Chrono Trigger is the best video game soundtrack of all time in this ranking, followed by Journey, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII, and Super Mario Bros. That ordering is an editorial judgment, not an objective measurement: the strongest game soundtracks do more than contain memorable songs. They give places an identity, respond to the player’s actions, shape the emotional rhythm of a story, and remain compelling when heard away from the game.
This list includes original scores and one clearly labeled licensed-radio soundtrack: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. A composed score and a curated collection of existing songs do different jobs, but both can become inseparable from the experience of playing a game.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
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Silent Hill 2 (Game Music) (Original Soundtrack) | $23.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Minecraft Volume Alpha | $13.49 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack | $38.70 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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30th Anniversary The Legend of Zelda (Original Soundtrack) | $26.94 | Buy on Amazon |
| 5 |
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Legend Of Zelda: 30Th Anniversary Concert | $30.17 | Buy on Amazon |
How this ranking was decided
There is no universally accepted objective ranking of video game soundtracks. This one balances five criteria:
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- Musical quality: melody, harmony, arrangement, performance, sound design, and the strength of the album outside the game.
- Integration with play and narrative: how effectively the music responds to movement, combat, exploration, character, choice, pacing, and story.
- Originality or influence: whether the score introduced a distinctive musical language or changed expectations for the medium.
- Longevity: whether people continue to listen to, perform, arrange, collect, or discuss it years after release.
- Critical and institutional recognition: recurring appearances on major soundtrack retrospectives, alongside independent signals from organizations such as BAFTA, The Game Awards, the Grammys, and the U.S. Library of Congress.
Recurring critical-list appearances provide the broadest consensus signal, while awards and preservation records provide useful outside confirmation. Neither should be treated as a mathematical score. A technically brilliant album can rank below a simpler one if the simpler soundtrack is more deeply woven into how the game feels to play.
#1 Best Overall
The 25 best video game soundtracks, ranked
1. Chrono Trigger — Yasunori Mitsuda, with contributions from Nobuo Uematsu and Noriko Matsueda
Chrono Trigger sounds astonishingly large for a 16-bit soundtrack. Its recurring melodies, unusual harmonic colors, and sharply defined location themes create a coherent musical map of eras, kingdoms, ruins, and possible futures.
What puts it at number one is the balance between immediacy and depth. Themes are memorable on first hearing, but their repetition across different contexts gives the world emotional continuity. The score is both a landmark of its hardware generation and a complete listening experience decades later, which is why it continues to appear near the top of all-time soundtrack discussions.
2. Journey — Austin Wintory
Journey is one of the clearest examples of music being designed around an interactive emotional arc. Austin Wintory’s orchestral writing expands and contracts with the player’s movement, discoveries, danger, and changing relationship with the world and the other travelers encountered within it.
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The score does not merely accompany a sequence of scenes; it makes the journey feel continuous. Its distinction was recognized beyond game criticism when it became the first video game soundtrack to receive a Grammy nomination in a relevant soundtrack category. Official physical vinyl editions also make it an especially attractive starting point for collectors.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Koji Kondo
Koji Kondo’s score makes geography and identity audible. The melodies associated with the forest, village, desert, water, and temples are not decorative labels: they help the player understand where they are, what kind of place they have entered, and what sort of attention the game requires.
Recurring motifs also connect exploration, puzzles, time, and character. The soundtrack helped establish how a 3D adventure could use music to communicate space without relying on constant exposition. Its frequent presence on all-time lists reflects both its influence and its remarkable memorability.
4. Final Fantasy VII — Nobuo Uematsu
Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VII score expanded the perceived emotional and cinematic scope of game music. Its synthesized orchestration, dramatic pacing, character themes, and leitmotifs give the game a sense of scale that extends from quiet personal moments to apocalyptic spectacle.
The production limitations of its era are part of its character rather than a barrier to its ambition. The score’s strongest themes remain immediately identifiable, while their recurrence gives the story a musical architecture. Its continued critical attention also reflects Uematsu’s broader importance in game-music history.
5. Super Mario Bros. — Koji Kondo
Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. music is economical, rhythmic, and almost perfectly synchronized with movement. The main theme does not just play over the action: its pulse seems to anticipate running, jumping, landing, and accelerating.
That combination of simplicity and function made it one of the most recognizable pieces of game music ever written. The main theme became the first video game music recording inducted into the U.S. National Recording Registry, an unusually strong cultural-preservation milestone for a work built from a handful of highly efficient musical ideas.
