I made a list a while ago with a bunch of my favourite Commodore 64 SID tunes. Obviously not everybody can (or can be bothered) to get hold of the wonderful SIDPLAY application, nor the High Voltage SID Collection where a lot of C64 music is archived. To this end, I thought I'd start up a weekly thing where I share my favourite C64 songs, giving peeps an easier way to get hold of them should they want to. Sometimes I'll just be posting one single song from a game, other times I'll probably get altogether too carried away and post a few because I can't nail down a true favourite.

EDIT: I think I'll only make the song(s) I post available for only one week, and then I'll take it down to make room for the next entry. So if you want to take advantage of this cheap 'n' easy way to download some SID goodness, you've seven days to act on it!

This week, as per my aforementioned list, I'm kicking things off with Fred Gray's twin tunes for Ocean's Mutants. I got this game as part of a six pack that came on the magical format of cassette tape, along with Head Over Heels, Wizball, The Great Escape, Parallax and Double Take. (Side note: some of those games will no doubt be featured in my blog at some point.)

Apart from its interesting gameplay and sleek sense of design, another thing made Mutants stand out against the other five titles. While the data slowly dribbled from the cassette's spools and onto the C64, all the other games had the usual Ocean Loader (version 2) accompanying the loading image. This was not the case for Mutants, though, with the game's main theme replacing Martin Galway's classic pre-game tune. For me, this only served to add to the strange alien atmosphere that already oozed from Mutants.

Fred Gray's musical contribution to this quirky game only consists of two tunes, but they're both hypnotic gems. The main theme is an evocatively epic song, with some unusual sounds used so cleverly you'd swear that more than 3 channels were being used. The other offering is a very driving song, full of urgency and menace but laced with brilliant subtleties.

[ Here's where the music was. I've probably still got the mp3 if you wanna PM me! ]