Tell me: What's the worst videogame song you've ever had to listen to?

I often write about how much I love videogame music—how it underscores narrative moments and can be enjoyed outside the games where it was created. Still, not every track succeeds. Some are forgettably mediocre, and others are so terrible they stick with you. One standout for me is the Mansion Basement theme from Resident Evil: Director's Cut – DualShock Edition.

The original basement track is ominous, with unsettling violins and sharp MIDI hits that serve the horror. The Director's Cut version, by contrast, sounds like an amateur classroom performance: a cacophony of sad trumpets and goofy effects that reads more circus than horror.

Bad videogame music feels more like a relic of the past, when composers had limited tools and experience pairing music with playable technology, but modern missteps still happen. A few Tekken 8 tracks grate on me—I particularly can't stand the Colosseum theme, where a Vocaloid wail halfway through goes right through me despite my usual fondness for Vocaloid music.

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