Free Music from Some Lovely Indie Games

Posted by Danny on Monday, June 22, 2009 at 10:55 pm

A quickie: for folks who don’t necessarily enjoy video games but do enjoy very pleasant music, I’ve tracked down the soundtracks for World of Goo, Braid, and Blueberry Garden. For those who do enjoy video games but haven’t explored these titles, they’re all really, really great, original, independently-produced games with appropriately singular musical scores.

Kyle Gabler’s soundtrack for World of Goo is freely available here. If you don’t already know the music and are turned off by the name of the game, please give it a chance and listen to one of the most celebrated tracks, “The Best of Times,” on YouTube. Don’t forget to toggle High Quality. (Also, for hard-core fans and/or pianists, a fan arrangement of the entire soundtrack and sheet music are available here courtesy of Sebastian Wolff.)

Jonathan Blow selected the tracks for Braid from the work of a handful of established artists on Magnatune.com, a really neat model for flexible music publishing and licensing that escapes the DRM and general obsolescence of traditional publishers and gets around the distributor-biased conditions of iTunes. Unfortunately, the Braid soundtrack isn’t available for download without a Magnatune subscription but can be streamed at high resolution for free. See?


Music from Braid by Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz

Finally, the lonely piano score for Erik Svedäng’s heavily applauded Blueberry Garden has been made available by its composer, Daduk. The details are all here and you can pick up the files from the link provided on Svedäng’s blog without doing anything strenuous like signing up at Jamendo.com (whereat the album is hosted). It’s CC-by-nc-sa — how groovy is that?

Enjoy, I hope.