Before I get to the beautiful, breath-taking, astounding, ravishing and overall – fucking awesome Biohazard / Resident Evil soundtrack, which is Resident Evil 2 OST (next week, I guess), let me take you for a ride through the land of the past and show you where it all began. Ladies and gentlemen, the first Biohazard soundtrack!
Don’t even try to compare it with other RE soundtracks, because today the whole CD, much like the game itself, seems... laughable. Take the two first tracks, for instance:
Introduction Movies and
Zombie Eating Kenneth. Who on Earth would place such things on a game soundtrack in this day and age? Some of the tunes have the game’s sound effects (even voices) embedded into them, like
Death Trap, in most cases this was done deliberately, believe it or not, which is evident in
Piano Frenzy, where you can hear a person opening and closing the door and walking up to the piano. The music doesn’t even have any decent fade-out, the tracks just cut off after only one loop, so no matter how hard you try, you can’t even enjoy the decent ones, like
First Floor Mansion. Actually, all of them can be found on Resident Evil PC disk, in the wav format, exactly the same. Great, huh? Capcom just burned these files into a CD, and boom! We have a game soundtrack, let’s go sell it. But enough of this ranting, we must remember that it was the year of 1996 and video games got away with lots of things, let alone the fact that no one really cared about the music. So let’s open your ears and listen.
The tracks can be roughly divided into three groups: the danger tunes which play when something bad is happening, the atmosphere tunes which accompany you while traversing the locations and finally – special tunes during the cutscenes. Of those three, the second one clearly stands out as the sole reason why anyone sane would ever care to listen to Biohazard OST.
First Floor Mansion, Second Floor Mansion, First Floor Mansion Again, Second Mansion Again (convenient names, huh?),
The Guardhouse, etc. all of them consisting only of computer-generated violins, very fitting for the Spencer Estate’s empty, yellowish corridors. To me, these are the essence of Resident Evil’s atmosphere – slow, still melodies with the notable touch of menace. A similar theme occurs in
Third Floor of the Laboratory.
Some of these tracks are still pretty scary, like
Forest is Dead, The Underground, Entrance to the Laboratory, which have the characteristic breathing-like sounds,
The Guardhouse Basement with its curious combination of guitar-like notes with violin-like noises. Ah, I’ve almost forgotten my personal favorite
Mansion Basement – the infamous kitchen theme. I swear this thing gives me the creeps even now. There are also some oddballs like
The Power Room (Can this even be called music? This isn’t Silent Hill, people!), or
Outside featuring the same dog’s howling over and over and over again, or, better yet,
Outside with Water Running – the title says it all.
The danger tunes are, simply speaking, all the same - very fast and without much melody. Take
Sudden Attack and
Death Trap. The only thing differentiating them is the sound of the Jill-sandwich mechanism activating in the latter. The truth is, these tracks just serve their purpose – providing the most appropriate beat-rate for our hearts during the violent cutscenes and boss-fights. All by themselves, they seem tedious and unremarkable, with the sole exception of
The Zombie is Coming which is much slower and truly spooky. The boss-fight counterpart would maybe be
Tyrant Breaking Loose – the track which would come back in the future.
The third group is really mixed – some of the tracks are not half that bad, like
Wesker’s Theme, or the cool
Slide Projector even
Barry’s Revenge has its... uh... virtues, but some of them are mediocre to say the least.
A Gunshot in the Underground, Meeting Rebecca, Barry’s Death... They might have been (and, indeed, were) appropriate twelve years ago, but today one would be right to ask for something better.
And, uh...
Still Dawn, the credit-roll theme. Really, is this the thing you would expect at the end of the symbol of survival horror? The track does get rough enough at the end, but the very beginning is absolutely traumatizing. The song reminds me of The Stars and the Moon – an ending song of the movie “Dead Alive” / “Brain-Dead”, but there it was supposed to sound like a romantic comedy featuring Jennifer Lopez, because the whole movie was a parody. Here, it just doesn’t work, even for a mid-nineties Japanese game.
I might have been a little too harsh, but that’s the way it had to be. If you want to introduce someone to survival horrors, you mustn’t, simply MUSTN’T begin with Resident Evil. This title was brilliant and will always be treated with respect, as an important milestone in video-game evolution, but let’s face it: it’s retired now, played only by true connaisseurs, replaced with its younger Gamecube reincarnation. Right, there’s also Dead Silence, but if you don’t feel even a bit embarrassed by having to blow to your DS’s microphone in public, you probably won’t even notice the game’s Dante-crawling-out-of-the-fondue-pit cheeziness.
But wait! There’s more!
At first I meant to divide this episode into a couple of parts and post them one at a time, but decided against it. After all, it’s not a gametrailers retrospective I’m doing and since you’re already here and have read this far, I might as well go on and tell you the next parts right now. So let’s turn the hands of the clock a little and move forward to the magic year of 1998, when such miracles as Resident Evil 2, Parasite Eve and Metal Gear Solid were released.
