Ominous Whispers
Illusion Of Gaia (1993)
I found this VHS tape while sorting through old boxes in the garage and it brought back a lot of memories. It's a piece of music from a video game that's approximately three minutes long. This is a loop of that song that takes up the entire runtime of the tape.
The game is question is Illusion Of Gaia. It was released on the Super Famicom thirty years ago today and came over to the United States on September 1st of the following year. It has a nice balance of action, puzzle, and RPG elements with rich 16-bit sprites and an immersive and fun story that can get pretty dark and even a little deep at times. It's one of my favorite games on the Super NES.
One of the things that drew me into this game was the music, and there's one song in particular that plays midway through the game when you reach the Incan Gold Ship.
When this game was released in the United States, I was 14 years old and living with my grandparents in West Hazleton. One of the reasons that it caught my eye at the store was that it came with a free t-shirt that came packaged with the game. I bought it, brought it home, and had just gotten to the Incan Gold Ship in the game when I started to get tired. The music in this part of the game was so relaxing that I just left the game on and laid back in my chair to take a nap. A few hours later, I woke up to that music still playing and continued on in the game. It would not be the last time that I'd fall asleep listening to this part in the game. Something about that song just stuck with me.
The game is question is Illusion Of Gaia. It was released on the Super Famicom thirty years ago today and came over to the United States on September 1st of the following year. It has a nice balance of action, puzzle, and RPG elements with rich 16-bit sprites and an immersive and fun story that can get pretty dark and even a little deep at times. It's one of my favorite games on the Super NES.
One of the things that drew me into this game was the music, and there's one song in particular that plays midway through the game when you reach the Incan Gold Ship.
When this game was released in the United States, I was 14 years old and living with my grandparents in West Hazleton. One of the reasons that it caught my eye at the store was that it came with a free t-shirt that came packaged with the game. I bought it, brought it home, and had just gotten to the Incan Gold Ship in the game when I started to get tired. The music in this part of the game was so relaxing that I just left the game on and laid back in my chair to take a nap. A few hours later, I woke up to that music still playing and continued on in the game. It would not be the last time that I'd fall asleep listening to this part in the game. Something about that song just stuck with me.
Five years later, I downloaded a handful of Illusion Of Gaia songs on Napster and found that the song from the Incan Gold Ship was one of them. The file was labeled as "Gaia Wind", but I learned much later on that it's called Ominous Whispers. I burned it onto a CD-R which I sometimes listened to when I was going to sleep. One day, I got the bright idea to pop the disc in my Playstation so that I could listen to it with the visual effects on screen. The vertical one looked especially cool to me with this song playing, especially with all of the lights except my blacklight turned on, so I recorded six hours of this on my VCR to play whenever I wanted to lay back and relax for a little while.
So, to recap, this is a song from a Super Nintendo game that was downloaded from Napster, then burned onto a CD-R and played through the original Sony Playstation from which it was recorded onto a VHS tape. How's that for 90's nerd culture?
