In celebration of game composer Chis Huelsbeck’s 50th birthday on March 2nd, the artists known as the German Remix Group have put together a tribute album paying homage to the music Huelsbeck has created for games in the past 25 years.
Literally titled A Tribute to Chris Huelsbeck, the album features 19 tracks of remixes and covers of the composers work across several games he’s worked on, including Turrican, Turrican 2, The Great Giana Sisters, Jim Power and more. It even includes SID medley, which Huelsbeck created a slew of from the Commodore 64.
A Tribute to Chris Huelsbeck is currently available on Bandcamp for digital purchase at the Name-Your-Price tier and a proper nod to the history of an amazing composer.
A remix album paying tribute to Nintendo’s MOTHER series titled “Psychokinetic” has been released by video game cover band Bad Dudes. Originally a part of the “You Are Now EarthBound” Kickstarter campaign run by Fangamer in 2014, the album is now available separately for the first time.
“Fangamer’s Kickstarter aimed to deliver the ultimate EarthBound fan’s dream package – a guidebook for the game, a documentary about the effects of EarthBound in the United States, a fan zine, lots of collectible knick-knacks, and our album.
Backer Emile Rosales challenged me by requesting two pieces of short, ambient music from EarthBound to arrange: ‘Crossing Space and Time’ and ‘The Place.’ I drew from my experience playing the game and applying my senses of both wonder and terror as you learn the true nature of this cave and what it means for your party.” – Mustin, Bad Dudes Founder
Separate of the Kickstarter campaign, a limited number of physical copies produced for the campaign are still available, housing both Part 1 and Part 2 of the digital collection in a sleek DVD case alongside a booklet containing credits and track commentary, along with digital copies of the albums available on several digital outlets.
You can purchase the physical copies of the Psychokinetic double album on the Mustin Enterprises website, with Part 1 and Part 2 being available on both Bandcamp and Spotify.
March 21st marked the 20 year anniversary of the Nintendo 64 cult classic Blast Corps (specifically the Japanese release), and composer Graeme Norgate commemorated the occasion by releasing a new mix from his original soundtrack. The new free track “Blast Corps – Replay – 20 Years!” receives the same cleaned up rearrangement as his previous Blast Corps track, “J-Bomb 2014 from Blast Corps”. Here’s the original “Replay” track from the N64 game if you don’t immediately notice the improvements.
While “J-Bomb” was released in 2014 as a teaser to a full length Blast Corps Re:Constructed album it seems the project has been put on hold. Norgate replied to comments on his Facebook page about completing the rearranged album by stating “I’d love to, maybe one day”.
For now fans will have to get by with his latest offering or maybe check out Mega Beardo’s remix from the game on the massive Tribute Album 64 released last Fall.
In terms of mashups between musical genres and styles, I can safely say combining EDM and A Capella was never one I thought about before. However, Youtube VGM vocal star Smooth McGroove teamed up with the people at GameChops and decided “Why the heck not?”. Thus, we have Smooth McGroove Remixed Volume 2.
Remixed by music producers like A_rival, Dj CUTMAN, Grimecraft, and James Landino., the album features licensed EDM remixes of classic videogame music from Super Mario 64, Undertale, Pokemon, Mega Man and many more based on the the a capella talents of Mr. McGroove. The album is available now for purchase on ITunes and Google play, on Spotify for your listening pleasure, or you can just watch the neat music videos like the one above.
I can safely say that an a capella of Castlevania‘s “Vampire Killer” remixed into a danceable electronic music was never something I asked for, but I’m appreciative at the quality put into the production of such a chimera of VGM and can say I give such an effort a thumbs up.
There’s been a lot of Gamechops material coming out lately, and a lot of Pokémon activity going on in the gaming world. It thus just makes sense that the two would eventually combine.
For your viewing pleasure, you can check out Grimecraft‘s interesting take on the Pokémon bike theme paired with footage from the games, cartoon series, and custom CG segments by Curse Gamepedia. (And an additional little musical shoutout at the very end.)
The music comes from Grimecraft’s 2013 PokéEP, which you can grab for free over on his Bandcamp page.
For all you Overwatch fans, the good people over at Gamechops have released a new remix of music from the game. The single “The World Could Always Use More Heroes“, created by Curly, mastered by Steven “bLiNd” Silo and master by DJ Cutman, also comes with a special extra music video with animations from PlayOverwatch.
As always you can find more remixes (including future Overwatch arrangements) over on the Gamechops Youtube page.
Here at Original Sound Version, we truly ask the burning questions that any true fan of video game music has discussed at one point in their lives or another. Michael started the question of what favorite versions of some of the most popular and heavily remixed tunes from iconic gaming franchises are your own, starting with Donkey Kong Country‘s “Aquatic Ambiance“. Now it’s my turn to pick your brain about arguably the most well-known and therefore remixed track from the Castlevania franchise – the original Castlevania‘s iconic stage 1 music, “Vampire Killer”.
It was hard for me to choose which Castlevania track I wanted to use for this question, as “Vampire Killer”, Castlevania 2‘s “Bloody Tears, and Castlevania 3‘s “Beginning” (Or the “Big 3” as I call them.) are almost equally arranged in proportion across both the Castlevania franchise itself, as well as within the remixing community. However, it feels right to start at the very beginning (No pun intended) with “Vampire Killer”, which was composed by the duo of Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima in 1986.
“Vampire Killer” – Castlevania
The tune is catchy and full of determination, which made it perfect for first-time players and veterans alike to start off their journey to Dracula with. It’s had several iterations within the Castlevania franchise over the years, showing up arranged in later games such as Dracula’s Curse (As castle track “Deja Vu”), Super Castlevania 4, Rondo of Blood, Legends, Dawn of Sorrow and more. It serves as that constant reminder of the series’s ties to one another and of that first faithful trek we took as Simon Belmont. If I had to choose my favorite iteration of the track from within the series, I’ve grown to truly love Castlevania: The Arcade‘s part-organ, part-rock synth version played during the first boss fight.
Video credit of Nyx Cyan
The track has also been remixed by the fan community in just about every style imaginable, from the jazzy swing of Nostalvania to the electric grooves of Zircon and everywhere in between, to the point of near-exhaustion. Yet “Vampire Killer” persists as one of the most recognized video game tracks in gaming history, and still manages to inspire creativity and energy from musical vampire hunters to this day.
So what is your favorite version or arrangement of “Vampire Killer”? Do you have several? Let us know in the comments!
