8GR8 #01: 8 Great Title Screen Themes

In 8GR8, we'll examine eight excellent pieces of video game music, loosely related by some sort of theme. Given it's the first installment, it's only fitting that we check out some great title screen themes.


In video games, where music often serves a more functional and workmanlike purpose than in other media, the title theme has extra burdens to bear. It's the song out on the front lines—the one that has to somehow encapsulate the overall feeling of the entire experience the player is about to explore. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, so that title screen really has to knock a player's socks off, or at least do its job better than "okay". Here are eight title screen intro themes that have gone way above and beyond the baseline job description and made it into my personal "classics" pantheon.


1. Puzzled - "Title Screen"
Composer: Thomas Mogenson
Platform/Year: Game Boy Color, 2001

This is one of my favorite random discoveries ever. What good is the Internet if you're just going to use it to listen to the same million-view songs over and over again? I've never even played this game. The song evokes memories of the Commodore 64 in the way that it's apparent that the bulk of the compositional effort was put into the title track. The whole soundtrack relies heavily on that trilling sound that appears far more often in chiptune compositions and so-called "de-mixes" than in actual video game songs and seems to most closely represent a Hammond organ, but it's deployed most tastefully on the title screen as a subtle call to the guitar's (or possibly saxophone's) funky responses.


2. Treasure Master - "Title Screen"
Composer: Tim Follin
Platform/Year: NES, 1991

You can hardly have a feature about title screen themes without mentioning Tim Follin. No matter what games he worked on, you could always count on Follin to manage previously inconceivable feats of wizardry with limited sound chips. Follin enjoyed working with the NES sound chip in particular, aptly citing its "character", and his soundtracks on the console rank among his best work. (Hardcore Gaming 101's user base ranked his title theme for Solstice third on their 2011 list of the 250 greatest Western video game songs.)

Distressingly often, one could count on a Tim Follin soundtrack to be the best part of an otherwise mediocre if not downright awful game. Treasure Master is no exception: a stoopid-hard platformer that instantly dated itself both with its ugly-as-sin box art and by yoking itself to a dumb MTV contest. This theme is actually somewhat of a remix of the Starsky and Hutch theme, but it's very well done: obvious enough to pick it out if you listen to them back-to-back, but subtle enough to stand as a tune on its own merits.


3. Castle Master - "Title Theme/In-Game Music"
Composer: Matt Furniss
Platform/Year: Amiga, 1990

It would be too easy to fill a list of great title screen themes with examples from the Commodore Amiga, so we'll just go with a representative that happens to be one of my personal favorites. The European computer's history is stacked with long, sprawling, and most importantly, amazing pieces of music. I found this one while playing a fanmade Lemmings level pack called PimoLems. It's been non-skip material in my VGM playlist ever since. This one's got atmosphere out the wazoo, and just when you think it's about to loop back around to the beginning, it tacks on another spooky segment.


4. Mega Man 3, "Title Screen"
Composer: Yusuaki Fujita
Platform/Year: NES, 1990

I could explore deep cuts all day long, but I should probably choose at least one song that makes this post remotely clickable. This was the first Mega Man game I ever played, and still my favorite, and a big part of it is the rush (no pun intended) I get from turning the game on and being greeted by that intro. Yes, Mega Man 3 is in some ways a highly flawed, rushed product, but it's got the coolest Robot Masters (yes, even Top Man) and the best title track of the series by a wide margin. Inafune can disown this game all he wants, and Capcom people can refer to Mega Man 9 as "the new Mega Man 3"; it'll still be my favorite. Does Mega Man 2 also have the bosses from 3 in it? I rest my case.

5. Spyro the Dragon, "Opening Theme"

Composer: Stewart Copeland

Platform/Year: PlayStation, 1998

Stewart Copeland is best known as the drummer for The Police, but before I ever bought my first copy of Outlandos D'Amour, his rock-star moment for me was composing the Spyro the Dragon soundtrack. Before Spyro hopped on the XTREME bandwagon a decade late and got sucked up and demoted to one more cog in the Skylanders machine, he was the star of his own series of bright, amiable collectathon platformers. Copeland's music incorporated all the elements the games put forward—fun and bouncy, a little rowdy at times, but also redolent with the weight of dragon history and legend. It's a more intriguing career move than Desert Rose, at any rate.


6. The Adventures of Willy Beamish, "Opening Theme"
Composers: Don Latarski, Chris Stevens
Platform/Year: Sega-CD, 1993

Some purists will try to tell you that Redbook audio was the beginning of the end for chip-based OSTs, but I personally can't get enough of the stuff. Before the bulk of more realistic VGM disappeared into a boring orchestral void, many games that featured Redbook audio contained wailing butt-rock guitars, cheesy saxophones, and myriad other instruments one on occasion feels somewhat sheepish about unabashedly enjoying. 

