This piece came about for two reasons. First: I’ve gone back to gaming to escape the nonsense of the job market — the “decided not to take you forward but keep you on record” emails, the companies that couldn’t describe what they wanted if you handed them a banjo. Second: BBC 6 Music played Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas on Sunday while I was doing exactly that. I couldn’t remember the track or album, Binged it via ChatGPT which sent me to Lycos, and there it was. I’ve seen him live, met him briefly. His drummer’s hands move faster than Bruce Lee. Anyway, serious do-rag time.
Kamasi Washington — Street Fighter (2018)
Kamasi Washington is one of the most significant jazz musicians working today. His 2015 debut album The Epic — three hours of orchestral jazz, 32 musicians, an extended piece that sounded like nothing else released that year — established him as someone operating at a different scale to most of his contemporaries. He played on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. He’s not, by any conventional measure, a video game musician.
In 2018 he released Heaven and Earth, a double album exploring two sides of human experience. On it is a track called Street Fighter Mas. It’s named after the Capcom arcade game, and Washington has said it was originally conceived as his personal theme for entering competitive gaming tournaments — the music he would walk out to if Street Fighter tournaments had walkout music. It runs for eleven minutes. It contains a saxophone solo that builds for approximately four of them. It sounds absolutely nothing like a video game and completely like Street Fighter simultaneously.
The track works because Washington understood what Street Fighter actually is: a game about discipline, preparation, and the moment when everything you’ve practiced either comes together or doesn’t. That’s a jazz theme. The music and the game share the same emotional logic.
Wipeout 2097 — The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Orbital, Leftfield, Underworld (1996)
In 1996, the original PlayStation was two years old and the British rave scene was at its commercial peak. Prodigy had just released The Fat of the Land. The Chemical Brothers had released Exit Planet Dust. Orbital were touring arenas. These were not small acts.
Wipeout 2097 — the second game in Psygnosis’s anti-gravity racing series — put all of them on its soundtrack. Not covers, not inspired-by compositions: actual tracks from those artists, licensed and cleared, playing while you raced at 400mph through neon-lit futuristic circuits. Firestarter. Tin There. The Saint. Halcyon and On and On. Music that had been in clubs in Blackburn and Manchester and Bristol was now coming out of a television in a living room, soundtracking a PlayStation game.
The effect was unlike anything that had happened in gaming before. Wipeout 2097 didn’t sound like a game. It sounded like a Saturday night. The music and the visuals — The Designers Republic’s iconic graphic identity, all angular type and brutal geometry — created an atmosphere that was genuinely new. Gaming had never felt this cool before. For a lot of people, Wipeout 2097 was the moment they understood that games could be culturally serious.
The soundtrack matters beyond nostalgia. Prodigy’s Firestarter, heard at 130bpm coming out of a TV speaker in 1996, was one of the loudest things most players had ever heard in a domestic context. It still is.
Nine Inch Nails — Quake (1996)
Trent Reznor composed the entire soundtrack for id Software’s Quake in 1996. Not a few tracks — the complete audio environment. The result is forty minutes of dark ambient industrial music that bears almost no resemblance to any game music before it.
Reznor approached the game as a sound design project rather than a music commission. The Quake soundtrack doesn’t have melodies or recurring themes in the conventional sense. It has drones, textures, the feeling of being in a space that is fundamentally wrong. It fits the game’s Lovecraftian horror aesthetic perfectly and works just as well listened to away from the game — which many people discovered when they realised the game came with the soundtrack as accessible audio tracks on the CD, playable on any CD player.
Reznor has said he was given unusual creative freedom by id — play the game, make music that fits how it feels, not how it looks. The resulting work is still cited as one of the most effective game soundtracks ever made, and it demonstrated that musicians with no prior game experience could contribute something genuine to the medium when given the space to do it properly.
Wu-Tang Clan — Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain (1999)
Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style — released in the UK as Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain — is a 1999 PlayStation fighting game built on the engine from Thrill Kill, a game so violent Activision refused to release it. The Wu-Tang Clan were given all nine members as playable characters, with fighting styles matched to their personas. RZA wields twin swords. ODB fights using drunken boxing. Method Man carries a giant hammer. The members provided actual voiceover and contributed to the music.
