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.

#39

I’ve played Mega Man since the first NES entry, and the X series is a different beast in many ways. I forget how I first stumbled across this one, since I was deep into RPGs and strategy games by the time Capcom released it in Canada in 1994. All I know is, as soon as I started playing it, I loved two things: the crisp and speedy feeling of the new controls (dashing and wall-climbing made me feel like I could pull of masterful stunts at will), and the music.

Every track in this game is phenomenal, so I had to use somewhat arbitrary criteria to narrow it down to this one. Storm Eagle’s stage has a lot of dynamic, vertical elements, so it’s one of the stages that really exemplifies the strengths of the game’s controls. This song reminds me of feeling like a hero, and if all the elements of your game work together to make a player feel like that, you’ve done a lot of things right.

Track: “Storm Eagle” (YouTube Link)
Game: Mega Man X (SNES, 1993)
Composer: Makoto Tomozawa