Being Original Is Hard: Video Game Songs That Sound Suspiciously like Popular Music (And Vice Versa)

I don’t know much about music, and I don’t really want to know too much about the mechanics of song-writing. I’ve always been worried that knowing how music works will take some of the magic out of listening to it; I don’t want to be mid-way through one of my favourite songs only for my brain to interrupt with some annoying observation like “the cascading high C’s accompany the offset of E minors to create this wonderful composition”. I’m the kind of guy who thinks it’s a little bit magical that Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody uses different speakers to give the impression of being surrounded by the music, and I don’t want to know the technical details of how they did that¹.

What I’m trying to establish is that I find music impressive – I wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to writing a new song, so anyone who can create music has talent I admire. However, like the rest of us there’s only ever a finite amount of new ideas available at any one time. Sometimes it takes “inspiration” from someone or something else to create something new. The same goes for music, and when musicians aren’t ripping each other off (or outright nicking bits for themselves and getting success off the back of it), musicians from the more niche area of video game music are pinching something a bit more popular to use on the basis that their smaller audience probably won’t notice².

Ironically, this isn’t an original idea for a post. Here are some other posts on other websites about the same idea:

• GamesRadar – Soundtracks you didn’t know were stolen
• 1up.com – Musical Miscreants: Game Music That Sounds a Little Too Familiar
• This or That – Grand Theft Audio: The Art of Game Music Rip-Offs
• 16-Bit Gems: Video Game / Pop Music Similarities
• FlyingOmelette.com – Video Game Musical Similarities
• Qjimbo’s Michael Jackson’s Sonic 3
• An article explaining that the iconic Metal Gear Solid theme has been dropped because of some butthurt Russian composers, despite MGS’s history being all about ripping off things.

It’s a little fascination of mine to try and find examples of music in video games that was stolen/ripped-off/heavily inspired, so like that other blog post I made where I collect things, here’s a post I will add to when/if I find more examples!

Final Fantasy VII vs. Led Zeppelin

Like every teenage geek of a certain era, my time was occupied with Final Fantasy. Specifically, the seventh game. It’s a game I’ve gone back to countless times, and even right now I’m listening to my girlfriend playing it.

Something I’ve only recently became aware of is a band called Led Zeppelin. A friend gave me a copy of a “best of” compilation and, even though it took a while for the songs to grow on me, I’m quite fond of their more famous tracks now. Quite a few of their songs have been used for iconic themes, such as the “Top of the Pops” theme and “generic 2000’s film trailer theme”.

It’s while listening to the latter of those two that I suddenly had a queer sense of deja vu. The last third of Kashmir has an uncanny resemblance to the music that plays while you’re sneaking through the Shin-ra building in FFVII. Here, listen to a YouTube doubler I made just to check I wasn’t going mad a while back.

Looking into it, apparently Led Zeppelin is one of the influences composer Nobuo Uematsu cited³. Either way, here’s a quick mix I slapped together in Audacity⁴:

Streets of Rage 2 vs. Will Smith

Small confession: I used to listen to Will Smith’s albums when I was younger. I liked Men in Black and Wild Wild West, and thus my musical tastes ran to his albums at one point. I now struggle to listen to them now, particularly the later ones where he spends a lot of time rapping about how awesome he is and how much money he makes (the bastard). The plus side about organising my music collection in alphabetical order is, the more new albums I buy, the further down the shelf Will Smith’s music goes.

One track has always stuck in my mind, and I spent years wondering why. It turns out that the song “Potnas” (that’s how kids on the block say “partners”, apparently) has a very similar music backing to a theme from one of my favourite beat ’em up games, Streets of Rage 2:

Alright, I’ll put my hands up and say it’s not an exact match at all. It’s annoying: every time I hear Potnas my brain immediately thinks of Streets of Rage, and yet when it came time to look for the matching track all I could find was “Slow Moon“. Potnas sounds like several SoR2 tracks merged into one, so perhaps Will Smith was a fan of Streets of Rage back in the day?

