The sounds you can hear just by reading their names
The two-note ascending bounce that plays every time Mario leaves the ground in Super Mario Bros. is the most-heard sound effect in gaming history — produced by Koji Kondo vocalising the sound himself, then shaping it through the NES's audio hardware into a short, expressive chirp.
The descending chromatic whimper that plays when Pac-Man is caught by a ghost — a short, melancholic fanfare that accompanied perhaps the most-repeated death in gaming's first decade — was composed by Toshio Kai for Namco's custom arcade hardware and became one of the earliest sounds to cross from arcade to cultural memory.
The bright, brief chime that plays when Sonic collects a gold ring — composed by Masato Nakamura of the band Dreams Come True — is one of the most frequently triggered sound effects in 16-bit gaming, its cheerful one-note punctuation arriving hundreds of times per level and maintaining its appeal through musical elegance rather than novelty.
The five-note ascending fanfare that plays when Link discovers a significant item — a melodic fragment so perfectly calibrated to the emotion of discovery that it became the universal auditory symbol of reward in gaming, referenced in parody, tribute, and critical writing more than any other single game music cue.
The shouted "Hadouken!" that accompanies Ryu and Ken's fireball in Street Fighter II became the most imitated voice sample in gaming history — a piece of Japanese arcade audio so globally distributed through the game's CPS-1 hardware that it entered popular culture as the universal representation of a video game special move.
The sharp, two-note alert stab that plays when a guard detects Snake in Metal Gear Solid — accompanied by a red exclamation mark appearing above the guard's head — is the most culturally recognised alarm sound in gaming, expressing in half a second the entire emotional content of "you have been caught."
The rising, mechanical shriek that announces an incoming Spiny Shell in Mario Kart 64 — and which was refined in subsequent entries into the series' most emotionally charged audio cue — communicates impending destruction with enough warning to generate dread but not enough to enable consistent escape, making it a masterclass in weaponised anticipation.
The deep, resonant shotgun report in Quake — sound-designed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails — used real recorded gunfire manipulated through industrial music production techniques to produce a weapon sound of physical weight and presence that redefined what video game firearms could sound like.
The punchy shotgun blast in the original Doom — recorded from an actual pump-action shotgun by sound designer Bobby Prince — established that game weapon sounds should be made from real weapon recordings rather than synthesised approximations, setting a standard for FPS audio that the genre has maintained for thirty years.
The thunderous, over-the-top crash that accompanies a critical hit "SMAAASH!!" in EarthBound — a sound designed to feel cartoonishly enormous and satisfying — is one of the most beloved attack sounds in JRPG history, perfectly capturing the game's comedic-but-sincere relationship with its own genre conventions.
The brief, bright line-clear sound in the Game Boy version of Tetris — composed by Hirokazu Tanaka — converted a visual event into an auditory reward so precisely calibrated that the sound became inseparable from the satisfaction of clearing lines, making the Game Boy release the definitive sonic identity of the game for a generation of players.
The ascending six-note jingle that plays when Mario collects a 1-Up Mushroom in Super Mario Bros. is the most universally understood musical signal of a positive outcome in gaming — a brief, celebratory phrase that has appeared in every mainstream Mario game since 1985 and has become the auditory definition of "extra life" in popular culture.