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So Bad They're Good

Let's Go Away - Daytona USA (sample)

Privledged with being one of the first songs anyone thinks of when the subject of bad game music is brought up, Let's Go Away is one of those tunes that refuses to leave your head once it arrives. From the masterful and poetic lyrics (This is your crew chief / The course is really tough / But it's a beautiful day / So good luck) to the slight but unmistakable Japanese accent in the vocals, this is one of the archetypal bad game songs. Though some unforunates who were working in arcades in the mid '90s now have a violent, foaming reaction to the opening "doot do doot do doot", most people recognize that this song is simply too goofy not to like. The band attempted to overcome their musical inadequacies with sheer energy, which served only to highlight how damned silly the whole thing is. That positive attitude is infectious, but please, be careful who you share it with.

Wild Canyon - Sonic Adventure 2 (sample)

I'm gonna get those fools
They want to play with my emeralds?
They playin' with the wrong guy

The catalog of Sonic games from the Dreamcast era and beyond alone could provide enough material for two editions of this list, and it seems to only get more ridiculous with each iteration. Not only did they get Gunnar Nelson to do a song for Sonic Heroes, but then what they gave him was the Team Chaotix theme. The man had a number one hit in 1990 and now he's singing about detective crocodiles.

But there's one thing dumber than Ricky Nelson's son singing "danger hides when the hyper bee flies" with a straight face, and that's Knuckles rapping. The choice to make Knuckles "street" was bad enough, but then someone had the bright idea to have the rapper speak as the character. Knuckles doesn't have a whole hell of a lot interesting to say, so the lyrics mostly fall back on talking about emeralds (he does this a lot) and describing what's going on. Imagine playing Super Mario Bros. while someone in the background mumbles "I'm hoppin' on turtles, then I'm jumpin' over holes, then I'm hoppin' on more turtles" and you'll get an idea of what it's like. The line "I can't see a thing but it's around somewhere" from the Pumpkin Hill theme is unfortunately a pretty accurate description of the gameplay in Knuckles' levels.

The first line of Wild Canyon is "Ek-i-do-na, that's what I'm representin'", and I can't figure out if he was making a poor attempt at producing urban slang, or if no one in the studio actually knew how to pronounce echidna. Should've gone with echidnizzle.

Beast From The East, Mix 2 - Biohazard 2 reMIX ~met@morPhoses~ (sample)

While technically not from the game itself, I couldn't pass up mentioning this mix from a Biohazard 2 (aka Resident Evil 2) arrange album released only in Japan. The music itself is fine -- a heavy techno mixture of various songs from the RE2 soundtrack, like Secure Place and T-A. But layered on top of this is an increasingly insane voice over dispensing cheery slogans perfect for next year's Valentine's cards ("Your lord and master is my dog. Let me feed him"), and culminating in a minute-long disjointed monologue which strongly suggests the speaker has body parts stored in his freezer. It's hammy, but is also more well-acted than anything actually in RE2.

The only question is that I have no idea where this is supposed to be from or what it's about. I didn't follow the Resident Evil series all that closely, but as I understand it, the only Chris of note is Chris Redfield. He's not even in RE2, nor is he crazy, nor was there anyone pretending to be Chris. Maybe someone more familiar with the games can clue me in, because I must be missing something.

Birthday Cake - Jet Set Radio Future (sample)

All right, let's get set to go here, gonna map out a good line, do lots of tricks, just let me get AAGGH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT

The Jet Set Radio games were all about style. And apparently the height of style is not just bold lines, thumping beats, and flashy moves, but a small Japanese woman screaming about cake into a bullhorn pressed against your ear. As with the other songs in this category, Birthday Cake gets away with being bad only because it's so Goddamned ridiculous. But I still won't hold it against you if you muted the TV every time it came on. If you've only ever heard the song in JSRF, you may want to check out the unedited version at least once just for the single, completely out of the blue vulgarity. It really does make a difference.

So Bad They're Bad

Cruis'n USA - Cruis'n USA (sample)

While not quite as infamous as Let's Go Away, Nintendo had its own arcade racer with bad intro music in the mid '90s. It highlights an important distinction between the good and bad categories of bad music, as Daytona's song had an unrelenting peppiness that gave it a kind of goofy charm, whereas this... Well this just sucks. The arcade's soundtrack wasn't stellar to begin with, but once squeezed through the N64's limp sound processor two years later, it became damn near unlistenable. The seven tracks that made up the in-game radio's selection all sounded like amateur MIDI compositions that you'd hear in a $10 Windows 3.1 shareware title.

