Best Video Game Soundtrack

Game music has a problem film music does not: it has to loop. The composer has no idea how long the player will stand in that room.

That constraint produced a whole school of writing. A piece has to reward the fiftieth hearing without demanding attention on the first, which is nearly the opposite of what a film cue is asked to do. Nobuo Uematsu put a Latin choir on a PlayStation because the hardware would allow it and nobody had tried. Undertale's most famous track was written for a fight most players lose repeatedly, which is precisely why everyone knows every bar of it. Fifty-six pieces are in, spanning chiptune loops through to full orchestral recordings.

The bracket favours music that works without the game attached, which is a genuinely different test. Several tracks are inseparable from a moment — a character dying, a world ending — and lose to something with no narrative weight at all that simply happens to be a better piece of music on its own.