I get a real Saturday morning cartoon vibe from the Willy Beamish theme, which is unusual because I either don't remember a lot of theme songs sounding like this or didn't watch a lot of shows that featured such themes. The only show of the era I can think of that I watched and had such guitars is Mighty Max, though for no discernible reason, the song I always want to hear after this is the intro from the CBS cartoon of Where's Waldo?. In any event, of all the versions of this theme, the Sega-CD version with real instruments in my opinion captures the spirit of the game best.


7. RoboCop 3, "Title Screen"
Composer: Jeroen Tel
Platform/Year: NES, 1992

When I first heard this, I thought, "If this isn't the work of Tim Follin, I'll eat my hat." Consider my hat well and duly eaten.

In related news, Jeroen Tel is currently (as of this writing) crowdfunding a remix album of some of his best Commodore 64 themes, including the above. I don't often consider backing crowdfunded projects but this one definitely has my attention.


8. Metroid II: Return of Samus, "Title Theme"
Composer: Ryoji Yoshitomi
Platform/Year: Game Boy, 1991

When people think of a great Metroid game, they usually think of Super Metroid, and for good reason: it's the best one. But this Game Boy installment is my sentimental favorite. Unlike Super Metroid, which aims to impress the player with its atmosphere and give them a well-rounded experience, Metroid II's atmospherics convey darkness and discomfort. Despite being the most linear Metroid game (until Fusion came out, anyway), the player does not receive a map of any sort, and many of its branching caverns lack true music—only ambient, incidental creeps, crawls, and chitters. In that sense, the title theme is something of a statement of intent, starting with a series of incremental, off-pitch pings before building into a brief soaring moment of ecstasy that soon dies beneath a series of echoing explosions. It's only two minutes long, but it's kind of a chore to get through the whole thing. That's the thing about chores, though: when you finish them, you usually get some kind of reward from it.

6 Overdone Video Game Songs

To date, Cheese and Pixels has been far more Cheese than Pixel, albeit even then not that much of the former. I personally don't think I'm obligated to keep myself bound to one or two narrow lanes of interest, but really it's more because the only video game I've played in earnest of late is Rogue Legacy, and I haven't been able to collect my thoughts on that game in a cohesive fashion beyond "I liek dis", and so I've been filling C&P with other things as they come to me. I do mildly regret that I'll be kicking off my thoughts on the wide world of video games with a pile of hot takes that will earn me zero friends and fewer page views, but I doubt I'll lose sleep over it.

I fancy myself a connoisseur of video game music, insofar as I listen to it even when I'm not playing games and I listen to songs from games I've never even played before. So I've been listening to it for a good long while. And there are some songs that keep cropping up, that you can't get away from no matter what you do. They're good, oftentimes even great, but they're very surface picks, and people just never seem to get tired of them. Maybe I'm just human, but I sometimes get tired of things I hear over and over, and I also sometimes have an urge to say something about it. I don't hate any of these songs (not that that will stop anyone from thinking I do), but I definitely wouldn't be opposed to retiring them, or at least shelving them for a decade or so.

1. Super Mario Bros. — World 1-1

If you're my age (30) or so, there's a good chance this was the first video game song you ever heard. It's as catchy as classics come. If you're my dad, however, it's also the only video game song you've ever heard.

My dad hates video game music. There were very few games he ever deigned to play in the first place, and when playing those he did, he turned the sound off. Those six notes, however, remain stuck in his craw. Until the day I moved out, there was no occasion in which my dad walked in the room while I was playing a video game that did not result in him going "doo doo doot doo-doot doot!". Video games were the Pavlov's bell that made those six notes come from his mouth. It did not matter what I was playing. It always happened. One time I wasn't even playing a video game. I was watching Law & Order.

Because I hate being a curmudgeon for too extended a period of time, I'll try when possible to counter my awful hot takes with a version of the song under the guillotine that I enjoy listening to. In this case, you get two! Both from OCRemix (longtime slogan: "Where Production Values Matter More Than Having Fun").

The first is "Dirty Mix", which samples "Ring of Fire" and is responsible for why I sometimes repeatedly say "noodles" in a terrible Brooklyn accent for what appears to be no reason:

And second is "The Life and Death of the Mario Brothers", which makes me wish I wasn't too old to use the word "molly" without being laughed at by kids who haven't eaten enough:

2. Super Mario Bros. — World 1-2

You know a game has reached legendary status when it has two songs you're tired of hearing. This one has an extra layer of annoying because no one ever sings it correctly. They always sing the doo-doos on the downbeat and stress the first doo in the couplet, when you're supposed to space them out a little more and stress the second doo. It's difficult to demonstrate in writing, but accept that I'm right and we'll move on.

