Soundtracks is where we take a look back at the use of licensed music in games. Go here if you want to know more.

Hello and welcome to Soundtracks, a series that is likely to be ending soon.

For a finale, let’s do some more racing games: why not? Specifically, all of the Need for Speed games that have some good tunes but not quite enough for me to be able to write an individual piece about them. Need for Speed: Underground and, especially, Need for Speed: Carbon might not be the best games in the series, but I’d argue that their soundtracks are the most memorable.

So what do we have left? A mopping-up exercise involving the best of the rest, in my completely subjective opinion? Or a bloody great compilation showstopper to send this series off with a bang? [The first one – Ed.]
 

Need for Speed: Underground 2

Need for Speed: Underground 2 has more *stuff* in it than the first game, and is probably a marginally better game overall. But it also has adverts for Burger King and Campbell’s Soup, as well as a less enjoyable selection of songs. I don’t want to hear an Australian rock band’s cover version of Black Betty, which also featured on the soundtrack to the 2004 film Without a Paddle (starring Matthew Lillard, Seth Green *and* Dax Shepard), ever again, thank you.
 

Snoop Dogg ft. The Doors – Riders on the Storm (Fredwreck Remix)
(Universal, 2004)

Riders on the Storm is the exception, a collaboration that sounds on paper like an hilariously misconceived mashup-stroke-remix with the potential to embarrass fans of 70s poser rock and 00s hip-hop alike.

But like many of the songs featured in this series, it soon worms its way into your brain through repeated plays, to the point where it seems quite cool and catchy. Jim Morrison’s voice always did sound kind of like a dusty old sample used in a rap song, so it fits perfectly here. I personally enjoy singing along in the manner of a buttoned up old crooner while wondering why Morrison was ever considered some kind of rock god. (I don’t get The Doors – don’t write in to explain/argue, you won’t win a prize).
 

Need for Speed: Most Wanted

Most Wanted may or may not be objectively the best Need for Speed, if you can even ever make that kind of claim, but I think it’ll be the one that personally will leave me with the fondest memories.

(As a wise man once said: in your life, you’re going to have experiences that remain forever special to you, even if you later come across better, improved versions of that same experience. Although that same wise man really didn’t like Need for Speed: Most Wanted, as it happens).
 

The Prodigy – You’ll Be Under My Wheels
(XL/Maverick, 2004)

An honourable mention here has to go to a track called I Am Rock, which is apparently by an artist called (logically enough) Rock, further details of whom are quite hard to come by.

However, I’ll go for You’ll Be Under My Wheels, which answered my question, ‘What have The Prodigy been up to since 1997?’ It turns out that they were so big in the late 1990s they decided to go away for a while, then came back with the mildly embarrassing 2002 single Baby’s Got a Temper, which attracted controversy for mentioning the date rape drug Rohypnol in the lyrics and prompted a rethink for the next album.

This rethink involved ditching the single altogether and excising from Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned any vocal contribution from either Keith Flint or Maxim Reality, who had both featured prominently in The Fat of the Land.

This one is quite thuddy, to the extent that if you drove a silly souped-up car with big speakers in the back in real life, the noise generated could well irritate pedestrians and the occupants of nearby buildings. But under other circumstances, for example while driving a fake car around the fake streets of a fake city while trying to avoid the fake police, it definitely recreates the frantic movie car chase sound that you’d consider appropriate for this kind of game.
 

Need for Speed: ProStreet

ProStreet is a game that combines all of the edgy attitude of the previous few NFS titles with all-new boring and broken track-based action. Which means while you’re driving in circles trying to battle the weird handling, you’ll also be distracted by some noisy era-appropriate pop music.

 

Peaches – Boys Wanna Be Her
(XL, 2006)

In the 00s I used to occasionally read Q Magazine (RIP) and happen across articles about/interviews with bands and artists that I’d never heard of before, find my interest briefly piqued, only to go back to never thinking about them again. So while I never actually discovered any new music, I did at least have a few tidbits of useful information about what was going at the time to throw into conversation and make me sound like a normal 20-something.

