Unsung Video Game Soundtracks: Zork

It occurs to me that possibly one of the better undersung video game soundtracks is the soundtrack to the first Zork game.

Yes, that's right, Zork, the text adventure from 1980, with the maze of twisty little passages all alike and the small white house and that stupid thief.  You don't remember a soundtrack?  Or possibly just the faint sound of an overpowered computer fan and the humming of a disk drive, such as you might hear on the BBC Library release "Essential Hi Tech Sound Effects" from 1984?  (The record is, that I've heard, the absolute essential effects recording of 1980s floppy disk drives.)  Surely Infocom didn't have any soundtracks to any of their games, with the exception of, you know, the Amiga versions of "The Lurking Horror" and "Sherlock" and while cute it's not like, out of all the sounds the Amiga was capable of making, those effects stood out or anything...

Anyway, yes, true enough, the original release of Zork had no sound effects, but in the '90s, having picked up all of Infocom's old IPs after they'd immolated due to poor management decisions, Activision did actually try to make some use out of their newly acquired brands, and thus learned that the Zork brand was of no particular commercial value to them.

But it was a valiant attempt.  They had the first Zork game translated into Japanese, gave it a (apparently decently usable) graphical interface, and got a soundtrack done.

Turns out the people they got were Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima.  I'd like to know more of the story of Koshiro's career around this time.  Soundtracks like "Revenge of Shinobi", "Actraiser", and "Streets of Rage" made him an exceptionally well-known and renowned composer, with the soundtrack to "Streets of Rage 2" still acclaimed as a stone fucking classic.  You see his name prominently featured on the titles of games - he's right there on the title screen of the Game Gear version of "Streets of Rage 2", though I'm not sure it's exactly a faithful adaptation, and though everybody except for the sound people were identified only by those cute little pseudonyms that were de rigeur in releases of Japanese games.  And he's there on the title screen to Streets of Rage 3, which was where one supposes he lost most of his rabid fanbase... while Streets of Rage 2 was him and Motohiro Kawashima using the YM2612 to capture the energy and pulse-pounding excitement of all of the best house and club music of the era and gave players the unforgettable experience of fighting a fire-breathing fat man in overalls on a baseball diamond that was a secret tunnel to an underground fighting club while listening to a reasonable facsimile of the Shamen's "Move Any Mountain" (not to be confused with Jimi Tenor and his Shamen), Streets of Rage 3 was... something else.  The simple fact is that nobody else, in any form of music, was doing what Koshiro and Kawashima were doing on that record, and "songs" like "Shinobi Reverse" apparently, then and now, just left audiences confused.

And after that?  After that things get very confusing.  He did the soundtrack to a game called "The Story of Thor" in Japan and "Beyond Oasis" in the West, which was a stab at using the YM2612 to emulate the dynamics and textures of an entire orchestra.  An impressive work - but certainly nothing that would be amenable to his justly renowned club-based approach!  Also, it turned out, a work that would be rendered almost instantly "obsolete" by the advent of CD audio game soundtracks.

The work of Koshiro and Kawashima I'm talking about today are, in fact, for CD games.  They'd apparently gotten into doing soundtracks for ports of classic Western games.  They did the soundtrack to the Sega Mega-CD version of "Eye of the Beholder".  Koshiro had also worked on the PC-98 version with Yuji Yamada, but that was a completely different soundtrack - even a cursory listen to this will tell you that this is '94 Koshiro, advanced programming, dissonance, and weirdness all over.  What with Eye of the Beholder being, you know, literally a Dungeons and Dragons game, one might expect that the soundtrack would be more along the lines of "Beyond Oasis" than "Streets of Rage 3".  One would be wrong.  The soundtrack is ten tracks of blazing techno, carrying on the bizarre fusion of gabber and breakcore that characterized tracks like the notorious SoR 3 track "Bulldozer".

The soundtrack to Zork is, in places, more traditionally "symphonic"/"RPG"-like than Eye of the Beholder's dance jams, but instead of trying to emulate a symphonic sound pallette, like they did with Beyond Oasis, the sound here is this strange meld the two sides of his persona in a way I've not heard him do elsewhere.  Track 14 is a good example - there's some almost medieval-sounding horn patches, but then on top of that there's 808-sounding acid house burbles.  It all comes together, there's no conflict - there's a fantastically doomy and oppressive atmosphere at play.  The beats are mostly gone, there's nothing to dance to here, but Koshiro and Kawashima were already pushing the limits of what you could dance to in Streets of Rage 3.

There's a progression, really, inherent in the music - the earlier tracks have beats, are nominally danceable, but the farther we get the more, well, cavernous, the more hellish it gets.  Koshiro and Kawashima's soundtrack is both brilliant and utterly appropriate to the work it's accompanying.  Which, I have to say, is pretty impressive considering we're talking about two Japanese club DJs in the mid '90s providing a soundtrack to a text adventure written at MIT in the late 1970s.

The game itself has come and gone with very little trace left - only a brief ten minute video and a few short references.  The soundtrack, in line with Koshiro's elevated stature, remains to those who would seek it out.