I feel like this should be a longer post on Tumblr or another listicle site, but decided that it could fit here with enough dedication. I’ve recently gotten in to playing some older video games. Ones that I grew up with and that have stayed with me for years. Ones that had songs I absolutely adored and would listen to for hours in the only way I knew how: sitting there in whatever level or room played the music, indefinitely on pause. Sometimes how my mind is now when I check out, compartmentalize, and turn down the ambient stress.
There’s one that recently came back to me, the real standout from the rest, and I literally refer to it as “the music that plays in the waiting room of my mind”, that place between where one thoughts ferries in the next, where I’m kind of just idling while waiting for the bus or waiting for my groceries to be bagged on days when me and the cashier would rather have silence. There is a clear winner in these moments:
I don’t think anything quite captures what the vacancy of my mind sounds like more than this song. Whenever I wash dishes and forget to think, this comes on. If someone assumes I’m sitting in silence bedgrudgingly, I want to reassure them that — no. There is only Luigi’s Mansion E. Gadd’s Theme at any given time.
But on this walk down memory lane I’ve rediscovered a slew of older songs that tip me back into my childhood days, sometimes not for the better. There’s something particularly dreadful about the existential crisis that Super Mario 64 put me through sometimes, when I realized it was just a 2-D world with glitching gray walls. I loved that game, but part of me wonders if it didn’t instill a strange realization of mortality in me at the age of ten. Anyway, I’m not here the wax poetic about the generation of games that raised me, I’m here to spit fire to you with old tracks that absolutely languished in the back of my memories for far too long, and are finally being brought to life.
I played handheld Pokemon obsessively as a child, hence my horrid nearsightedness, starting from the originals and all the way to…well, Sun and Moon. But I will never forget how it felt as a child to stand before the Champion of the Hoenn region Pokemon League and listen to this music with unbridled anticipation.
The thing about these games, and I don’t want to sound like the “well back in my day!” garden variety of gamer, is that they were rough looking. At the time they were groundbreaking, sure, but looking back this left a ton of room for me to imagine climactic and amazing battles outside the 2-D frames of these spaces. And boy, did I do that. Especially when this song came on and I sat there for minutes just listening to it, pumping myself up, closing my eyes and imagining throwing down with this dude. Sometimes, I was even on the toilet while this epicness transpired. I’d be just sitting there until my mom would knock and remind me that, hey, Dad needs to use the bathroom and I know you’re just sitting there on the lid, trying to beat the Elite Four again.
I spent the lion’s share of my Pokemon childhood with the Johto and Hoenn regions. I remember sitting in my backyard and daydreaming of Pokemon adventures. And nothing brought me the peace of those halcyon days quite like the Relic Forest theme from Pokemon Colosseum.
I remember my parents getting me the game knowing of my love for the series at that point when even most of my friends had begun dipping out of it. I played Colosseum largely with myself, although my parents did try, preciously, to fill the space a sibling might have. Playing it alone gave me plenty of time to daydream. I even wrote out a whole book for this game, wanting to literally translate it, line for line, into a novel. If I had an ounce of that dedication now I’d be three contracts deep and one movie deal in my hands.
Now I would sit in this forest for hours after purifying my Pokemon just to close my eyes and nap to it on lazy, rainy weekends. And when it got sunny out? I would play it in my head while exploring the open fields of my neighborhood. Sometimes, you know, I still do.
Most of my time in the video game world was spent playing Pokemon. Until I turned fifteen and picked up Final Fantasy XII, which I then dumped a fascinating amount of hours into and became lovingly obsessed with. But I wasn’t one to only play only popular games. Oh, no.
I was also a notable fan of a little something called Fullmetal Alchemist, which my obsession with manifested similarly to Pokemon’s in that I collected all of the things I possibly could of it. Or, rather, I would hyperfixate on one particular piece of its vast collection and play it over and over again. This was Fullmetal Alchemist and The Broken Angel for me. It was the closest I ever got to being Ed or Al, specifically Ed, and I adored the heck out of it. I mean, really adored it. It’s reputation as a poor anime game notwithstanding, I loved it. And even as I put this song on now to listen to I am reminded of the older me who had grown from only playing Pokemon and Mario games and evolved into playing more. I also have a distinct memory of listening to various popular music while running through this game’s dungeons, culminating in a weird association with slapping around giant crabs and Bubba Sparxx’s “Mrs New Booty.” This song, of course, is not that level of weird.
This game is probably nowhere near as good as I remember, I’m sure. But that’s fine! I’m not one to rebrand nostalgia as a failure of discerning tastes. I still listen to this song sometimes, and it also plays in the waiting room of my mind often when I am, in fact, in waiting rooms.
There’s a lot of recent games that I love the soundtrack to: Persona 5, Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy XIV (note a pattern, at all?), but there’s one that launched me into oblivion when I first played and became the backdrop of my largely studded-belt era of tomfoolery, in which Evanesence and My Chemical Romance began to take center stage. Step aside, childhood! Now is the time for real suffering!
I spent hours here exploring the city streets. What style! The rain scene at the end where the blindfolded keyblade weilder stood atop the tower? Ho! What drama! I watched that trailer until I couldn’t take it anymore. I wore down this song just standing around in The World That Never Was trying to understand what, exactly, I was feeling. If Super Mario 64’s oddly off-putting world made me uneasy, this song and this world made me something else. Thoughtful? Angsty? Oh, yes. Absolutely, completely full of angst. Even the name — the World That Never Was. Ah! Devastating! Kingdom Hearts was galaxy brain energy and I, a mere mortal, could never dream of transforming such profound ideas into a palpable sense of style. But damn, did I try!
I’m still very much so that person who gets emotional over games with the depth of Kingdom Hearts. And it took me re-listening to The World Ends With You soundtrack that my musical taste hadn’t changed all that much either.
If there was a musical predecessor to Persona 5 in my mind, it was definitely TWEWY. I held that game for hours to run around the streets of Tokyo and when I finally got to go there in 2016 the first thing I thought of was how we had met up at the Hachiko statue in the game and here I was IRL, standing at it, taking pictures, surrounded by tourists and locals and living a dream I did not even imagine could manifest back in the early 00s.
They’re totally making an anime of this game now. Which is great! But also, like, 10 years too late for me. I am no longer a tough, headphone bopping adolescent. I am interesting in baking bread, romance novels, and acoustic guitars. Oh many woes mine, where have the years gone!
Now I’d like to take a hard left into a different kind of territory, one that’s way more idyllic and, recently, far more meme.
Now It might appear that I’d played a copious amount of video games as a child and you’d be correct in that assumption. As an only child with friends who didn’t always like to play video games, I squirreled away my free time to dedicate hours to them. I’d say “ah, youth” with a breathless sort of wonder but being that we’re all stuck in quarantine again, I’m on a very similar schedule of gaming at ridiculous hours and breaking to cook, clean, spend time with friends, and finally water my plants that are slowly dying. So, in light of more distressing realities, I find myself wanting to go back to spend the quiet hours of my evening doing something perhaps a bit more indolent. Namely, Super Mario Sunshine.
So there’s all the songs that play in the waiting room of my mind and my life. I wish I had actual purpose to this post, considering the tone of some of my others, but I don’t. I just wanted to share some good old video game music! I hope you’re out there playing too, in between all of the other things that you might be actively engaging in, because we, as humans, need fun and, well, sometimes we get it from sucking up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner and pitting our pets against other people’s pets in fake battles of strength. Whatever you feel like, man!
Stay safe out there, friends ❤