6. Minecraft: Volume Alpha — C418
C418’s Minecraft: Volume Alpha takes the opposite approach from a constantly dramatic action score. Sparse piano, soft synthesizer textures, and long stretches of quiet create emotional space for building, wandering, mining, and simply existing in the game’s enormous procedural world.
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- Minecraft Original Soundtrack by C418 CD Volume Alpha
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Its restraint is its defining achievement. The music leaves room for the player’s own thoughts, yet its wistful tone gives otherwise ordinary discoveries a sense of memory. The album’s life beyond gameplay and its inclusion in the National Recording Registry show that minimalist game music can have broad cultural significance.
7. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — Jeremy Soule
Skyrim uses choral-orchestral writing to make mountains, ancient ruins, dragons, and political conflict feel mythic. Its major themes provide immediate grandeur, while quieter ambient cues keep long exploratory sessions from becoming musically exhausting.
The score succeeds because it serves both spectacle and duration. The player can remember the force of its central musical statements while still hearing the landscape as a place rather than as a succession of cinematic trailers. Contemporary BAFTA-era recognition and its continued presence in soundtrack retrospectives reinforce its status as a defining modern fantasy score.
8. NieR:Automata — Keiichi Okabe, Kakeru Ishihama, and Keigo Hoashi
NieR:Automata builds its identity from invented languages, choral writing, unusual vocal textures, and arrangements that shift as the player’s understanding of the world changes. Music associated with a location or event can return in another form, making repetition feel like a deliberate part of the game’s themes of identity, grief, machines, and consciousness.
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It is one of the best examples of a modern game soundtrack that stands confidently as a standalone album. Its emotional power does not depend entirely on knowing the plot, but the game’s structure gives each vocal line and rearranged theme additional meaning.
9. Undertale — Toby Fox
Undertale demonstrates how a small-scale soundtrack can achieve extraordinary thematic density. Toby Fox moves from comic minimalism to tense electronic passages and emotionally direct climaxes, often using the same melodic material to reflect changing relationships and player choices.
The result is a score in which repetition is narrative. A tune that first seems funny, incidental, or nostalgic can become painful or triumphant when the player’s actions change its context. Its recurring appearance in best-soundtrack roundups and its active physical-music collector market reflect an audience that values both its craft and its personality.
10. Halo: Combat Evolved — Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori
The opening chant of Halo: Combat Evolved established an instantly recognizable identity, but the soundtrack’s achievement goes beyond that famous entrance. Spacious percussion, orchestral tension, choral color, and rock-inflected combat cues give the game a sound that is simultaneously ancient, militaristic, alien, and propulsive.
It also helped demonstrate that a console first-person shooter could have a musical language as distinctive as a fantasy role-playing game. The Halo theme’s powerful cultural recall has been cited in Grammy-related coverage as an example of how game music can trigger an immediate visceral memory.
11. Red Dead Redemption 2 — Woody Jackson and contributors
Red Dead Redemption 2 combines cinematic orchestration, regional instrumentation, reactive scoring, and a substantial licensed-song component. Its music changes the emotional meaning of travel, violence, camp life, landscape, and relationships without making those moments feel artificially divided into separate scenes.
The score’s greatest strength is continuity: the frontier, its people, and its conflicts seem to belong to one musical culture. It is a recurring modern favorite in critical and radio-oriented soundtrack selections because it works both as atmospheric accompaniment and as a carefully shaped album.
Rank #3
- Banda sonora original de Final Fantasy VII
- Compositor: Nobuo Uematsu
12. The Last of Us — Gustavo Santaolalla
Gustavo Santaolalla’s score for The Last of Us relies on restrained guitar writing, sparse percussion, and recurring emotional colors rather than constant orchestral force. The intimacy of the instrumentation makes the world feel vulnerable and close, even when the story reaches a larger dramatic scale.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesThis is an important counterexample to the idea that a major game needs a maximalist score. Its silences and incomplete-sounding phrases leave emotional space for the characters and the player. The music supports the game’s themes without explaining every feeling in advance.
13. Silent Hill 2 — Akira Yamaoka
Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill 2 soundtrack treats sound as an unstable emotional environment. Industrial noise, ambient dread, melancholy piano, distorted guitar, and vocal material coexist without settling into a single safe genre.
That instability is the point. The score can make a location feel empty, diseased, mournful, or threatening before the player has a clear reason to feel any of those things. Its importance lies not only in memorable tracks but in showing how music and noise can become part of a psychological horror game’s unreliable atmosphere.
14. Super Mario Galaxy — Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo
Super Mario Galaxy gave Mario a full orchestral palette without sacrificing the series’ melodic clarity. Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo balance sweeping strings, brass, and percussion with playful motifs that remain unmistakably connected to Mario.
The contrast between cosmic grandeur and cartoon precision makes the score unusually satisfying. It can make a small platforming challenge feel momentous, then immediately return to lightness. As a large-scale orchestral achievement, it is one of Nintendo’s most persuasive demonstrations of how far the series’ musical language could expand.
15. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — Michiru Yamane
Michiru Yamane’s score moves fluently among gothic classical writing, rock, jazz, organ, and atmospheric synthesizer textures. That stylistic range gives Dracula’s castle a sense of variety without making its rooms feel musically unrelated.
The soundtrack helped define the musical identity of gothic action games in the 1990s. Its melodies are strong enough to survive outside the game, but its real achievement is how naturally it accommodates exploration, combat, grandeur, and eerie stillness within one ornate world.
16. Persona 5 — Shoji Meguro and collaborators
Persona 5 gives menus, districts, battles, school days, social scenes, and major confrontations a strong acid-jazz, funk, soul, and rock vocabulary. The music is stylish immediately, but its deeper success is structural: it turns the repetition of everyday routines into part of the game’s pleasure.
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17. Hades — Darren Korb, with vocals by Ashley Barrett
Hades blends rock, folk, blues, and mythic theatricality into music that changes meaning with the characters and the narrative. Its vocal songs are memorable outside the game, but they also comment on relationships, regret, rivalry, and the underworld setting.
Rank #4
- Import Game - Japanese Version
- Compatible with US systems (region free)
- Japanese language (other languages may be included)
- Manual and packaging in Japanese language
The score is especially effective because it feels performed by the world rather than pasted over it. Darren Korb’s arrangements give repeated escape attempts a strong sonic identity, while Ashley Barrett’s vocals add emotional contrast to the game’s speed and humor. The soundtrack’s recognition in The Game Awards’ score-and-music conversation reflects its unusually complete musical personality.
18. Transistor — Darren Korb, with vocals by Ashley Barrett
Transistor is a compact, highly stylized album built from electronic textures, noir atmosphere, and expressive vocals. It establishes the game’s world quickly and confidently, with music that feels both futuristic and intimate.
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19. Doom — Mick Gordon
Mick Gordon’s Doom score is less concerned with traditional melodic themes than with propulsion. Industrial metal, distorted electronics, mechanical percussion, and abrasive textures are tightly coupled to speed, aggression, and the player’s combat rhythm.
That makes the soundtrack function almost like a second movement system. It pushes the player forward and gives violent encounters a physical pulse without pretending they are orchestral set pieces. Its importance lies in proving that an action score can operate as an engine for play rather than merely as background accompaniment.
20. Shadow of the Colossus — Kow Otani
Kow Otani’s score alternates between vast orchestral heroism and fragile, mournful passages. The contrast mirrors the game’s central tension between the enormous scale of the colossi and the vulnerability of the world’s lone traveler.
Music gives emotional and mythological weight to a sparse landscape without filling every quiet moment. Triumphant passages can feel dangerous as well as heroic, while the gentler writing keeps the game’s ambiguity present. BAFTA’s historical music records include the title among notable nominees, and the score remains a canonical example of music making absence feel enormous.
21. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Marcin Przybyłowicz, Mikolai Stroinski, and Piotr Musiał
The Witcher 3 combines Slavic folk colors, driving percussion, choral writing, and cinematic orchestration to establish a distinctive regional identity. Its music makes villages, battlefields, swamps, courts, and forests feel like parts of the same cultural landscape rather than disconnected biomes.
Consistency is the score’s major achievement. Exploration, combat, quests, and political drama all belong to one musical world, even when their immediate moods differ. The result is an album with enough rhythmic energy for action and enough local character to make the setting feel specific.
22. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — licensed-song compilation curated by Rockstar Games
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City belongs on this list for a different reason from the other entries. It is primarily a licensed soundtrack, assembled through radio stations rather than written as one original score, and it should not be confused with a conventional composed game soundtrack.