Peaches is a fairly colourful character and made for an interesting interviewee, from what I can remember. I’m pretty sure she was at that point described as a hip-hop artist, although I could well be wrong [annoying American Muso voice: ‘Actually, her official genre is Electroclash, so…’] and one of the recurring themes of the piece seemed to be the controversy generated by the explicit content of her work. (Wikipedia says that she once recorded an appearance for Top of the Pops which was considered ‘too racy’ to air).

Boys Wanna Be Her is the second single from the delightfully-named 2006 album Impeach My Bush (other sample track titles: Fuck or Kill, Tent in Your Pants and Slippery Dick) and, against all expectations, is a surprisingly commercial-sounding pop song. It’s a tune alright, and one that has been used in countless other places aside from on the soundtrack of a quite bad Need for Speed game.
 

Need for Speed: Undercover

I genuinely have very few memories of the music from Undercover, which itself is quite an unmemorable game, comprising a slightly hobbled version of Most Wanted with some fairly crap GTA-style bits bolted onto the side. But! It does have a couple of Nine Inch Nails tracks that play over the menus.
 

Nine Inch Nails – The Warning (Stefan Goodchild ft. Doudou N’Diaye Rose Remix)
(Interscope, 2007)

Unsurprising/uncontroversial opinion: I love Nine Inch Nails. [Of course you do, you’re a 41 year old male nerd – Ed.] The other featured song in NFS: Undercover is The Mark Has Been Made from 1999’s double-album The Fragile, which works quite well on a menu screen, although it takes a while to get going, by which time you’re likely to have impatiently stabbed through whatever options and other screens you need to give brief attention to before heading back onto the streets.

The Warning is taken from Year Zero, one of my favourite NIN albums, although this is the remix, from the remix album Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D. Which is also very good. In fact, if you were some kind of mega-geek, you might have once created some kind of mix and match CD featuring your favourite versions of each track from the two albums.

The original mix of The Warning is quite good, although its vibe is that of a metaphorical warning, while the remix goes for more something more literal, with sinister plinky-plonky piano giving way to thuds, hums and squelches that better suggest impending doom. Which is appropriate, given that Year Zero is a concept album that imagines a version of 2022 in which the world – and specifically America – has gone nuts. Imagine that!
 

Need for Speed: The Run

I have a soft spot for largely-reviled NFS road trip The Run, although the music is more of a curated soundtrack that might accompany a movie rather than a selection of rotated tunes being hammered into your head while you drive around the same city streets.
 

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Beat The Devil’s Tattoo
(Abstract Dragon/Vagrant, 2010)

My favourite licensed track is this effort from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which would be my choice for the ‘theme tune’ of The Run, with its laid-back opening building to a frantic march in the same way the game shifts from gentle motorway cruising to increasingly desperate and stressful dashes for the finish line.

I don’t know much about BRMC, though, except for the fact that they were liked by people who liked The ‘The’ Bands in the 00s. (That’s bands that had ‘The’ in their name, not the post-punk band The The, whose song This Is The Day plays at the end of Empire Records.)
 

Brian Tyler – Front End
(EA, 2011)

The Run also has an original score, too, and although it might be against the rules of this series, I’m going to make an exception for what I think is the actual ‘theme tune’ of the game (even though it apparently isn’t the main theme, and has a disappointingly descriptive name).

I just love the little guitar twang at the start, which while playing The Run I occasionally found myself trying and failing to replicate around the house. My wife: ‘Were you just talking to me?’ Me: ‘No, I just said ‘clung-clang!’ in a failed attempt to recreate a guitar riff from an old computer game.’ Clung-clang!

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Righto, that’s it for now. I’m not sure if it’s the end or not, but if it is, I hope you’ve enjoyed the series.