Games that you associate with music/albums of the time?

I figured out how to play Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter on PC! (Thanks to a certain prolific duder, you know who you are...) My brain remembers every single sound effect from this dumb game, it's glorious.

Next up, once I get bored of this, will be Turok: Evolution. You know, the best Turok game ever made (says someone who never played any other Turok games). A large part of my nostalgia for this admittedly-mediocre PS2 dino-shooter (not to be confused with a boomer-shooter) is a very special CD I received for Xmas at the same time. In my pre-teenage brain, there was no better combo than shooting human-dino hybrids in the face, and the ultimate nu-metal album - Drowning Pool's Sinner (yeah, the one with that Bodies song - forget every album that came after...).

So my question is, what games and songs/albums/artists are intrinsically linked in your brain for whatever reason?

Dubstep and Borderlands 2.

After the first 200 hours in BL2 i got a little bored of the (great) soundtrack and even though I didn't listen to the dubstep ever before, that's what I ended up listening to for the next hundreds of hours in Borderlands 2.

My music taste was certainly questionable at best, but in that crazy Borderlands world it just worked and i enjoyed that combo a lot. Fun times.

The PS1 era for me was very much 'Now That's What I Call Music Era.' I was living abroad at the time. So pretty much (according to wikipedia) Now 30 would have been out at the time and would have been on heavy rotation. The series was really big well before Now hit the United States. I'm not sure if the albums were pre-popularity and in turn started popularity or if the songs were popular in the previous couple of months and ended up being on a compilation. Broke teenage me would have preferred to buy a compilation instead of taking a risk on an entire album, especially of brittish music. Oasis was pretty big for me and is very much a 'liked them before they were popular,' well just not in the United States. When i was overseas that was the beginning of the UK invasion. Spice Girls and that Blur song they play at every sporting event. You're welcome.

I take no responsibility for anyone playing Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. You need to look inwards for that.

As for me, beyond the obvious of games that are specifically associated with certain music because that music is in the game (AKA Tony Hawk's Pro Skater syndrome) I have a very strong association between 90s music and EverQuest. I don't play EverQuest anymore so that doesn't trigger the music memory, but sometimes I'll be listening to something from the 90s that I listened to on repeat while raiding and it will trigger very specific memories of places in that game, 20 years later. I might be listening to Soundgarden and suddenly remember Lower Guk or hear some Green Day and be transported back to the Karanas. MMOs are played for hundreds of hours and back then voice chat was not reliable so I just played music over and over and over until the game became permanently intertwined with the music and I think they'll stay that way for the rest of my life.

Crazy Taxi and Offspring (who just this year actually released a solid album)

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH!

For me, synthwave music for Sim Racing, Rally Sim, Simcade and arcade-style street racing games because when I feel kind of bored so I listen to them as part of a custom soundtrack in order to get more motivation.

There are a lot of games, but the one I think of the most is Revolution X and Aerosmith, because of how they implemented their music into the game's soundtrack. So every time I hear an Aerosmith song like "Eat The Rich", I think of the arcade shooter.

I agree the exercise falls apart a bit if we just attach licensed music to things so I'll try to ignore that (still love you, Need for Speed: Underground!) and with that in mind the first that comes to mind is embarrassing but what about pre-teen years isn't embarrassing? I played an ungodly amount of Time Crisis 2 on PS2 while listening to Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory on my Discman as loud as I could (why it was Hybrid Theory and not Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP is another story from the Accidentally Racist But Mostly in Cutural Ways Parents vault) and those two will forever be fused together in my mind.

I could also associate just about all of my musical growth to the Madden and NCAA games from 2002 to 2007, as I used to spend just about every waking moment I wasn't in school or off smoking weed pirating entire discographies from OiNK's Pink Palace and then listening to them sequentially for as long as I could without getting bored (man, now I'm thinking about when I got ratio'd out of REDacted and missing the OiNK scene so much...) so in some ways, I could attach everything from The Decemberists to Don Caballero to Thelonious Monk to Cam'ron to those games. Seems like a bit of a cheat, and I'm not gonna go ahead and list off 7 or 800 artists, but it was what it was.