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Best Value
23. Street Fighter II — Yoko Shimomura and Capcom sound teams
Street Fighter II helped establish that a fighting game’s music could be as identifiable as its fighters. Character-stage associations, concise melodies, and sharply defined arcade motifs gave each match a compact musical identity that could survive the limitations of looping hardware.
The score’s influence is particularly visible in the number of fan arrangements and reinterpretations it has inspired. Its themes are short, direct, and built for repetition, but they are not interchangeable: the music helps players remember the fighters, locations, and rivalries attached to it.
24. Celeste — Lena Raine
Lena Raine’s Celeste score follows the game’s emotional progression from anxiety and isolation toward resilience and self-acceptance. Layered electronic arrangements and recurring motifs give the soundtrack a sense of movement that parallels the difficulty and persistence of the climb.
The music is emotionally direct without reducing the game’s psychology to a simple inspirational message. Its changing textures can suggest panic, concentration, release, or determination, making it a particularly effective example of a score reinforcing a character’s inner narrative through both melody and arrangement.
25. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai
Breath of the Wild uses restraint as a design principle. Piano fragments, environmental ambience, sparse regional cues, and occasional orchestral expansion leave room for distance, weather, discovery, and the player’s own route through the open world.
It is important because it treats silence as a compositional tool rather than trying to fill every moment with a conventional loop. When a stronger musical statement finally appears, it feels earned by the quiet around it. The soundtrack’s understatement is precisely what makes the landscape feel so open.
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Listening is only one way to engage with game music. Fans who want to perform these themes can look for video game sheet music, including licensed piano and guitar collections associated with series such as Undertale, The Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy. Check the arrangement level, instrument, licensing information, and whether the book covers the specific game or only a broader series collection.
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Where to start if you have not heard much game music
- For orchestral scale
- Start with Journey, Skyrim, Shadow of the Colossus, Super Mario Galaxy, or Final Fantasy VII. These scores make the medium’s cinematic and symphonic possibilities immediately apparent.
- For ambient and minimalist writing
- Choose Minecraft: Volume Alpha, Breath of the Wild, or The Last of Us. They use space, texture, and restraint as actively as melody.
- For retro and chiptune-era melody
- Try Chrono Trigger, Super Mario Bros., Ocarina of Time, or Street Fighter II. Their motifs are concise, functional, and extraordinarily durable.
- For vocal and genre-driven albums
- Listen to NieR:Automata, Hades, Transistor, Persona 5, or Celeste. Each commits to a recognizable sound while using vocals, arrangement, or genre to deepen the game’s identity.
- For licensed radio
- Pick Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It is the best entry here for understanding how pre-existing songs can become a game’s setting, period, and social texture.
Strong alternatives that narrowly missed
A 25-place list necessarily leaves out excellent work. Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy IX, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Sonic CD, Mega Man 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Disco Elysium, Returnal, Bloodborne, Cuphead, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mass Effect 2, Bastion, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are all defensible choices under the same criteria.
The omissions do not mean these soundtracks are less valuable. They reflect the difficulty of comparing different goals: a short arcade loop, a reactive open-world score, a radio compilation, an ambient album, and a narrative leitmotif system are not trying to solve the same musical problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a ranking of original game scores or all game soundtracks?
It is primarily a ranking of original scores, but it includes Grand Theft Auto: Vice City because its licensed radio compilation is unusually important to the game’s identity. The distinction is labeled so a curated collection of existing songs is not mistaken for an original composed score.
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Why is the order subjective?
There is no objective measurement that can directly compare melody, interactive integration, influence, cultural longevity, and listenability. The ranking balances those five criteria and uses recurring critical-list appearances, awards recognition, and preservation records as supporting signals rather than as a numerical score.
Which soundtrack is the best place to start?
For a broad introduction, begin with Journey or Chrono Trigger. Choose Minecraft: Volume Alpha for ambient music, NieR:Automata for vocals, Doom for aggressive electronic metal, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a licensed-radio soundtrack.
The Bottom Line
The best video game soundtracks do not merely make memorable albums: they teach players how to feel a place, a character, a movement system, or a story. Chrono Trigger takes the top spot here because it combines unforgettable themes with unusually cohesive world-building, but every entry demonstrates a different way music can become part of how a game is remembered.
Quick Recap
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