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Music

The Five Greatest Video Game Theme Songs Ever

Ahhh the nostalgia...

Video game soundtracks leave an indelible mark. As kids we consume them passively, attention wrapped in the immediacy of headshots and bosses. They imprint themselves directly into the subconscious, bubbling up years later in the sonic textures of day-glo chiptune and vaporous cloud rap production. Allow me to go straight-up memory-mining Buzzfeed clickbait on your ass—here are my favorites, five luminous cuts that evoke the agony and ecstasy of gaming, fantasy, and innocence.

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LUIGI'S HAUNTED MANSION THEME

This game was fucking scary. It shouldn't have been—it's rated E, the ghosts look like marshmallows, it's on GameCube, etc. Still, there's some kind of disconnect between the silly graphics and a deeper malevolence that threw me off in 4th grade. The theme song is a perfect example—consider the very real fear implicit in Luigi's attempt to whistle along to its its childish, tinny chords. He wants to reassure himself but his cracking voice betrays his thoughts, inevitably turning towards the imminent destruction of his soul and body at the hands of the malicious, intangible beings hiding behind every mirror and frame. He's a scared, small man with a vacuum cleaner, and despite my best efforts he is almost certainly about to die, because this game is impossible. The ghost's whinny at the end still freaks me out.

DONKEY KONG 2: DIDDY KONG'S QUEST—FOREST THEME"

Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest level themes contain an unbelievable range of sounds, from IDM and krautrock to smooth jazz and ambient soundscapes. My favorite is the wide-eyed bounce of DC2's Forest Theme—the flutes sound like the sun shining through a jungle canopy after a monsoon rain, punctuated by birdsong trills and steamy synth washes. Ryan Hemsworth pays homage with this bootleg.

HALO 1 THEME

"Epic" is beyond tired as a descriptor in 2013, but nothing else can adequately explain the music that played from the loading menu in the original Halo. It's got everything—Gregorian chants, tribal percussion, soaring strings—and would sound absurd soundtracking any narrative other than humanity's genetically engineered scion racing to save the universe from a three-way war inter-species war in the middle of a planet-sized weapon.

MEGA MAN 2 THEME

Mega Man 2 offers one of the greatest 8-bit themes of the 80's, its fluttering melody reflecting its hero's plucky determination. This one will get stuck in your head the same way it clearly stuck with happy hardcore producers and modern revivalists like Unicorn Kid.

POKEMON BLUE/RED—LAVENDER TOWN THEME

If Luigi's Mansion instills raw terror, Pokemon's Lavender Town evokes a more unsettling type of fear. Team Rocket's unavenged murder of a Marowak has left the town sapped of color, ghost-ridden and vacant—the theme's ominous synths and heart-wrenching flute capture the charged atmosphere of a community grappling with the inexplicable death of one of its own.