Most of my associations are not of the same era. I've never played the most recent games (mostly for financial reasons) and I generally have not been trendy with musical tastes. Even by those standards, the one I have a pretty strong association with is weird. My now-wife, but girlfriend at the time (early '00s) loved playing Tetris Attack on the SNES. While it has a great soundtrack in it's own right, puzzle games lend themselves well to listening to other things so we often turned the TV down and listened to music while we played. When I wasn't around, she would relentlessly beat her dad in vs. while listening to his favorite band, The Eagles. Eventually that was just the disc that was in the stereo and, well, I can't see heads-up Tetris Attack being played without hearing Take It Easy or Hotel California.

That's hilarious. I associate Quarashi's Mr. Jinx album with Turok: Evolution. I played that game to death but I think there was only one occasion where I listened to that record while playing it, and for whatever reason, that one time is forever engrained on my brain. Any time I listen to a song from that record I instantly think back to Turok: Evolution and kinda want to play it. Pretty sure I thought about it last week actually...I may actually have to do it soon. Unfortunately I have no music memories linked to Mace Griffin, but I am glad someone else mentioned that awesome game, lol.

I have a lot of others though. "Survival of the Sickest" by Saliva and Jak 2. Slipknot's "Iowa" and the first Red Faction. My buddy and I would often have sleepovers as kids and there was a period where we played a fuckton of THPS3. Obviously that game has an amazing soundtrack of its own, but you get bored of it after awhile. That game is mostly linked to "Group Therapy" by Dope and the first two Ill Nino records for me. When the 1+2 remake came out last year, I made a Spotify playlist exclusively on all the shit we listened to back then to listen to while playing.

@killem_dafoe: If you do decide to try and find a copy of Turok: Evolution, I recommend staying away from the PC version. I got it working great, and was super excited to get some of that nostalgia rush, but unfortunately it has the absolute worst implementation of mouse acceleration I've ever seen :(

On the other hand, Mace Griffin works great if you download it from a certain abandonware site and use the fixes I updated on PCGamingWiki!

Need for Speed Underground, Underground 2 Most Wanted (2005), Burnout 3 and Revenge: 2000's era alternative rock, post hardcore, emo, nu-metal, metalcore, industrial metal, various forms of EDM, and "Get Low".

Also; since the music of the Senran Kagura games doesn't really do it for me, I'd often turn off the game's music and listen to death metal instead. Beyond Creation's Earthborn Evolution came around the same time the original Vita version of Shinovi Versus came to the States, so Fundamental Process became the soundtrack for one of the game's endings; similar associations with linking Estival Versus with The Black Dahlia Murder, and Peach Beach Splash with Mick Gordon's tracks for Doom.

I played a ton of Counterstrike while listening to the Linkin Park album "Meteora." I always associate that album with Counterstrike. And both really just feel like the most "early 2000s" things ever to me.

I would say Vice City for all the New Wave and 80's rock and such.

Kind of a period piece I know, Vice City being released in 2002.

@ll_exile_ll: Oh man, I also strongly associate PS2 gaming with Meteora. Can't think of any specific games, but any time I listen to anything off that album, I'm transported back to my room in my childhood home.

Brains are weird.

Mine are more music that remind me of games.

I mentally associate the Kayo Dot song "Offramp Cycle: Pattern 22" with Paratopic, specifically the highway sections of the game. They both have the same vibe of unease while depicting transporting of non-specific creepy cargo.

The new Kayo Dot album ("Moss Grew on the Swords and Plowshares Alike") also makes me think of a world very similar to that of Caves of Qud. Even though the backstories of both seem quite different.

@stealydan: I'm fairly certain I still own my PS2 copies of both of those games actually. I don't really have a good way to hook up a PS2 though. I'm thinking about trying out some emulators soon.

I really enjoy going through Playlists of top songs of the year by Pitchfork, TheNeedleDrop and others in December while playing a game. Last year I was playing King's Field (II US) and it was a really memorable experience, so much so that I plan to do it again this year with King's Field II (III US -- gosh, these names are so annoying).

A very memorable older one was staying home from school sick and playing Syphon Filter while listening to that Christmas compilation with Smashing Pumpkins and DMX (it's still pretty good). Unfortunately, Syphon Filter really doesn't hold up. Well maybe. I played the 2nd one recently and the stealth areas are awful. Maybe 1 doesn't have those and is better for it?

