Ian Stocker - Robots (2005)

 

Composer: Ian Stocker
Console: GBA
Game Release Date: 2005-02-24
Soundtrack Release Date: 2014-12-04 
Runtime: 37:11, 18 Tracks

So, after writing out two blog posts I realized that I didn't have enough time to prep the soundtracks for download. Both of them need some additional mixing and minor fixes to them. Turns out I am actually busier today than usual, so I won't be releasing those ones yet. That aside, at least I have the next two weeks posts written. Here's a quick one for you all.

Back in 2005 Blue Sky Studios and Fox released a movie called Robots. I remember seeing it and I barely remember anything else about the movie. I think I found it okay. Back in that era every movie had a video game tie in. A lot of them were bad but there were some good ones (Open Season, Spongebob: The Movie, etc). I've never played the GBA Robots tie-in but I will at some point. That's about all I can write about that. I know the game is a platformer and that's about it. The soundtrack is far more noteworthy than the game anyways. If I do get to a full run, I will update this post. 
Due to space limitations on of GBA games the composers had to heavily compress their music to fit on the cartridge. This is also the reason I don't care much about kbps of GBA/GB soundtracks. The quality is already like circa 50kbps so it's not that much worse than 128. Uncompressed versions of the music are extremely rare. Outside of this soundtrack and a few others I don't know of any uncompressed OSTs available. It's up to the composers to release it themselves. 

In 2014 Ian Stocker, composer for the Robots GBA game released the uncompressed version on YouTube. It became semi-viral reaching over 100,000 views. The opening track is this breathtaking new age track that sounds very heavy. The other tracks have a very funky and almost poppy sound them. It's electronic music at its core and almost IDM at points but maintains its futuristic bouncy electronic sound. I don't know if the game is as good as the soundtrack but if it is then I simply got to play it. I heard about this the same way I heard about next week's post, through /r/vaporwave users proclaiming it as a proto-vaporwave masterpiece. I can definitely see the comparisons to vaporwave, although I wouldn't tag it as such. It's night and day the difference between the original GBA versions and the uncompressed version. Sucks there aren't more uncompressed soundtracks out there. 
Sorry about the short post, expect something more substantial next week. 

Stream/Download: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo8ykwFxVL0
The download is in the comments. Should it go down I will update with a working link here.