Our Favorite Video Game Music of the Past 20 Years

Video game music has evolved dramatically from its plinking, 8-bit origins. The arcade machines and home consoles of the 1980s were limited by those systems’ rudimentary sound chips, but as tech improved and game developers started to build more enveloping worlds, the music grew more elaborate, too. Composers began creating entire scores spanning classical, techno, jazz, and more. Sports titles like FIFA and open-world games like Grand Theft Auto started licensing hit songs, further blurring the lines between the game world and our real one. Today, video game soundtracks can be as evocative and detailed as those in films, offering powerful listening experiences on their own. Here are 12 of our faves from the last 20 years, in alphabetical order. –Noah Yoo

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

Composers: Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yumi Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi, Masato Ohashi

There’s beauty in every mundane moment of Animal Crossing. As your humanoid villager with an abnormally bulbous head goes about their daily tasks—pulling weeds, digging up fossils, making small talk with adorable animal neighbors—gentle melodies soundtrack every hour. The sun rises to light whistling and sets to pensive strings, and every shop, season, and holiday gets its own theme. The music ranges from smooth jazz to light calypso and changes subtly as you move around the world. Of course, any mention of Animal Crossing’s delightful soundtrack would be remiss without mention of K.K. Slider, the game’s guitar-playing dog (inspired by lead composer Kazumi Totaka). In the latest installment of the series, New Horizons, K.K. has a bit of an inflated ego, only playing once your island reaches a certain degree of popularity—which might be the realest part of the game. –Quinn Moreland

Buy the game: Amazon

Celeste (2019)

Composer: Lena Raine

In Celeste, your character climbs a mountain as an analogy for working through panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. Lena Raine’s original score is a crucial component of the adventure platformer’s careful balance of vulnerability and tension. Some of the Seattle composer’s ambient passages are beautiful, spare, and languid, with gleaming synthesizers. Other moments have ascending, spritely melodies befitting difficult climbing sequences. It’s music that thrives outside the context of gameplay, and Raine’s soundtrack is not only a big hit on Bandcamp, it’s been adapted for a lullaby album, too. –Evan Minsker

Buy the game: Celeste website

Eternal Sonata (2007)

Composers: Motoi Sakuraba, Frédéric Chopin

In Eternal Sonata, the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin is on his deathbed. In his final hour, he dreams up a dewy, enchanted world in which he and a ragtag crew of companions unite to fight against oppressive rule. (The real Chopin suffered from chronic illness and died at 39.) The game features a small selection of Chopin compositions played by Russian pianist Stanislav Bunin, including the delicate “Raindrop Prelude,” which feels like an afternoon of quiet reflection, and the stormy, dramatic “Revolutionary Étude.” The rest of the Motoi Sakuraba–composed score includes jaunty strings, tranquil harp, and ominous horns that mirror the game's dramatic emotional shifts. –Cat Zhang

Buy the game: Amazon

Monument Valley (2014)

Composers: Stafford Bawler, Obfusc, and Grigori

In Monument Valley, the laws of physics have loosened their grip. The game’s strange three-dimensional structures don’t behave in logical ways; crank a gear, and a wall might turn into a passageway, or a right angle might become a straight line. Even gravity has no purchase as you follow the Moebius-like shape of a curving rampart. A quest that takes the form of a series of puzzles, the game is patient and devoid of stressful scenarios, as is its score, composed by electronic musicians Stafford Bawler, Obfusc, and Grigori. The music is completely ambient, a tranquil web of shimmering drones, birdsong, distant breezes, and faintly detuned synthesizer chords. This backdrop fuses seamlessly with the sounds of gameplay itself: screen taps trigger harp plucks and chimes, ruptured by the occasional deep-bass rumble of a castle tower spinning on its foundation. With echoes of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, it’s a contemplative soundtrack to a virtual realm that invites players to slow down and imagine what things would look like from M.C. Escher’s point of view. –Philip Sherburne

Buy the game: Apple App Store | Google Play

NBA Street Vol. 2 (2003)

Various Artists

NBA Street Vol. 2 strengthened my love of hip-hop. As an 8-year-old, there were days I turned on my Playstation 2 not even to play the game but just to surf through its soundtrack. It was mostly instrumentals, but I was obsessed with them all: Dilated Peoples’ “Live on Stage (Remix),” Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka,” and even Benzino’s “Rock the Party.” My favorite was Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y),” because Pete Rock’s smooth blend of jazzy horns and head-knocking drums was like nothing I had heard before. Up to that moment, the rap I listened to was confined to whatever played on New York’s Hot 97 or BET’s Rap City, but Street Vol. 2 let me know that there was more out there, and I had to find it. –Alphonse Pierre

Buy the game: Amazon

Persona 5 (2016)

