Hey, D-grade Venezuelan video games with randomly generated, atonal, utterly cacophonous digital noise that passes for menu music are video games too, you know. And hearing it slowed down is quite simply the stuff of nightmares.

Like, waking-up-in-a-darkened-empty-space-station-completely-alone-except-you-realise-those-twins-from-The-Shining-are-there-but-holy-shit-they-actually-look-like-your-parents-and-they're-very-disappointed-in-you-style nightmares.

You're welcome.