It just popped into my head the other day as I was (still, forever) cleaning up my music collection: what single game has the most music. The few that sprang to my mind were Final Fantasy games with their multi-disc soundtracks and Ocarina of Time that squeezes 82 songs onto a single disc. But that’s just in my own personal experience and I knew there had to be gargantuan soundtracks out there I was completely oblivious too. So I did what inquisitive minds have done for eons when a question exceeds their realm of understanding; I asked reddit. And, boy, did the r/gamemusic subreddit respond in kind. This is by no means comprehensive or scientific but here are some of the games that got thrown my way.
Runescape is a name I’ve heard for quite a while (14 years it turns out) but I’ve never known anyone into it or gone looking for myself. In the process of writing this post I finally did look it up and, oh, it’s an MMO. That explains why I’ve never gotten into it. Anyways, according to the Runescape Wikia there are 1,055 music tracks available in the game as of August 24th, 2015. Potentially more astounding, I’ve seen it mentioned that much of the music is presented in triplicate with new versions arranged for the Runescape 2 and 3 upgrades of the game.
Also out of my wheelhouse is Blizzard’s perpetual MMO, World of Warcraft. The closest thing I could find for confirmation is this YouTube playlist consisting of 547 tracks. As it was last updated in September 2014 it doesn’t include the 53 tracks from the Warlords of Draenor expansion which would bring it to an even 600. Blizzard also announced another expansion at GamesCom this year, Legion, which will surely add even more music.
Continuing the trend of games I’ve heard of but am mostly clueless about is EVE Online. It may not have the most individual tracks for a game but its base soundtrack of 74 songs is nearly seven hours long. Add in an extra 26 from the expansions and another 20+ tracks of mission-specific music and it’s another juggernaut of a soundtrack.
Finally, something I know. Well, I know most of the source material from Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, if not the spastic fighting game itself. You could argue against it as it’s basically a huge compilation of existing music but I’m throwing it in. Encompassing a huge swath of Nintendo’s history, and an increasing range of third-party properties, the current Smash’s soundtrack weighs in at over 450 tracks.
To round things up I also got mentions of this eight hour playlist from the original version of The Sims (with expansions), a link to Bayonetta’s ridiculous 5-disc, 150-song soundtrack and a great comment about the biggest soundtracks for the Commodore 64 and NES. Lastly, a few people pointed out that the most technically correct answer would be games with randomly or procedurally generated music. Proteus, Spore, Peggle 2, and Fez all use scripting to build a score based on what is happening to the player at the moment. These could result in thousands, maybe even millions, of different musical combinations that would never be repeated. It’s an accurate point but I don’t think it falls in line with the spirit of my original question. By the way, neither do games with licensed soundtracks like Rock Band which, at one point, was up to 1,692 tracks.
So, dear OSV readers, what do you think? Which individual game (expansions or not, it’s up to you) has the most music? Ring in with your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments and maybe we’ll get a little closer to a definitive answer.
