Growing up playing games in 90’s, I was always a big fan of actual music playing in the background, before all this atmospheric, and orchestral stuff came along in recent years. With games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, you mainly had MIDI tracks – not that they were bad.
I think Quake was likely the first to break this trend in 1996 with Trent Reznor of NiN fame doing the soundtrack.
But then some games, rather than come up with their own soundtracks (or borrow heavily from other sources like Bobby Prince did with Doom I and II), they just licensed a number of tracks from real artists.
In 1997, the one game that had this was Worms 2 - the sequel to the equally addictive Worms, released years earlier.
While playing, you were treated to songs like “Come Out And Play”, “Self Esteem”, and “Killboy Powerhead” – tracks off of Smash, the best album off of the then punk rock sensation known as The Offspring. You could also squirm your way to several other great tracks, like The Prodigy’s “Firestarter”.
Of course, all these tracks had different names to suit the game, like “Swim Like A Brick”. Funny stuff, seeing as the worms in the game can’t swim. I think especially the punk rock songs complimented Worms 2’s fun gameplay and defiant stance against other games at the time – particularly Doom clones or first-person shooters. It showed that a game could be fun and not overly violent to be a major success. That’s pretty much Team 17 though. They’ve really just stuck with the same sort of formula of strategy titles for the past near twenty years.
It’s a shame that it was the only Worms game to date that actually had a soundtrack as impressive as this. Other Worms titles, before and after, didn’t, to my knowledge.
The Best Video Game Soundtracks: Worms 2
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