Look at this interview.
[Dave] When I write for video games. [Sola] Yeah?
[Dave] "Aquatic Ambiance". I know it's called "Aquatic Ambiance".
[Dave] But for years, it was The Water Level in DKC1.
When I write something, that's what it is.
The actual name? I've got no idea. [clip fades out]
This is David Wise, composer for the majority of the songs from the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy,
saying that for years, he had no idea what the title of his own composition was.
“Aquatic Ambience,”
one of the most famous video game songs to exist,
and the very person that composed it didn’t even have a name for it.
For records and albums and streaming services, it’s not just expected that each song you
release will have a title, it’s basically required.
There are exceptions to this, but these get filled with the astoundingly nondescript title of...
“Untitled”.
Game music is a different case.
You don't really "Untitled" very often.
So where do titles come from, if not from the person that composed the song?
It kind of depends on how you get the music out of the game in the first place.
There’s two methods:
the fans and the archivists that rip the music,
and the official sources.
The latter is far less common, and the former has to pull from a lot of sources to get any sort of title.
So, if you’re lucky, the game that you want to rip the music from has a sound test that includes song titles.
If you’re less lucky, these song titles are “BUGSPACE”, “BUGHAUNT, “BULLYBUG”...
As seen in “Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble”.
These titles seem a little dry, but they’re probably the closest you can get to the author’s intent.
Each of these are almost certainly the name of the project file that Andy Brock delivered
to the programmers.
As someone who has worked on similarly constrained deliverables: this naming convention is simply
The Method for organizing your work.
I can even confirm this with the few examples from leaked source code from old games:
For Top Gear, Barry Leitch called his songs Title, and Tune 1 through Tune 4.
Jereon Tel names his songs after sections in Winter Gold FX: Aerial, Downhill, title…
Sometimes you’ll get actual song titles in your soundtest,
maybe with a cool jukebox or custom graphics.
“Good Wine Makes Good Blood”, for example. From Tales of Phantasia.
Or from Battle Mania Daiginjou,
"Burning Heart".
These are most likely straight from the composer,
but it's possible that some programmer came up with the titles without asking.
I don’t have any examples pointing one way or the other.
I swear I’ve seen a sound test that actually names which composers worked on which song,
but I ca not remember where this was.
One of the thousands I’ve looked at.
The only ones I can remember are cases where the sole composer in the game is credited,
like here in Side Pocket, or in pretty much any game Yuzo Koshiro scored.
Still, it’s great when this happens as you can feel a more pure artistic intent,
which you can preserve when you're ripping the music from the game.
But you know what’s better?
The gold standard of releasing music: an album.
The official soundtrack for a game.
These have existed basically ever since games started having music.
In 1995, Nintendo Power released an OST for the original Donkey Kong Country,
and offered it as a promo to anyone in its Super Power Club.
This CD offered titles to songs that fans only knew from their level names.
This is where we first saw the title “Aquatic Ambiance”.
However, it’s also where David Wise learned that his song was titled “Aquatic Ambiance”.
Yeah.
Details about this CD are hard to come by.
Nobody even knows who came up with the titles beyond “probably someone at Nintendo of America".
Nonetheless, this is, by all measures, an Official release of The Soundtrack,
so the titles are canon now, and have been ever since.
Dave has even accepted it as such.
There’s a fuzzier case here, though.
Also in 1995, Neil Biggin was tasked with filling out the soundtrack for Loaded, a Playstation
game in the “extreme violence” genre.
This only meant adding a few songs, but after development finished, there was plenty of
room left on the CD.
Neil had a ton of original tunes laying around, and thought it’d be cool to fill the CD
with these, thus, y'know, giving them an audience.
Unfortunately, the price for this was forfeiting the intended names for these songs.
I can’t track down exactly what happened, but it looks like the game got a re-release
that included a tracklist, thus giving titles to each of those hidden tunes.
