Jesper Kyd - The Adventures of Batman and Robin (Sega Genesis, 1995)

One year, for Christmas, my dad got me a present. It was a gigantic box, and had a series of smaller boxes inside of it. The final one was tiny, and inside was a note saying "IOU one sega game."

At first this might sound like a lazy gift, but it actually made a lot of sense. Back then, adults knew nothing about videogames, and instead of spending 60 bucks on something I might not like, he let me pick it out, without ruining the surprise on christmas morning. This is the game I got.

It might've been a poor choice. The game is visually amazing, but brutally hard. It's much different from the SNES version by Konami. It's much darker, done by a company called Clockwork Games (a division of Psygnosis, who are really only known for the Lemmings series, as far as I can recall off the top of my head), and unlike the SNES version, which had music based on the animated series, this soundtrack was 100% original, and it fit the mood perfectly.

The music was done by Jesper Kyd, who started off in the demoscene, writing for the Commodore 64 and Amiga, and went on to score numerous games and films. The Genesis/MD had two soundchips. The first was 6 channels of 4-op FM synthesis, with one channel having the ability to play back samples. The second was a simple portable sound generator, capable of 3 square waves and pseudo-random noise. You could also sacrifice one of the square channels to change the pseudo-random noise into periodic noise. That's not really important, I just didn't want some one as equally as nerdy as me to call me out on it later.

The thing that IS important,  is that this was done without the PSG, and without sample playback. The entire thing is 6 channels. And jesus christ it's hard to get a decent snare out of 4 sine waves modulating each other.

The songs are pretty long too. It's sort of like if the ravey-dance stuff from the Streets of Rage series got way darker. I let each one play at least twice (only more for the shorter tracks), the shortest one is around 6 minutes (besides the continue screen music, which only needed to be 10 seconds long), the longest one is 12. 18 tracks, clocking at 2 and a half hours. It's a hefty ass download (almost 270mb), but totally worth it.