Composer: Shoji Meguro

In Persona 5, a group of teenage vigilantes gain superpowers whenever they enter the Metaverse, a realm filled with mankind's collective subconscious desires. It is a kooky, fanciful adventure that puts equal weight on living everyday life and fighting monsters. The glue that holds the story together is Shoji Meguro’s score, which is one continuous work of light, lounge-ready funk. It is incredibly balanced, meeting both the hectic action of dungeon heists and the chill monotony of studying for exams. The soundtrack’s free-flowing acid jazz mirrors a confounding journey in and out of a shared psyche; the dream state has rarely sounded so groovy. –Sheldon Pearce

Buy the game: Amazon

Space Channel 5 (2000)

Composers: Naofumi Hataya, Kenichi Tokoi, Ken Woodman

In the late ’90s, games like Dance Dance Revolution built rhythm-based puzzles around the frantic beats of electronica. Then Space Channel 5, Sega’s stylish entry into the genre, took the unexpected approach of setting its neon-soaked dance challenges to big-band jazz. As the 25th-century TV reporter Ulala, players investigate alien spaceships that force its captives to dance uncontrollably to the game’s swinging soundtrack. Its brassy theme song, “Mexican Flyer,” is an actual piece of ’60s ephemera by British composer and trumpeter Ken Woodman, who was reportedly shocked Sega would want to license it. Bless the space-age visionaries who did. –Eric Torres

Shadow of the Colossus (2005)

Composer: Kow Otani

Flute flutters, organ pedals, and whispered chants usher you into Shadow of the Colossus, one of the greatest video games of all time. Armed only with a sword and bow, your character travels vast stretches of land to defeat towering creatures and bring a sacrificed young girl back from the dead with a forbidden spell. Through it all, Kow Otani’s score conjures longing and loneliness. Distant pan flutes breathe awe into each vast, impossible landscape, and dramatic synths soundtrack intense battles. Much of the game happens in silence, save the soothing sound of your horse’s hooves, so when the haunting music rises and the ancient bells ring, their effect is even more enchanting. –Bailey Constas

Buy the game: Amazon

The Sims (2000)

Composer: Jerry Martin

Composer Jerry Martin’s score for The Sims is intentionally calming and Muzak-y; like the gibberish the game’s characters speak, it can feel like a tidy facsimile of the human experience. Recall the meditative jazz instrumentals of Build Mode that made drywalling and swimming pool construction feel peaceful and domestic, followed by the giddy pizzicato of Buy Mode as you blew your fake cash on flat-screen TVs and self-flushing toilets. The score’s optimism and mid-century lounge vibe underlined just how much The Sims critiqued the suburban consumerist values it replicated—and if you bought your Sims a stereo, it played goofy Simlish replicas of other genres, too, like country and Latin jazz. Put some of it on the next time you’re fantasy-browsing Zillow. –Anna Gaca

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP (2011)

Composer: Jim Guthrie

The first instructions you receive upon entering the world of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP are “look, listen.” You’d do well to heed them. Though it contains quests and occasional battles, Sword and Sworcery is mostly about absorbing its quietly beautiful world, a blueprint for many similarly meditative mobile games that followed in its wake. The music is especially important, as the game makes clear in its title and in the way it charts your progress: with a needle that tracks further along a record each time you accomplish a new goal. Jim Guthrie’s score provides miniature, symphonic post-rock, layering lo-fi synths with crystalline guitars and walloping drums. His compositions carry a touch of melancholy even in their triumphant moments, filling the emotional blanks in the game’s minimal narrative. –Andy Cush

Buy the game: Apple App Store | Google Play | Steam

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (2000)

Various Artists

Sony’s first Playstation console was a quantum leap for video games, with a CD-ROM drive that dramatically expanded the amount of data a single game could contain. This led to curated soundtracks that became as influential as the games themselves. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 is one of the earliest examples, with an adrenaline-fueled mix of punk and hip-hop that mimicked the skate-rat aesthetic and highlighted rap’s undersung impact on the culture. Naughty by Nature was next to Bad Religion; High & Mighty and Mos Def followed Swedish pop-punk quartet Millencolin. There’s even some nü metal and dub in there. Hawk’s playlist serves as a time capsule for both skate culture and a game-changing musical moment. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Buy the game: Amazon

Undertale (2015)

Composer: Toby Fox

Five years after its release, Toby Fox’s Undertale remains a monolith among indie games. Inspired by Super Nintendo classics like Earthbound, this 16-bit role-playing game taps into a similar vein of nostalgia, casting you as a human child in an underground fantasy world full of enigmatic monsters. The score veers from frenzied battle themes and jazz-influenced cues to smeared ambient pieces and dramatic orchestral moments. Much of the soundtrack was produced with the bygone canned computer synthesis format SoundFonts, which lends it a retro charm. Fox handled composition in addition to developing and publishing the game, and as his deliberate motifs drift in and out of focus, you’ll feel as if you’ve heard these melodies before, in a dream or a forgotten childhood memory. –Noah Yoo

Buy the game: Undertale website

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork