As a fan of late-90’s techno and drum & bass music I made a lot of crummy recordings from games that never stood a chance of getting an official soundtrack release. Nearly 20 years later I assumed it would only be me who made the next highest quality recordings so I was surprised to see that Throwback Entertainment beat me to it. The Canadian studio made headlines in 2006 after they bought up nearly 200 of Acclaim’s properties when the publisher went bankrupt. It’s been a long time coming but Throwback is finally bringing some of those old games back to market.
The first with a focus on the music is TrickStyle which was originally released on Dreamcast and PC in 1999. The futuristic hoverboard racer from Criterion Games was quite a sight at the time but the music by Richard Beddow stuck with me much longer. The version that Throwback released to Steam on February 21st includes the 11-track soundtrack as free DLC in OGG and MP3 formats. For those wondering, both the Dreamcast and PC versions had the same soundtrack.
Things are a little more complicated for Throwback’s April release of Extreme-G 2. Probe’s 1998 combat racer was released on both Nintendo 64 and PC where its soundtrack from Simon Robertson and Steve Root exist in similar but unique forms. On PC there are vocals, samples and more layers to the trancey music, not to mention a few extra tracks. The Nintendo 64 version is much simpler but it’s still one of the most impressive soundtracks to come out of the console and the version that I personally know by heart.
When I asked about Extreme-G 2’s upcoming Steam release on their Facebook page, Throwback teased that “we are planning a little surprise . . . with the soundtracks”. Hopefully that results in a complete package with both PC and N64 versions represented but we’ll have to wait a little while longer to find out.
