Game music of the day: Beyond Good & Evil

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GR's ongoing tribute to the beloved world of videogame music

Game: Beyond Good %26amp; Evil

Song: Dancing With DomZ


Above: Dancing With DomZ from Beyond Good %26amp; Evil

We started this week bycounting down overlooked games, so why not close it out with one of the most criminally overlooked (and, later, almost impossible to avoid) games of the past decade? Beyond Good %26amp; Evil's dismal sales in late 2003ensured it a top spot on every critic's list of must-play games that nobody did, and for good reason: it was an amazing production, with a deeply involving photojournalist-against-the-stateplot and some of the best, most variedaction-exploration gameplay this side of Zelda. It also had an incredible soundtrack, as the above piece (which plays during your first big fight against the invading DomZ aliens) capably demonstrates.

Created by French TV and movie composer Christophe Heral, the BG%26amp;E soundtrack also covered a lot more ground than just menacing orchestral pieces.In fact, as asort-of-free-roaming game, some of its best tracks played when there wasn't much actiongoing on, like when you visited the Akuda Bar and were treated to the unforgettable Middle Eastern rhythms and Bulgarian lyrics of Propaganda:

Or the rapid-fire, Spanish flamenco stylings of Fun and Minigames, which played, well, during minigames and races:

Also strangely unforgettable is the mellow, reggae-inspired flow of Mammago's, the theme song for the Rastafarian rhino-owned Mammago Garage:

With around 80 tracks that range fromNew Age-y orchestral piecestofrantic, incomprehensible butt rock, the BG%26amp;E soundtrack can be a lot to take in. Fortunately, publisher Ubisoft made the whole thing available for legal download a few years ago, and you can grab it in its entirety right here.

Dec 17, 2010


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Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.