I’ve put together a list of 60 tunes that have stuck with me through the years, inspired by Jeffrey Canam (@GrahfMetal)’s Twitter rundown of his top 100 favourite video game tracks. I’ve attempted to limit myself to a couple songs per game, but there are exceptions.

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#38

The NES version of the first Romance of the Three Kingdoms game was my first exposure to China’s great epic novel and the historical period on which it’s based, but the SNES sequel absorbed far more of my time and entrenched itself as the standard to which I hold all strategy games.

Once you spend enough time on a strategy game that’s delimited in a way that many other “grand scale” staples of the genre aren’t (there are only so many specific generals, and the map is always the same shape and size), you begin to follow patterns. Each area has its own map and battle themes, and I made my home in one particular corner enough times to make this song feel like my own “toil and struggle” theme.

I like how the map themes are more ambient while the wartime themes pick up their melodies in faster, more desperate tempos. The battle version here is a short loop, so I’ve included it as a bonus.

Track: “Theme of the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Bonus: “War in the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (SNES, 1991)
Composer: Minoru Mukaiya