There are two frequently heard ways of doing a game remix. Either you start out with the cheesy SNES/C-64/whatever version and then kick in your modern instruments over the top, or you do a huge trance-anthem build-up for the first two minutes of the track, then introduce The Triumphant Theme, which turns out to be Terra Cresta (?) or something.
A good example of Type 1 is McVaffe and Quasikaotic's McVaffeQuasi Ultimix Tetris remix. An example of the second is R3FORGED's Tetris Thirty Plus Mix.
Only the first of those is "the Tetris theme", more correctly known as the Russian folk song Korobeiniki, and widely covered. Ozma's version is quite famous, and I've also got one allegedly by Mr Bungle.
Kalocin's "Piano Practice Remix" of it is particularly cool, though. It's the special track at the end of his album of C64-ified rock songs, most of the download links for which appear to be broken. You can still find the Tetris mix here, though.
13 November 2006 at 10:19 pm
A great site for this is http://www.c64audio.com/ - they even have an album full for Martin Galway! I bought their first CD way back in The Day - well, 1998-ish anyway.
Speaking of the 64 / SID chip sound, does anyone else out there think the Gorillaz track 19-2000 has a very SID-inspired bit of filtering going on the the background synthy-bloops? (technical music term, that is) Aparently Murdoc has a C64 in his Winnebago...
13 November 2006 at 10:33 pm
Terra Cresta - hmmm... looks like a
copyer, clone of Xevious - the graphics are very similar, verging on exactly the same. The player ship is if I am not very much mistaken a SOLVALOU.I love how a lot of the game companies of the eighties happily engaged in a bit of good old-fashioned yo-ho-ho high seas bucaneering when it came to their competitor's successful games. Not that I am claiming they are all a bunch of hypocrites, oh, no no no!
14 November 2006 at 1:17 am
Terra Cresta could fairly be said to be inspired by Xevious, but so can every other vertically scrolling shooter. TC came out three years later, had much better graphics and sound (of course), and didn't have separate bullets and bombs, though. So it's really a quite separate game.
There was, however, arguably a (legal) clone of Terra Cresta, called Dangar. It was sort of Terra Cresta v1.5.
I was quite good at Dangar. That, 1942, and Ikari Warriors were the three arcade games I managed to finish (or wrap around to the beginning again, as the case may be).