CD audio and the 90s: when game soundtracks became recordings

Landmark scores of the era

1. 1989Ys I & II (PC Engine CD-ROM²) Yuzo Koshiro, Mieko Ishikawa and Hideya Nagata (arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu)An early showcase for CD audio, with 41 music tracks on the disc.
2. 1995Wipeout Tim Wright (CoLD SToRAGE), with licensed tracks in EuropeMade by Psygnosis in Liverpool; the European PlayStation version mixed original music with tracks by Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital.
3. 1996Quake Trent Reznor / Nine Inch NailsAmbient, textural sound design delivered as CD audio tracks, far from conventional game themes.
4. 1997Final Fantasy VII Nobuo UematsuMoved the series to PlayStation; its battle piece set Latin text drawn from the same medieval poetry Orff used in Carmina Burana.
5. 1998The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Koji KondoMusic is part of the game itself: the player learns and performs melodies to solve puzzles.
6. 1999Silent Hill Akira YamaokaIndustrial and dark ambient music that blurred the line between score and sound design.

From chip instructions to finished recordings

Before CD, a game's music was a set of instructions. The console's sound chip read the data and generated the notes in real time, which is why the same piece could sound different on different hardware. A compact disc changed that. The Red Book audio standard, published by Philips and Sony in 1980, stores stereo sound as 16-bit values sampled 44,100 times a second, the same quality as a music album.

For composers this meant they could record in a studio, use live musicians and singers, and know the player would hear exactly what they had mixed. It also meant that music was no longer limited to a few kilobytes. A disc could hold well over an hour of audio, though in practice space was shared with graphics, video and data.

There were trade-offs. CD audio was harder to change in response to gameplay, because a recording plays from start to finish. Many games used CD tracks for main themes and kept chip-generated music for moments that needed to react quickly. That tension between fidelity and flexibility runs through the rest of this history.

Early discs: the PC Engine CD and the Ys soundtrack

NEC's PC Engine was among the first consoles to offer a CD drive, through its CD-ROM² add-on released in Japan in 1988. Ys I & II, released on it in December 1989, became a showcase. The disc carried 41 music tracks, voice acting and animated scenes. The music, by Yuzo Koshiro, Mieko Ishikawa and Hideya Nagata, was arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu for the format, and it remains widely praised.

Sega followed with its Mega-CD add-on, and PC games increasingly shipped on CD-ROM. For a few years, many CD games mixed approaches: recorded tracks for some music, synthesised sound for effects. By the time Sony's PlayStation reached Europe in 1995, CD was firmly the main medium.

PlayStation, Psygnosis and the sound of British club culture

The PlayStation's sound processing unit could handle 24 channels of 16-bit samples at up to 44.1 kHz and could also play CD audio directly. That combination let developers choose between flexible sampled music and full studio recordings.

Wipeout, developed and published by Liverpool-based Psygnosis and released as a European launch title in September 1995, made the most of the second option. Its original music was written by Tim Wright under the name CoLD SToRAGE. The European PlayStation version also included licensed tracks by Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital; the North American release kept only the CoLD SToRAGE compositions. The game is often credited with bringing UK club music to a games audience and with showing that a soundtrack could be part of a game's identity and marketing.

Licensing raised new questions. Because the rights to those tracks were held separately, they did not all appear in every version: the European Saturn release replaced them with new music. Licensing complications still affect re-releases of 1990s games today.

Texture over tune: Quake, Silent Hill and atmospheric scoring

Not every composer used the extra fidelity for melody. For id Software's Quake (1996), Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails produced textures, ambiences and machine-like sounds rather than themes, delivered as CD audio tracks. Reznor also voiced the player character. Some later digital re-releases lacked the original music for a time because of rights issues; the 2021 enhanced version restored it.

Akira Yamaoka's work on Konami's Silent Hill (1999) pushed further into ambiguity. As sound director and composer, he chose industrial and dark ambient styles to give the game a cold, rusty feel, and drew on the influence of Angelo Badalamenti's television music. The score sits somewhere between music and sound design, which is part of what makes it unsettling. Our explainer on sound design versus music looks at where that line falls.

Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time: two ways to be epic

Two 1997–98 releases show different routes to scale. Final Fantasy VII (1997) moved Square's series to PlayStation. Nobuo Uematsu's score still relied mostly on sequenced samples, but its final battle piece added a choir singing Latin text taken from the same medieval poetry Carl Orff used for Carmina Burana. In the UK, Uematsu's music later became a regular presence in Classic FM's listener-voted Hall of Fame: in 2012, Aerith's Theme was voted in at number 16.

Nintendo's 64 used cartridges rather than discs, so its music stayed sequenced, with output at up to 48 kHz. Koji Kondo's score for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), the last Zelda he scored alone, turned this into a strength. Players learn short melodies on an in-game ocarina and perform them to change the world. Music becomes a mechanic, not just accompaniment, an idea we follow in leitmotifs in games.

Why sequenced music did not disappear with the CD

It would be easy to assume that once CDs arrived, every game used recorded tracks. In practice many did not. Recorded audio has to be read from the disc, and a CD drive can only do one thing at a time. If a game needed to load levels, graphics or video while the music played, streaming a CD track could get in the way.

Sequenced music, played by the console's own sound processor from small sample sets, avoided that problem. It used little memory, could change instantly and could be looped seamlessly. The PlayStation's 24-channel sound unit and the Saturn's 32 PCM channels were designed with this in mind, and many well-known scores of the period were sequenced rather than recorded.

Nintendo's cartridge-based Nintendo 64 had no CD drive at all, so its composers worked entirely in this way. The result was a period in which two methods ran side by side. Recorded tracks suited opening themes, cinematic scenes and licensed songs; sequenced music suited levels that needed to react to the player. Modern engines blend the two, a balance we return to in adaptive and modern.

Licensed soundtracks and the rise of the album release

By the late 1990s, licensed music was a routine part of many genres, especially sports, racing and skateboarding games. That brought new audiences to bands and made the soundtrack a selling point. At the same time, original scores were increasingly released as albums, particularly in Japan, where game soundtrack CDs had been sold since the 1980s.

The arrival of DVD and hard drives in the next generation removed most remaining limits on how much recorded music a game could hold. Composers began to record with full orchestras, as the next chapter, the orchestral turn, describes.