‘EarthBound’: how psychedelic pop shaped the strangest video game soundtrack of the 1990s

Posted On December 1, 2024December 1, 2024

Video games are often looked down upon as being a childish hobby, but there are plenty of reasons why they’re just as much of a legitimate art form as other mediums that we digest. The storytelling has the capacity to have just as much depth as a film or book would, and the visual aspects are often so detailed or stylised that they can’t be dismissed as being lesser than other forms of visual art. That’s not to mention that the soundscapes and soundtracks that we hear in the background are often just as important to the game as any other part, and sometimes they’re good enough to listen to on their own.

There have been many examples of where popular artists have contributed to soundtracks for video games, with the Police and Curved Air drummer Stewart Copeland providing the soundtrack to the first three Spyro the Dragon games and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh having a hand in the music heard in Crash Bandicoot and The Sims franchises. In both of these cases, their own musical footprints can be seen across the soundtracks they created rather than folding into a creative brief. Copeland’s trademark polyrhythms and interest in new-age spiritualist music can both be heard as you traverse fantastical levels, while the bizarre staccato riffs of Devo come through on Mothersbaugh’s soundtracks.

While the music used in video games has been allowed to get more complex with time due to the advancements in the hardware used in gaming consoles allowing for polyphonic sound, the earliest consoles were limited to just a few tracks of sound at a time, meaning that composers had to be clever with the way they used sound in order for it to fit onto the cartridges and be played at the highest possible quality. In the case of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), it only had the capacity to use eight channels at a 16-bit sample rate, but that didn’t prevent those composing music for the console from really pushing the boat out.

Keiichi Suzuki and Hirozaku Tanaka, the composers behind the soundtrack for the cult classic video game EarthBound released in 1994, were shrewd in how they utilised the channels, often incorporating samples from other songs to be used as an instrument in order to conserve space on the cartridge. However, that didn’t mean that the compositions they were coming up with weren’t elaborate or lacking in any sort of depth due to the minimal resources they were working with, and they were heavily inspired by some of the most forward-thinking artists in the world of psychedelic pop when it came to the ways in which they presented the game’s ethereal soundtrack.

For a very brief synopsis of the game, a small boy with psychic abilities summons three other children to help save the world from an alien invasion – which, when cut down to size, is quite reductive of its actual scope. The overall offbeat nature of the game, its vibrant colour palette and its goofy sense of humour lend itself incredibly well to being soundtracked by psychedelic sounds, and those with attentive ears will be able to hear nods to the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd scattered throughout, along with a few other nuggets of inspiration and samples across the game.

There are two Beatles songs that are directly sampled in the soundtrack, with the drum beat from the beginning of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ is being used during a sequence where the characters travel through a half-man-half dungeon hybrid, while the horn fanfare from ‘All You Need Is Love’ is warped beyond belief as they enter the caves to fight the final boss. This section of the game is also where another notable sample in the soundtrack is used, as the eerie voices heard in the depths of the caves are actually directly sampled from the delightful harmonies of ‘Deirdre’ by The Beach Boys.

The remainder of the soundtrack makes plenty more acknowledgements of psychedelic pop and classic rock, with some songs paying direct homage to Pink Floyd, The Who and Chuck Berry. The sections of the soundtrack that don’t borrow heavily or use samples from existing materials also lean heavily in this direction, with the slight unease and anxiety that can often be felt in the summery music of the genre being reflected in the game’s overall tone. The soundtrack aside, the amount of other references the game makes to pop music is endless, with characters such as Starmen and Diamond Dog both alluding to the work of David Bowie, while the in-game band known as the Runaway Five are a clear Blues Brothers rip.

While the game might appear outdated now considering how far technology has come in 30 years, its soundtrack still holds up as one of the finest of its era, and a loving embrace of psychedelic pop and the culture that surrounded it. There’s plenty of connections to be drawn throughout, and considering the limited resources it was made with, the ways in which they pay tribute to the music of the movement is sublime.

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