Apparently, in 1998, someone at Capcom finally sobered and realized the Biohazard Original Soundtrack was not a product of the finest possible quality. Hence, they decided to release a remix, just as they had released the Director’s Cut version of the game itself the year before.
You pop the CD in, push play and what are you greeted with? The game’s character introduction rock-tune, in all its original “glory” (together with the voice reading out the names), completely untouched, just with some game’s sounds added at the beginning. (Still, it could be worse, some movies showing the early pre-release versions of the game have different music there – much worse music, with singing even...) Thankfully, it’s the only unremixed track on the disk, so don’t let it belie the rest of the soundtrack; the changes become pleasantly evident with
At Deep Mountains and Dark Valleys, the Night Begins. At first you don’t even realize it’s the remix of
First Floor Mansion.
Most of the tracks got pleasantly polished, more instruments were added, in some cases the melody was slightly altered. Oh, and there are fade-outs, thank God. There is a price to pay, however. The new tunes have the game’s corresponding sounds and voices; sometimes entire cutscenes were inserted. For example, the evacuation theme has been broken into two separate tracks:
10 Minutes Until Explosion and
5 Minutes until Explosion, the second of which has the voice of Brad, the sounds of the elevator and the wind howling on the landing area. The oddballs remained oddball alright.
Dismal Field, a remake of
Outside, features not only the old sounds but now also the footsteps of a character running around, taking the elevator and being attacked by zombie dogs. Hilarious.
In most cases, the music really benefited from the changes. The creators have given the old, familiar tunes the new quality which elevates it significantly from the mediocrity into decency, without any violent changes. There are some exceptions, like the kitchen theme, whose remake (
Narrow and Close) lost some the original’s malevolent energy, but all-in-all, even if some tracks did undergo a little more than cosmetic changes (
Sigh of Relief) and (
Peace of Mind), it’s generally for the good (notice how one flute can change the entire atmosphere of a song
Concealed Passage).
There is one track which deserves a very special mention. The remastered version of the
The Moonlight Sonata, now over 4 minutes long, featuring the full original melody, accompanied with background violins. It is... beautiful. Might even fit for an ending theme, in my opinion, especially since
Still Dawn remained pretty much unchanged.
Okay, let’s fast forward to 2002 and “take a listen” to the Remake OST. Sadly, the official soundtrack never got released on its own, instead being a part of the expensive Biohazard Best Track Box initially sold only in Japan.
As we all know, the Resident Evil Remake differs significantly from the original in some places and it shows. The creators abandoned most of the old tunes and written them anew, completely from scratch. The result was a finer quality, or “up-to-date quality” would be a more fitting way to put it. While the tunes are considerably gentler on your ears, they remain a little much soulless and identity-lacking. They concentrate on heavy, blurred violins playing some barely discernible melodies. It’s hard to remember them, in some cases, it’s even impossible to notice them while playing the game altogether, yet they maintain the atmosphere and thus serve their purpose – being good background horror music.
The true fun begins when we do actually notice the familiar tunes and there are plenty of them. The way they have been constructed is simply flawless – they retain their original melodies, which brings up the game’s identity, but their quality has been significantly improved by adding more different sounds and ironing out the old ones. This transformation has made them much gentler, less aggressive and invading, yet they are still scary, probably thanks to the breathing-like sounds. Scarier than ever. I would go on talking in detail about each one of them, but this would take too long, so let me just mention the most distinctive ones.
Disappearance, which makes the searching for Wesker actually a pleasant task.
Lost in Darkness, probably the most beautiful variation of
First Floor Mansion ever.
Save Theme, which remains strange and unclear, but in a much more acceptable way.
Vacant Room with the little tickling bells now constantly traveling from one ear to another.
Talking to Yourself? – an astounding track, all but bursting with terror and despair, conjuring everything around it.
Cold Water, now much slower, expressing not only the flooded underground facility but the entire dark ocean with God-knows-what swimming just under the surface.
Concrete Bound, immersing us in the depths of the abandoned laboratory, with the electrical lights illuminating nothing but thick clouds of dust, floating in the air.
Like I’ve said, there are more of the remade tracks, but I think I’ll let you discover them on your own. For me, the greatest joy was to compare them side by side, the old one versus the new one. Then the elusive details or ironing out become clear and you can just point your finger at some sound at say “oh, that’s what did the trick.”
One more thing, the
Ending Credits. I’ve had some really mixed feelings about this one. For one, it isn’t even a bit horror-like (try and compare it to the RE: Outbreak counterpart), the violins sound optimistic, but at the same time, serious, even aristocratic. That has always reminded me of the one thing that many people seem to forget about. The Resident Evil legacy. The year 1996, when it all started with a small game with artificial acting, crappy dialogues and B-movie plot which aspired to be the milestone in gaming industry. Which created the expression “survival horror” and paved the way for some of the world’s greatest, most memorable titles. While the original game pales in comparison to its sons and grandsons, it will always be there, in the all-time hall of fame, which the soundtracks, both old and new are there to remind us about. Laughable or not, rest in peace, Resident Evil. We’ll always love you. :-)