The game itself received mixed reviews and is best described as a competent four-player brawler with an exceptional soundtrack and a collector’s edition that included a W-shaped controller — moulded after the Wu-Tang logo — that was ergonomically impossible to hold and completely unusable for playing the game. It has become one of the most sought-after gaming collectibles of the era.
What made it significant was less the game and more the fact that it happened at all. Wu-Tang Clan in 1999 were one of the most influential musical acts in the world. The RZA’s production had defined a sound. The idea that this group would put their name and their actual involvement into a PlayStation fighting game — and that the game would take the martial arts mythology of their music seriously enough to build a whole lore around it — was genuinely unusual. Most celebrity game tie-ins of the era were cash-grabs. This one felt like the Wu-Tang Clan had decided games were worth taking seriously.
Beastie Boys and Public Enemy — Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999)
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater didn’t use original compositions. It licensed real tracks from real bands — Goldfinger’s Superman, Dead Kennedys, Primus, Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys’ Sabotage — and played them while you skated. The effect was to make the game feel like it existed in the same cultural space as the music rather than alongside it.
Every subsequent Tony Hawk game expanded the approach, and the series essentially demonstrated that a licensed soundtrack could be a central part of a game’s identity rather than background noise. The music wasn’t illustrating the action — it was defining the atmosphere that made the action feel like something worth doing.
Burial — Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)
Burial is one of the most influential electronic musicians of the past twenty years. His 2007 album Untrue — made in near-total anonymity, released on Hyperdub, built from pitched-down R&B vocals, vinyl crackle, and rain — is widely considered one of the defining records of the 2000s. It sounds like South London at 3am. It sounds like cities and loneliness and something unresolved. It does not, on the surface, sound like a PlayStation 2 game from 2001.
Except it is, substantially, built from one. Archangel, Untrue’s most celebrated track, samples Opening Infiltration from the Metal Gear Solid 2 soundtrack — the Harry Gregson-Williams and Norihiko Hibino piece that plays over the game’s opening tanker sequence. Ghost Hardware samples Freedom to Decide from the same game. Distant Lights, from his self-titled debut, opens with audio from a Metal Gear Solid 4 cutscene. He’s also sampled Ico, Silent Hill 3, Dark Souls, Majora’s Mask, and The Last Ninja 2.
The difference between Burial’s use of game audio and everyone else on this list is that nobody asked him to. There was no licensing deal, no commission, no mutual PR benefit. Burial is a known Metal Gear Solid fan who made some of the most acclaimed music of his generation partly because he loved a Konami stealth game. The MGS2 soundtrack is in Untrue the same way a formative experience is in anything — not as a reference, but as part of the material.
David Bowie — The Nomad Soul (1999)
The Nomad Soul is a 1999 action-adventure game developed by Quantic Dream — the studio that would later make Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human. At the time, they were a small French developer with an ambitious idea: a game with a story serious enough to attract serious collaborators. They got David Bowie.
Bowie didn’t just license existing music. He wrote original songs for the game, appeared as a virtual character named Nathan Watts, and brought his band to perform at the in-game music venue. The character design is unmistakably Bowie — the angular face, the particular quality of his presence — rendered in the polygon technology of 1999, which means he looks like a very stylish PS1 character but is recognisably him nonetheless.
The game was released the same year as Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style. 1999 was apparently the year the music industry decided games were worth taking seriously. Bowie’s involvement is notable not just because of who he was but because of how he engaged — with full creative commitment rather than a cameo. He treated The Nomad Soul as a legitimate creative project. Coming from someone who had spent three decades making genuinely unusual artistic decisions, that’s a meaningful endorsement.
What They Have in Common
In each of these cases, the music works because someone on one side of the collaboration took the other side seriously. Kamasi Washington understood Street Fighter well enough to write music that captures its essence. The Wipeout 2097 team understood rave culture well enough to know which tracks would work. Trent Reznor played Quake before he wrote a note. The Wu-Tang Clan didn’t just licence their name — they contributed to the world the game was building.
The moments when music and games collide properly are rare. They’re also the moments when gaming most clearly demonstrates that it belongs in the same conversation as any other cultural form.
Wipeout 2097 is covered in more depth in our Looking Back series. For more on the cultural history of gaming, see our Manchester computing piece and our piece on gaming and older audiences.