There is an absolutely fantastic version of this song called "Plumber's Cave" that was supposed to be in Wario Land: Shake It! for the Wii, but didn't make the final cut. I recall reading that the song was omitted because the developers didn't feel like it fit the style of the rest of the game. Evidently the style of the game wasn't COMPLETELY BADASS, because this song gives you your 100 percent daily recommended allowance of it. I mean, listen to that jazz flute! LISTEN TO IT!

3. The Legend of Zelda — Overworld Theme

How many times can they make an orchestral version of this song and not expect me to fall asleep within the first five seconds? Straight-up orchestral music is the most boring VGM. I can listen to classical music any time I want. I'm showing my age and era bias pretty flagrantly here, but I don't care and I don't really want to have an argument about what "real" video game music is.

No fancy remixes for this one, more of a simple re-arrangement: the version that appears in Link's Awakening. The fourth Zelda adventure is for me a heavy sentimental favorite, because it was the first Zelda game I owned and really had a chance to dig into, but I like the mystical yet more heroic turn that it takes in the second half of its loop.

4. DuckTales — The Moon

People are always going on about how great this song is. Once again, I can't dispute that it is an excellent piece of music, and its massive popularity is proof that licensed video games, considered terrible so often that there's a word for games that add to that mountain of failure, are capable of adding meaningfully to the mythos of a property. But it's not the best song in the DuckTales NES game. It's not even second. Most days, I would place it third, and depending on how I'm feeling about the Transylvania theme on a given day, I might even slip it in at fourth. 

This is borne out in the fact that the Moon theme isn't anywhere near the best part of the DuckTales Remastered soundtrack either. As spotless a reputation as it has, you would think it would have gotten the most love and attention. Not so much, as it turns out. It barely gets an update at all—virtually no changes to the melody with only a short almost ambient jam that goes nowhere. I'm not asking for an OCRemix-level reinterpretation, but that's seriously weak. Compare the Amazon theme, which you can tell by its interpretation has captured so much more of Jake Kaufman's heart. Listen to how happy those bass and flutey synths to be in there. I'll even take dubstep Transylvania over the limp-noodle Moon remaster.

5. Mega Man 2 — Dr. Wily's Castle, Stage 1

This one, I actually get the fuss about. Mega Man 2 was such a huge improvement over the first one that at least some of its component elements, if not the whole game itself, were bound to become emblematic of the series. In fact, it probably represents the biggest-ever improvement from one installment of a video game series to the next outside of Super Mario Bros. 2 [Japan][1] to 3. But people just refuse to let go of this one. There are so many other tracks from other games in this venerable series that I'm inclined to reach for first, and as for this game, I'm more of a funk lord, so the Crash Man theme is my jam.[2] Mega Man is such a wide-ranging series with so many great pieces of music that it seems a shame to keep slobbing this one song's knob over and over again. It all reminds me of the time I was eating at this wing joint and they were playing Nickelback and Finger Eleven and other similar bands over the speakers, and when the song ended, it turned out they were on satellite radio. Like, why pay all that money for Sirius/XM when you're just going to tune the dial to the same stuff you've heard a million times everywhere else? Are you feeling me here?

6. Final Fantasy VII — One-Winged Angel

Maybe I should cut this one some slack. There are now so many Final Fantasy entries of such wavering quality that it's important to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think only trolls and the truly hateful would argue that VII should be in the latter category. But given the choice between this track and "Dancing Mad", are you seriously telling me you're not going to take "Dancing Mad" every single time? "Dancing Mad" is one of the easiest 18-minute songs to listen to, with its operatic prog-rock sweep and gradually increasing intensity, whereas I can barely stand one minute of Latin chanting in "One-Winged Angel" and that seven minutes feels like an eternity. It's that combined with the fact that Sephiroth seems like a bit of a ninny compared to Kefka. Also, this game used to be everywhere all the time, even well into the PS2 era. Final Fantasy VI never got to be everywhere all the time. Maybe I have a complex about this. Or perhaps I've just been listening to too much Axe of the Blood God.

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[1] We're all aware of the fluke that is Super Mario Bros. 2/USA, and the prospect of of yet again rehashing the most basic facts of its genesis is exhausting. Suffice it to say that since it's so much its own thing, I don't consider Super Mario Bros. 3 a natural outgrowth of its mechanics and style, and I really doubt anyone else does either.

[2] Until just now, I thought this song was lost to the mists of time, but if you go to vgmixarchive.com and listen to "crashman jam working title", you'll get a six-minute slice of fried funky gold, and it even has that oh-so-90s "pssh come on!" sample in it. Was pretty sure it used to be called "Crash Beat Boombox", but I'll take it in any form I can get it.