Besides, it's more fun to shout DAAYYYTOOONNNAAAA than mumble cruuussnnn... eeheyyeh.. yu essayy..

Let's Get It On - Street Fighter 3 (sample)

Rap music made specifically for video games never turns out well. It's like hearing your parents try to rap. The elements are there, you can tell what it's trying to be, and yet somehow it's just.. wrong. At least this guy attempts to rhyme, which is more than I can say for Knuckles, but the song loses out anyway just for pure literalism.

Select and make your first pick
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six
Choose and pick the best one
Five, four, three, two, one

Thanks for the protip, chief, I was a little confused as to the goal of the character select screen. Double penalty for rhyming "one" with itself, but the gravest offense of all: No Mills Lane to be found in the track's entire five minute length. Or Marvin Gaye, for that matter. Now that would be some awesome fighting game music.

Main Theme - Back To The Future (sample)

"Main Theme" isn't an official title, that's one I just made up. Here's a better one: Only Theme. Yes, I hope you liked that sample, because you're going to hear it again and again through the entire length of the game. Title screen! (dunnadunnadunnaDUN-NA) Walking around and collecting clocks! (dunnadunnadunnaDUN-NA) Being attacked by hula-hoop girls and giant bees for some reason! (dunnadunnadunnaDUN-NA) Going to a cafe and throwing sodas at people! (dunnadunnadunnaDUN-NA) Collecting more clocks! (dunnadunnadunnaDUN-NA)

Needless to say, the game sucked and the music just acted as further punishment for daring to buy a game because you liked the license.

I Am The Wind - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (sample)

Turn this song on and close your eyes. You can see it, can't you? The blond woman in the recording studio, eyes closed, hand holding one side of a set of headphones to her ear (she probably calls them cans since she's "in the biz"), warbling into a mic with a big round pop screen while her lip quivers with emotion, a giant screen in the background playing a montage of scenes from Symphony of the Night, none of which are really at all connected with the song. It's all just so damned "the hit single from Disney's latest masterpiece" that half-way through you've already forgotten you were fighting Dracula with a giant floating crucifix two minutes ago and now you're just waiting for Peabo Bryson to join in on the last verse right before the credit comes up informing you that the soundtrack is available on Columbia Records and you should buy the Bantam book. Big shout out to Kenny G for helping out with the music there.

Wings - Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (sample)

I struggled to choose between Wings and Wind's Nocturne, aka Luna's boat song. Neither song is terrible, really -- just kinda.. amateurish.

Pop songs have been a mainstay of anime forever, and by the Playstation era they started popping up like weeds in every RPG pressed to a disc. This created an issue for translators, who have had different solutions over the years: Replace the music entiely (still a popular choice today for afternoon kids anime), leave it in and try to subtitle it as best as possible (the choice for most modern non-kids anime), or have the original singer do a version in English (as seen in recent RPGs like Kingdom Hearts and FFX-2). Working Designs wasn't satisfied with any of these choices, however, and thus decided to commit one of the cardinal sins of translation: Keeping the original music and overdubbing it with a different singer and different lyrics. As anyone who has seen an anime theme subtitled can attest, a literal translation of the original words tends to create a floaty, ethereal, barely coherent mess, so the writer has to completely redo them while trying to remain in the "spirt" of the original. This unfortunately turns something you might see on a t-shirt at Engrish.com:

Sometime we will surely meet --
as the charming future
beckons us on.

Into something you'd see on a 14-year old's Geocities page entitled "~LuNa_6969~'s Nall/Ghaleon Fanfic and Poetry Page":

In your dreams
Love is the plot
carried on wings of hope

Wherein the writer believes that they'll make something beautiful and romantic if they just put in enough references to dreams, hope, souls, and hearts. And one other thing: "All things are real unless you dream they're not"? What the hell is that?

Clayfighter - Clayfighter (sample)

Interplay had a weird obsession with new technology. If you look back over their history, you see numerous games that were notable specifically for some technical achievement, from the fluid animation of BlackThorne to the vector graphics of Out Of This World. Likewise, Clayfighter was a fighting game with clay models and backgrounds probably less because it was a good idea and more because no one had done it before. But that wasn't enough. It was decided Clayfighter should also be the first game to have it's own theme song with real digitized vocals! Surely that will make the game better!