I generally always just listen to the in-game music as the developers intended, but there has been one exception:

Doom (or possibly Doom II), we were all playing lots of custom maps, and eventually I got tired of the in-game music. I ended up playing the second Body Count (Ice-T's metal band) album from start to finish every time I was playing Doom, it seemed to fit the mood of the game.

ATV Off road fury 2 will always be my favorite. The soundtrack was so good. Bands like Korn, System of A Down, Lostprophets (rip), etc. Pretty much the game that defined my taste in music in the early 2000's.

I will always link SSX to The Caesars - Jerk It Out.

Goldfinger - Superman will always be an integral part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in my brain.

Crysis 1 and the Alexisonfire album Crisis. Complete coincidence.

Though I'm probably getting ahead of myself, "When Stars Collide" by Obscura is already my open world roaming theme for Elden Ring.

Outkast- speaker box/love below is associated with enter the matrix and turok evolution. Crossfades first album was downloaded onto a used Xbox at a friends house and would listen to it all the time while playing Tony hawks underground 2. I used to listen to Kanye college dropout in the mornings before school playing pikmin 2 and Metroid prime 2.

G unit beg for mercy is linked to conflict desert storm 2 for me as well. 50 cent massacre with jak 2

I will always, always associate Yellowcard's "Way Away" and Autopilot Off's "Clockwork" with SSX 3 on the PS2. Those were my two favorite songs on that OST, and I remember turning all the other ones off and doing the "All Peak Jam" (which took around ~25 minutes) down the whole mountain while they were on repeat. The thing that game did where it would remove elements from the songs (like vocals) when you bailed and then add them back when you were doing well was friggin' awesome. Related: Jeff G retweeted this a few days ago.

I have an extremely weird combo with Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor 2 & Borderlands 2. I was going through the game with a buddy who could only play at nights, so I would just listen to FAL2 on loop as I grinded on the "kill 5/10/50/100 of x monster" on my own time. The album had just came out when Borderlands 2 was released and while not a great Lupe album it was WAY better than the big let down of Lasers two years earlier. I can not hear Strange Fruition without having flashbacks to post college what am I going to do with my life, living in a shit apartment and just logging dozens of hours into Borderlands 2.

I very rarely listen to music other than a game's soundtrack while playing. I, of course, have the natural mental links for games like Tony Hawk and the Madden games, the only unrelated connection is a very strange one. I'm a huge David Bowie fan and had a modest collection of Game Boy games. I ended up with a copy of Final Fantasy Legend in '93. Weird game. As I was trying to work through this game, the album Black Tie White Noise was released. There is a bit of a quirky song on there called Miracle Goodnight. For some reason, every time I hear that song, I get the strong memory of lying on my bed with my headphones on playing this game.

Weird as it may sound, I associate early 2000's era RPGs with Simpson's commentary tracks. It was before podcasts really took off and I enjoyed listening to them while grinding in Baten Kraitos or FF XII.

Ooh, i remembered a fun one.

Fiona Apple - Tymps (Sick in the Head song) sounds very Final Fantasy 7 to me.

Sandy (Alex G) - Taking has a flute part in the middle that reminds me of a bunch of Final Fantasy themes too.

I will always associate American Idiot by Green Day and From under the Cork tree by Fall Out Boy with vanilla World of Warcraft. I spent a ton of time listening to both of those albums when it first launched.

Additionally, a lot of my high school Halo LAN parties were soundtracked by Toxicity by System of a Down, and Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park, so those as well.

Majora's Mask and Hotdog Flavored Water, Counter Strike and Static-X/Fear Factory/Deftones. There are definitely more, but those 2 jumped out at me before I even clicked to get in here.

I rarely listen to music while playing a game other than its own soundtrack, for some reason. I'm much more likely to listen to podcasts. I have an association now between Doom (the original, on DOSbox) and This American Life.

shenmue 2 and linkin' park-Hybrid Theory, monster magnet- god says no , slayer- god hates us all. why with shenmue 2? .. frankly i just played alot of darts while listening to music with it when i was young in these times. which is something i don't really do these days.

The biggest one is Gears of War and Mad World by Gary Jules. I feel like you probably wouldn't see that kind of video game advertisement on TV today. It would be viewed as corny, but I loved it as a kid.

Tony Hawk definitely influenced my music preferences as a teenager.

I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned by anyone so i say it,

Burnout Paradise and the song Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne.