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Horrible / Video Game Soundtracks

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"Subjectively, you can find something to love about any soundtrack, and music especially falls into that category of being something that anyone can love if they try hard enough, but certain creative decisions in the past have had more than a few holes in them. And some of those holes hurt to listen to, so I don't feel bad about hating it."

Irredeemable soundtracks exist in every medium that makes use of music, but for some reason, they seem to be most frequent in video games.

Important Note: To ensure that the soundtrack is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after the game's release.


  • 720°:
    • The title screen music of the NES version is a complete butchery of a much cooler tune from the original arcade version. The other tracks from the game (all three of them) are pretty poor in their own right, but at least they don't sound as horribly off-key as the title theme.
    • The Commodore 64 soundtrack is even worse, with the only tune being an ear-grating rendition of the Downhill stage theme from the arcade and NES versions, which gets interrupted when sound effects play.
  • Action 52 has several bad tunes. "Crazy Shuf(f)le" is one of the most prominent due to the grating nature of its 6-7 second loop, but the other notable ones are "And They Came/Beeps N' Blips" for its own loop that grates after a while, and "Operation (Full) Moon" for its piercing soundbites.
  • The entire soundtrack from the NES version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is absolutely horrendous. All the songs are poorly looped, have terrible instrument usage and are arranged very poorly. Considering how short they are and the length of the stages, it will wear on you really quickly. The music from the second level deserves a special mention. The link above is what the song is supposed to sound like normally. In the actual game, the sound effects for the "Goof Bombs" were accidentally coded to interfere with the sound channels, making an already-terrible song even worse.note 
    The Angry Video Game Nerd: Oh my God! I didn't know the NES was capable of producing such an ear-piercing sound! That's awful!
  • The DOS adaptation of All Dogs Go to Heaven stays mostly silent, which is a good thing because the sound is loud and heavily distorted. The developers attempted to rip the movie's soundtrack and adapt it for the PC Speaker, and ended up with a result worse than had they just made music for the sound engine (which in itself can only play screechy 8-bit noises). The audio as-is wouldn't be out of place in a more obnoxious YouTube Poop. Joel from Vinesauce witnessed the torture from the sound on this game here, stating that if all dogs go to Heaven, he just went to Hell from this experience.
  • The Genesis version of Imagitec's Licensed Game of American Gladiators, which sucked across all the 16-bit platforms for numerous other reasons, goes the Hong Kong '97 route by playing a single music track nonstop throughout, which happens to be an ear-bleeding FM-synth butchery of the formerly-passable intro theme of the SNES version.
  • Bébé's Kids for SNES is already an infamously awful game with terrible music, but the final boss theme is the icing on the cake of shit. The same annoying wordsnote  are repeated constantly to a horrible hip-hop beat; it is played during an already crappy boss; and worst of all, good luck trying to get it out of your head.
  • Title theme of 1990 PC video game adaptation of Beverly Hills Cop is the main theme from the movie. However, the sound is extremely distorted and high-pitched. In addition, the theme briefly pauses at semi-regular intervals.
  • The intro theme to the Japan-only game The Black Bass for the Famicom note  has to heard to be believed. One of the lead channels sounds corrupted to the point where it's grating.
  • Darius R is a lousy port of the original arcade game that would become particularly infamous with the series's Japanese fanbase thanks to its soundtrack, which consists of tinny, discordant, out-of-tune rearrangements from songs all over the series with some odd choices on what tracks were picked and where to employ them. For instance, the peppy stage 1 theme "Captain Neo" was moved to one of the final bosses and in its place is the cave theme "Chaos", a fine composition in its original form, but one as far removed from the "optimistic level 1 tune" vibe as possible. One of the boss themes plagiarizes the track "Ya-Da-Yo" from Fantasy Zone , which makes this port legally impossible to rerelease. To give you an idea of how bad it is, here's VISIONNERZ from Darius Gaiden in its original form and here is its Darius R rendition.
  • The original recording of "Subhuman," Dante's theme in Devil May Cry 5. Eddie Hermida of Suicide Silence sang lead, somehow doing even worse than on their last album. His delivery consisted of nothing but hamfisted screams, so loud in the mix as to drown out the entire instrumental. The end result flew in the face of everything about Dante's character. When they announced they would re-record it with Michael Barr of Volumes (officially because Hermida was accused of severe sexual misconduct), the reaction was nothing short of relief. It’s not a good sign when people are listening to the song for the first time and laughing at how bad it is.
  • Dian Shi Ma Li's sound design is extremely beepy, repetitive, and loud. This makes the (already boring) game hard to play without your eardrums exploding. Take a listen here if you dare.
  • The Sega Genesis version of Fantasia is already horrible as a game, and its soundtrack is doubtless the crowning jewel of horror. The music covers all seven segments of the 1940 classic (if "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria" are counted as a single segment, although only the former is heard), but it all sounds tinny and ear-rending, if not to the point of Sensory Abuse. Clips include annoying butchered versions of L'apprenti sorcier and The Rite of Spring, the latter already butchered in the film itself; the first part of the Russian Dance from the Nutcracker, a downright hideous version of it; and a terribly botched version of "La danza delle ore" from La Gioconda. Listen to the awful soundtrack in this playlist at your own risk.
  • Farmyard Fun for the Atari 2600 plays an arrhythmic and cacophonous tune. The sound effects for walking (a horrid buzzing sound) and collecting eggs (a four-note jingle that restarts the main music, and plays very often due to how close together the eggs are placed) make it even worse to listen to.
  • The GB Hunter (aka Datel Game Booster, its original European name), an unlicensed Game Boy emulator for the Nintendo 64, is rather unique in an unfortunate way: In lieu of Game Boy audio, which it can't emulate, the device plays an utterly awful, distorted, off-key racket masquerading as music... specifically, masquerading as a portion of "That's The Way It Is" by Jeroen Tel, which sounds infinitely better than what the GB Hunter screeches through the N64's line out pins. Even worse, as (possibly unknowingly) demonstrated in the linked video, it doesn't necessarily fit with what's happening on the screen - since the music is generated by the GB Hunter itself, it just plays independently of what's happening, Hong Kong '97-style. Needless to say, when looking at third-party Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player alternatives, The Gaming Historian cited the terrible music as reason alone to avoid the GB Hunter at all costs, even before looking at the other problems with the system. Thankfully, Datel removed the music for the Super GB Booster, the PlayStation equivalent, and instead allowed owners to use audio CDs.
  • Hoshi wo Miru Hito (Stargazers) may be Japan's equivalent of Action 52, but its soundtrack wasn't one of the few redeeming qualities. All the songs consist of high-pitched notes and are arranged beyond abysmal level. As a result, the town and battle themes almost sound like something out of a fever dream, and the rest of the songs are absolutely ear-splitting. This video (which demonstrates Stargazers' mind-blowing flaws) shows off some of the music. Apparently, the composer was Naoki Morishima, who wrote the music for the Famicom-exclusive The Black Bass (which also has awful music) and its sequel, who programmed all of the games he created. And to make matters worse, Romancing StellaVisor proves that, with proper arrangement and reworking, the same tunes could easily fit on the other side of the spectrum.
  • The pathetic Suspiciously Similar Song version of the "Raiders March" in the NES version of Hydlide. It actually first appeared in the otherwise Japan-only Hydlide II, and is unfortunately indicative of the quality of music on the PC-88 before later models gave it a sound chip and improved games' soundtracks by leaps and bounds. Here's the two tracks of these songs from the NES port.
  • Sachen's (Color Dreams to be exact) soundtracks are generally as shoddy as the games themselves, but Silent Assault's music is horrible even by their standards. The sole BGM track consists of a monophonic sine wave melody accompanied by white noise military drums.
  • Mythicon produced some terrible games for the Atari 2600. Their one attempt at music is definitely no exception: although Sorcerer is probably one of the first games to use Variable Mix, it unfortunately resulted in a really annoying whistle-like tune that is accompanied by an awful buzzing noise whenever you encounter an enemy.
  • For the most part, Kingdom Hearts II has an excellent soundtrack. "Swim This Way" from the much-maligned Atlantica level's rhythm minigame, however, puts the direct-to-video Disney sequels to shame in terms of how terrible it is, with its terrible singing including from Donald Duck (the second half of the chorus, which is repeated countless times throughout the song, tries to cram 16 syllables of lyrics into 8 beats, which sounds awkward), obnoxiously catchy and childish tune (similar to a knockoff of "Under the Sea", which is baffling since the actual "Under the Sea" is also present in the same level), and such wonderful lyrical content as "finny fun". It's obnoxious as-is as a rhythm game section in an action-RPG, but it can't even be listened to on its own due to the lyrics having too much to do with the rhythm gameplay. This song, as well as the aformentioned gameplay changes, has made Atlantica hated among many players.
  • Many of the educational Mario games fall straight into this. Mario Is Missing and Mario's Time Machine had an OK soundtrack, but the others aren't so fortunate.
    • The music from Mario Teaches Typing (backed with extremely annoying typing sounds) and Mario's Early Years is torture on the ears due to the really bad samples being used. The CD-ROM re-release of Mario Teaches Typing didn't improve on the soundtrack, but it includes a rap song by Legacy X. It's really out of place for this sort of game, but of all the music from the edutainment Mario games listed here, it's the most listenable of them all, if not enjoyable in its own right. And this is if your sound card is compatible with the game; if it's not, it will play the music and sound effects through the PC speaker, creating sounds comparable to a malfunctioning R2-D2.
    • The PC version of Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun featured a set of public-domain sing-along songs with the Mario characters acting out the scenes. This wouldn't be so bad if the kids singing them weren't so tone-deaf and out of sync with the instrumentals. The animations does not help into giving everything an oddly nightmarish quality akin to those poorly-animated videos of kids' songs littered throughout YouTube. Special mention goes to "The Wheels on the Bus" where the bus driver is none other than Weegee. Have a listen if you dare.
  • Mega Man II for the Game Boy is already infamous on its own, mostly thanks to the grating, excessively high-pitched arrangements that manage to kill perfectly good compositions like Air Man's theme - and SiIvaGunner improved on that by rearranging it in the style of the NES games.
  • The MS-DOS port of Metal Gear consists of badly rendered versions of music from the NES version's soundtrack, but what truly places this here is because it is all played back through the PC Speaker at unbearably high pitches, which makes the music downright painful to listen to. Listen here, if you dare.
  • The NES port of 1942 has an extremely beepy and irritating rendition of the March of Midway that plays throughout every single stage.
  • The overworld theme of the Famicom game Onyanko Town is Sensory Abuse at its finest, with it being a completely whacked-out arrangement of "Ballet of the Chicks In Their Shells" from Pictures at an Exhibition, which loops every 5 seconds.
  • R-Type III for the GBA is pure Porting Disaster on all fronts, and that includes the BGM. Most SNES games that were ported to the GBA tend to have botched music because of the different sound chips between the two systems, but in this situation the developers lost the original source code and they redid it from scratch. Shockingly, how they butchered the recreated music (with the GBA soundchip in mind) has to be heard to be believed. Here's the original Force Select music, and here's the GBA version. It gets worse if you compare the theme for the first stage: SNES and GBA, or even the C64 version of R-Type, which was made in 1988.
  • While the NES version of Rygar is well-known for its distinctly atmospheric soundtrack, the Palace of Dorago BGM stands out (in a bad way) for being nothing but a four-note loop. Considering how disproportionately short it is to the length of the dungeon its featured in, it gets repetitive very quickly. Contrast this with the more developed, sophisticated melody of the Famicom version, which captures the mood of dread the NES version was trying to achieve, and better fits the style of Rygar's soundtrack.
  • San Francisco Rush's original arcade and N64 score was nothing to write home about, but the soundtrack to Climax Studio's PlayStation Porting Disaster was nothing short of atrocious. For example, the title theme is a short and tinny Drum and Bass loop with a repeating "Rush!" voice clip. And it continues to play during the lengthy loading screens. The race BGMs are barely better, being hideously lo-fi attempts at Big Beat or Industrial Metal with haphazard sprinklings of announcer voiceovers and crowd cheers from the arcade version. A particularly egregious example is the Track 2 theme, whose synth bass line sounds like a long electronic fart. Then there's "What's Your Name?", a butchered knockoff of the original name entry theme.
  • Sega Smash Pack Volume 1, on the Sega Dreamcast, suffers from a horribly butchered soundtrack; the included Mega Drive games sound like a Master System at best and an Atari 2600 at worst, while Sonic the Hedgehog sounds worse than in its already bad Game Boy Advance port. While the compilation was patchy to begin with, the soundtrack alone yielded a 4 out of 10 from GameSpot.
  • Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijou Yuukai Jiken , the music was very high-pitched without any embellishments and variations of the tone, resulting in a downright painful listening experience.
  • Snoopy for the Commodore 64 has some pretty bad music even for 1984, when it was first released. It contains nothing but the first couple of bars of "The Entertainer" played on only one channel of the SID sound chip, looped a couple of times in different waveforms. Even if the developers couldn't afford the rights to any of Vince Guaraldi's memorable tunes from the cartoons, they could have at least put more effort into making this public domain tune sound a little less plain, as games from a year earlier such as Pogo Joe and Hover Bovver could do a lot better.
  • Most gamers will tell you that even the worst Sonic the Hedgehog still have rocking soundtracks. Though sometimes, they don't even get that right:
    • The soundtrack of Sonic Eraser is the closest the Sonic series has come to full-blown Sensory Abuse. The Puzzle Mode theme is outstandingly mediocre (or So Bad, It's Good to some), while the Versus Mode theme is straight-up painful to listen to thanks to the extremely harsh and grating synthesizer, unfitting use of what sounds like a ship's bell, and some brief quiet sections so your ears can't even get used to the cacophony. It has been described thusly: "Basically, Eggman banging his head on the Eggmobile while someone is banging a gong, while someone is getting electrocuted and someone is playing a synthesizer, ALL AT THE SAME TIME!"
    • Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis for GBA was a rushed-out-the-door Porting Disaster in all respects. This includes the BGM. Rather than try to synthesize it from scratch, they threw in MIDI files of the original melodies, with ear-grating, tinny samples which are incredibly low-fidelity, even by GBA standards. Even stranger is that several of Sonic 1's tracks were already in Sonic Advance on the same system four years earlier, and those sounded fine. It's made even worse by the game's unbearable levels of slowdown.
    • If there's one place where it's evident that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was an Obvious Beta, it's the music. The battle themes are the only original tracks, and sound alright, if badly-compressed and converted, but everything else is really botched MIDI versions of tracks from earlier games which are barely recognizable and utterly devoid of energy or fun because of the lack of bass and poorly-mixed instrument volumes. Compare the original version of Sonic 3's final boss theme, then the remake for Chronicles.
  • In the early era of SOUND VOLTEX, a remix of "Second Heaven" known as Second Heaven Lamaze -REMIX- by Lamaze-P was known as one of the worst songs in the game, due to a lack of skill in using the Vocaloid software. Lamaze-P attempted to make the Japanese voicebank Hatsune Miku sing in English, even though English was a second language that he didn't know very well. note  This caused the vocals to come out muffled and incomprehensible. This is shameful, considering that Lamaze-P has demonstrated that he could make more comprehensible and clear English results with a Japanese voicebank in an English version of the song "Po Pi Po" released three years before this remix came to SOUND VOLTEX. The non-vocal parts were also nearly identical to the original song, just lower in pitch. It was so comically bad that the remixer publicly admitted it as shame, and KONAMI rose their quality control bars a lot higher for their future songs.
  • The first Street Fighter has Sagat's theme for the Final Boss. What the composer was trying to do was to emulate the kind of music played at Muay Thai fights, but couldn't imitate the gamelan sound needed for the style. This resulted in a surprisingly grating theme dominated by painfully high-pitched bells. If Sagat spamming his Tiger Shots somehow doesn't kill you, the shrill instrumentation of this track will. The arrangement for the Turbografx-CD port (confusingly renamed to Fighting Street) is a marked improvement but even that has its detractors.
  • Taz-Mania for the Game Gear features some of the most cacophonous, atonal music ever put into a video game. See how long you can stand it.
  • The Terminator for the Nintendo Entertainment System was already horrible in its own right, but the soundtrack is the icing on the awful cake. Composed by one Paul Wilkinson (the same composer as the NES Rocky and Bullwinkle, which itself has an infamous soundtrack), the songs are all either poorly composed, lack actual melodies, or sound too similar to each other. The Sewers is easily the worst, because it mainly revolves around a single note being repeated on a steady beat, which would have been fine as a bassline, but it's used as the lead melody. And for the first 30 seconds, it's the only instrument, with the drums and actual bassline still being too short and repetitive to make the track tolerable to listen to. The Angry Video Game Nerd put it best when he called the soundtrack "unacceptable"; it quite simply is.
  • The 16-bit console ports of Wayne's World (Gray Matter), as the Angry Video Game Nerd put it, has the "all-time worst butchering of Bohemian Rhapsody". The Genesis version is leaning towards this as that rendition is trying its hardest to not sound like a depressed organ. The SNES version, while still terrible, is more So Bad, It's Good as it sounds like someone is spamming the accordion.
  • An example that likely would've gone unheard of in this day and age had it not been for The Angry Video Game Nerd, the Speed Skating "music" from the NES port of Winter Games. For reference, this is the same bit of music from the Amiga port; certainly nothing very impressive, but it at least sounds like music, rather than an audio chip having a nervous breakdown.
  • Wizards & Warriors III - "Thief's Guild", which is even written by David Wise of all people. The track starts out fine but, 50 seconds in, devolves into random notes. It's pretty jarring, considering how good the rest of the game's soundtrack is.
  • One of the reasons why Zelda's Adventure is considered the worst of The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games is its Loads and Loads of Loading, which forces the music to restart every time the screen scrolls. This issue reaches its worst in the Shrine of Illusion (video only plays music in the right-side headphone for some reason), due to its music being a mix of Creepy Circus Music and Ominous Pipe Organ that becomes extremely grating extremely fast. It's telling that despite each segment of music being only 18 seconds long, most of them qualify as Long Song, Short Scene (unless you get stuck trying to beat enemies without their designated weakness, which leads to the normal issues with short looping music). When Danny and Egoraptor played through that level, the video was full of them complaining about the music.

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