This was the result. Who knows how much cartridge space taken up for a handful of heavily compressed, choppy lyrics that you'd hear once, go "huh, how about that", and then never listen to again. Worse still, once you were done listening to the music, you actually had to face the prospect of playing Clayfighter.

So Bad They're A Leading Cause of Cancer

The DK Rap - Donkey Kong 64 (sample)

I've actually heard people defend the DK Rap before by saying that it was tongue-in-cheek, and that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. They act as if this makes it better. Let's go ahead and clear that up right now: This is a Godawful song, and it doesn't matter how or why it was written. Just reading aloud the words "His coconut gun can fire in spurts, if he shoots ya, it's gonna hurt" can spontaneously induce body-wracking sobs in children and the elderly.

Nintendo doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, as the song has reappeared since in Super Smash Bros. Melee and Donkey Konga. To their credit, at least they rerecorded the song with more variety so it doesn't sound quite as monotonous, so I suppose we can upgrade its status from Godawful to terrible. Congratulations, DK Rap.

Father Abraham - Exodus (sample)

Exodus was one of those unlicensed Christian NES games you've probably read about. I actually got this one for Christmas one year, thanks to an overly religious aunt. Despite what you may think, the game itself is really not bad, mainly because it's just a Boulderdash clone with Moses shooting the word of God at rocks. But apparently all that taking someone else's game didn't leave the team much time to work on a soundtrack, as the only song you'll hear is Father Abraham. I checked; one verse of the song in this version is 18 seconds long. That's 18 seconds infintely looped over the course of 100 levels.

There was a Genesis version too, appropriately enough, and the only real difference besides the graphics is that the song doesn't go up in pitch after each verse as it does on the NES. I can't decide whether that's better or worse.

EA Trax - Numerous EA Games

I'm not going to bother trying to narrow it down to one song -- if you've played a game with Trax in it, you know the score. EA's own special brand of music licensing has probably been responsible for at least half of all total usage of the Xbox's custom soundtrack feature. Only the most cliche, the blandest, and the most obnoxious top 40 pantycrust gets the privilege of making it onto an EA soundtrack. But that's not all! EA's crack team of scientists are always hard at work devising new ways to ruin your aural experience. You would think copious amounts of John Madden's voice would be enough in this regard, but they bested even themselves with the implementation of DJ Stryker in Burnout 3.

Fighting Through The Darkness - Lunar: The Silver Star (sample)

Hey, who hit the demo key on my Casio? ..Mom? Mom! Get down from there!

Wings was actually this song's replacement when they remade the opening for Lunar: SSSC, and that was considered an improvement. One has to give Fighting a little slack for seeming dated since it was made in 1992, but not too much because even then it would've sounded like it belonged in the mid '80s. To experience the full effect of the song in context, watch Lunar's original Sega CD intro. Those three frames of animation were really exciting 13 years ago.

Could Well Be In - Project Gotham Racing 3 (sample)

As you are probably aware, all the music in PGR3 was licensed. This means that Could Well Be In was made by an actual "artist" on an actual label. It was released as a single, meaning people paid money to listen to this. They made a video for it. It boggles my mind. It means that this is not only one of the worst game songs I've ever heard, but just plain one of the worst songs period I've ever heard. This is what white, preteen suburban kids sound like when they decide they want to rap. The guy can't keep to any rhythm or structure, he can't rhyme, he sounds like he's drunk, he repeats the whole message of the damned chorus in the first lines of the second verse, and the entire song is about a girl touching her hair. I'm not going to get worked up over something silly like one little song, all I'm saying is that if I were to meet the man who wrote Could Well Be In I would run him down with my car.

Player Select - Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (sample)

I know I said that if a song is ridiculous enough, it can become good despite itself. Well, this is the exception. Instead, it's so ridiculous that it just makes you really sad. I don't know that I could even go through with picking my character once this came up. I'd just frown all the sudden and wander off to go lie down. Long after every secret of nature and the cosmos has been revealed and carefully disected by science, there will still remain the mystery of what would compel a man to think about martial arts masters and the world's greatest superheroes in a violent contest of physical superiority, snap his fingers and exclaim "This calls for jazz!"