It’s not the techno-organic bubbling of Mother Brain’s tank. If there’s one composition more iconic than the opening, it’s not the driving heroism of Brinstar, or even the murky, disjointed oddness of Norfair. The vacuum of space that gives way to the synthetic twinkling of stars and a melody expressive of the myriad possibilities and how we feel looking up at the night sky. I know it from the opening drone, sinister, expansive.

But as much as Zelda and Castlevania have centered themselves in my life, it’s Hirokazu Tanaka’s score that has cemented itself. Which one has the most iconic opening theme? If you ask my mother, Simon’s Quest will never escape her mind. It’s a three way tie for me, between The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, and Metroid. Look, Samus is complicated, but all the same-these soundtracks slap. At the very least she’s definitely a Space Natty Bumppo. Hell, we could talk about the attempts to mimic John Williams in licensed Star Wars games.īecause if you’re too coarse to be a Real Astronaut, be a 6’3” Space Bounty Hunter. We could sit down and rap about the way Freespace uses music to communicate grandeur or the horror of Dead Space. Now, this week I could have picked three videogame soundtracks from different franchises. It’s fitting that our relationships to the heavens should be as complicated and diverse as the ones to ourselves. We are made of stars, we live among them. Or the unquestioning delight of “discovery.” How we turn the space of space into place, pressing our apprehensions and exhilarations onto the dreams of life off-world is fascinating. Jack de Quidt has managed no less than three, distinct visions for the Milky Way. For every vision of space, there is a score. There’s Kubrick’s usage of classic music-expressive, expansive, cost-effective. How we communicate emptiness, fullness, and the truly “alien.” Mapping sound to soundless vacuum to express cosmic immensity, like Priscilla Snow does in Voyageur. You can also get sick album art for sick albums out of it.

Radio waves turned into data, meaning applied to it. One of the ways we “see” space and celestial phenomena is through sound. Turns out you have to be a die-hard nerd, a low-key jock, AND have led an unimpeachable boring public life to be an astronaut. They knew how fixated I was on space, how I wanted to be an astronaut, and they didn’t want to take that away from me. When the Challenger exploded, my parents tried to hide it from me.

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