However, nobody asked Neil what these titles were supposed to be.
As such, you got this weird edgy fodder.
Like “Groove On The Corpse”, or “The Lanky Kill Song”, or
“Da Doodoo”...
Most of these are listed as just “Hidden track” on Neil’s soundcloud.
If you dig a little deeper, some names appear.
For example, “Groove on the Corpse'' is actually a short cut of a track from the CD32
version of Zool 2, where it had the title of… Ingame 7.
It was probably “Mount Ices” but I can’t get that far into the game to confirm, and
nobody has on youtube, either.
And even that was repurposed from an original song, giving a full lineage of titles from
“Dusk A Memory” to “Mount Ices” to “Groove on the Corpse”.
So then, what happens when the composer and the OST have differing opinions on what a
song title should be?
Who makes that decision?
Well, this is when we reach into the secret origin of song titles.
Very few games actually put out an official
soundtrack, especially as you go back into time.
Luckily, there’s a sizable group of dedicated people that tasked themselves with ripping,
organizing, and preserving the music from every game on certain systems.
Their names are sadly somewhat unknown, but their work is everywhere.
And they are very often tasked with the overly complicated question of
“what should this song be called”.
If there’s an OST available, then that’s almost always the source of the titles.
This even affects tracklisting, which is why you get some SPC rips that have a track list
implying Chrono Trigger came on 2 discs, for example.
If there’s no OST, you have to basically look through this entire video as a checklist.
Does the song only play for a certain level?
This is how you get titles like the hit song “Stage 6-1” from Alisia Dragoon.
It’s not glamorous, but it does copy what it says in the game.
But maybe the level has a name.
That’s how you got “Bramble Blast” from DKC2,
before the rip replaced it with “Stickerbrush Symphony” to match the OST.
Maybe the song only plays on certain types of levels.
This music plays when you’re underwater, therefore it shall be called “Underwater”.
(From Mighty Max!)
This is where I got the titles for my Dial Q rip.
Maybe there are no level names in the game and you don’t like the idea of calling your track “Volcano”.
If you’re lucky, the game's instruction manual gave a name to each of the levels.
This is how I landed on the title of “If You Can't Take the Heat, Get Out of the Volcano”
for level 2 of Chuck Rock on the Sega CD.
..though I don’t think I ever distributed this.
A quick way to figure out titles is to just
ask someone else.
Or better yet, cross-reference rips from ports of the game that you're looking at.
This is what I did for my rip of the Sega CD version of Mega Race.
Only one tune needed a new title, and it only played during the machine select,
so… easy enough.
But sometimes, you just have no idea.
Maybe the track is unused, or only appears in the sound test as a number.
There’s no OST and the only other port of the game is on the 3DO.
Nobody has a 3DO…
It looks unseemly to have a tracklist filled with funky fresh titles and then a single
track that’s just “Unused Song 2”.
In this case, it’s ok to come up with a new title that fits the theme.
No harm, really.
Unless an OST comes out later, or the original composer provides the proper names,
or someone actually looks into the 3DO version and discovers that the SNES song titled
“You Don't Mess With Da Judge!” is actually called “ORCHA HIT”.
That last one was actually my discovery, though I found it on the Genesis version,
not the 3DO. Jammit is kind of a weird complicated case.
But this isn't meant to throw any shade on the people that actually rip and name these soundtracks!
It’s a weird position.
In an ideal world, the name of every song would be easy to discern,
given by the person that composed it.
But in our world, every song title is built from a pile of compromises from the people
who try to preserve the song.
“Archivists are the arbiters of the titles of video game music” is a little dramatic,
but not entirely inaccurate.
I happen to be one of those.
If you’d like to listen to the music I’ve ripped, and maybe even read the titles,
I’ve got a playlist right here.
If you just like the music, then this channel is full of curated mixes of game music.
Mostly from Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo.
Check 'em out here.
Whatever the case, thanks for watching.