Keiichi Suzuki, Hirokazu Tanaka · EarthBound · SNES · 1994 · 153 tracks
EarthBound's 153-track score by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka is the most eclectic and unconventional SNES game soundtrack ever produced — sampling Beatles-era pop, country, new age, surf rock, experimental noise, and Chuck Berry rock and roll into a work that deliberately resisted genre consistency in favour of psychological texture.
Suzuki, a pop musician with connections to Yoko Ono and John Lennon's circle, and Tanaka, a long-tenured Nintendo composer known for his Metroid work, created a score that game creator Shigesato Itoi designed to feel like memory and dream rather than game music. The approach was genuinely experimental: some tracks sample or closely reference recordings by The Beatles, Chuck Berry, and other Western artists (triggering ongoing copyright concerns); the Giygas battle music uses reversed, distorted recordings that resist musical categorisation; the title screen theme's gentle acoustic guitar creates an atmosphere of nostalgia for a childhood that exists in the game's America-inflected fiction. EarthBound's 153 tracks were the most ever in a SNES game, and many were ambient loops under thirty seconds designed to create environmental texture rather than identifiable musical themes.
Itoi's brief to his composers was that EarthBound should feel like a dream about childhood — specifically, about an Americanised version of childhood filtered through Japanese popular culture's relationship with the United States. The musical consequence was a score that used Western popular music forms not as references but as emotional shorthand. Country guitar suggested open roads and normality; Chuck Berry rock and roll suggested teenage energy and the specific American mythology of the 1950s that had saturated Japanese popular culture through the postwar decades.
The result was music that evoked emotion through cultural association rather than purely through musical structure. Hearing the acoustic guitar of the title screen produced nostalgia before the player had any specific in-game memory to be nostalgic for. The score was working on the player's pre-existing emotional relationship with musical style rather than building emotional associations from scratch — a technique drawn from film scoring but applied to an interactive medium where the player's attention was divided.
The music accompanying the Giygas battle is not music in a conventional sense. Reversed recordings, atonal electronic textures, and sounds that suggest human vocal distress without resolving into language create an audio environment that mirrors the visual incoherence of the boss itself. Itoi described Giygas as evil beyond comprehension, and the battle music was designed to communicate incomprehensibility rather than dramatic urgency.
The specific choice to use reversed and distorted recordings — rather than specially composed atonal music — gave the Giygas audio a quality that composed music would have struggled to achieve: the sense that something was present but could not be heard correctly, that the music was trying to resolve into meaning and failing. Players described the battle as uniquely unsettling, and the audio was a significant component of that response. EarthBound used its most experimental music for its most conceptually extreme moment, and the match between aesthetic ambition and narrative context was precise.