This is why The Young Folks’ Music section and Video Games section decided to collaborate on this massive list to amass our personal favorite 100 Best Video Game Soundtracks of All Time to celebrate the unique medium, to not only satisfy our nostalgia, but so I can make a new Spotify playlist for myself like a freak who needs 26-hour playlists to write to. Now, not only do games fit equally onto cartridges and CDs, sometimes it’s designed through full orchestra, through collaboration with rock and roll artists, or even is fundamental to the flow of the game itself, and now the ancient downsampled 16-bit themes of the 1980s and 1990s have been homaged and superseded by some of the best indie games out there. But in the near half-decade since that title, music in games, and the idea of music in games has evolved and flourished just as the overall gaming medium has. It requires a certain level of thinking and in the earliest days had to be coded directly into the game’s level design, resulting in the powerfully kinetic tune that introduced the world to Super Mario Bros.’ theme in 1986. Composing music for a video game is an entirely different beast than creating a SoundCloud single or producing a studio album. While video games have, as millions of elders have articulated over the years, “come such a long way since Pac-Man,” so too has its music in the form of OSTs or Original Soundtrack albums. No, it’s not just your nostalgia talking.

Yakuza 0 fight music