Streets of Rage vs. Maxi Priest vs. Soul II Soul

Another Streets of Rage comparison? Yes! I turns out that Streets of Rage tended to capture some of the Zeitgeist with its music, and the Zeitgeist at the time happened to be early 90’s rhythm and soul. It appears that composer Yuzo Koshiro was quite fond of the music of the era:

There’s two songs that come around on the radio semi-regularly: Maxi Priest’s Close to You and Soul II Soul’s Back to Life. Every damn time I hear them, I’m instantly transported back to being about five or six, playing Streets of Rage 2 and getting to the building where Mr. X is hiding out on his remote island. Now I’ve went to the lengths of mashing the three songs together into one track, I’m actually a little sceptical of the similarities myself. See what you think:

Deadly Premonition vs. Green Day

I bloody love Deadly Premonition. As a modern video game, it’s terrible – cheesy voice acting, bloody awful combat, patronisingly easy puzzle mechanics, odd day/night cycle mechanics, weird humour, PS2 era graphics and general bugginess. Yet it’s got a brilliant story, genuinely interesting characters and an immersive world that, in many ways, trumps other sandbox games. I lost about three weeks straight to this genuinely charming game, it’s like crack cocaine (both unhealthy and fun!).

One of the hallmarks of Deadly Premonition is the fact it has about 20 themes, each centred around a “mood”. In fact, some of the better awkward moments come from where one theme just stops and another starts, like one theme just bumped into the back of another and pushed it forward. You can have creepy one second and jovially bouncy the next.

The lightest theme of the bunch has a distinctly familiar quality to it, especially to those of us who bought an iconic album in our teenage years with a title similar to “colonial cretin”. The theme just randomly crops up throughout the game and it plays whenever you drive around in the protagonist’s absurdly fast car (assuming you go to the lengths to unlock it), which just underlines the fact that you probably shouldn’t be driving at stupidly high speeds through a sleepy Midwestern American town.

See what you think about the similarity (oh, and caution! Explicit lyrics ahoy!):

Apparently I’m not the only one to make the connection – it turns out that most of the tracks in Deadly Premonition reference something, mostly Twin Peaks.

Road Rash II vs. Electric Light Orchestra

I realise that quite a few of my choices stem from the 16-bit era. That’s because I’m a nostalgic old git who replaced his childhood with hours of sitting in front of a SEGA Mega Drive.

I’m sitting in the car on the drive home from work one day, listening to the greatest hits of ELO (as you do) when the song Alright comes on. My brain, being the sort of queer organ to randomly retain useless bits and pieces I’ll potentially never use again (like algebra), flashed up that I’d almost definitely heard this song before. More specifically, I’d heard this song while punching the crap out of someone while riding a motorcycle. I’d also heard this song while playing Road Rash II⁵.

Like pretty much every damn song on this list, my memory is a lying bastard. The theme I remembered, for the Arizona stage, sounds vaguely similar to the ELO track but not nearly as much as I thought. Either way, see what you think:

Sonic Spinball vs. Technotronic

Okay, this is a tenuous link at best – while researching this blog post I came across Pump up the Jam by Technotronic, and my brain once again did that annoying thing of somehow linking it to a 16-bit era videogame theme. Specifically, my grey matter pointed me in the direction of Sonic the Hedgehog this time, Sonic Spinball to be exact. After going through my video game music collection and through the various folders for the different Sonic games⁶, I mashed them together just for kicks.

There’s possibly some resemblance there, and I like the idea of the SEGA of America team being inspired to take a cue from a fairly mechanical sounding track for their level called “the Machine“, but maybe not. Again, judge for yourself:

I always swore there was some parallel between this Sonic track and Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine, but apart from the name there’s not much in common at all.

On reflection…

This post was mostly an exercise in putting some of these themes together so I can point at them and loudly exclaim to my brain “Look! Listen to these! They sound nothing alike!“, to which my brain usually retorts “Oh come on, there’s a little bit of a resemblance there. Admit it!”.

Personally, I can’t argue with my brain. I tried it once but in the end we both agreed to disagree. You can argue on my behalf though! Be my second opinion – add a comment below if you thought any of these were similar, or tell me if I just need a hearing test because there’s no resemblance in any of these tracks. You can login using Facebook, Google or Twitter!

As said in the introduction, if I find any more that I think sound similar I’ll add them to this post.

Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | August 10, 2013 at 1:54 pm | Articles, Video Games | No comment

Tags: Deadly Premonition, ELO, FFVII, Final Fantasy, Green Day, Led Zeppelin, Maxi Priest, music, Pink Floyd, Road Rash II, Sonic Spinball, Sonic the Hedgehog, Soul II Soul, Streets of Rage, Will Smith