Video Games That Stole Their Music 

One of my worst fears is (eventually) making a song then finding out i unconsciously copied a melody or something from an existing song

As an illustrator, I can relate. Artists take the best bits of things we love from other artists and turn them into ingredients for our own art. Hopefully, with enough ingredients from enough sources we can create a fresh dish, with hints of what made it, but having a taste all its own. That’s all of art in a nutshell.

Let's be real: the idea that a chord progression or basic rhythm can be "stolen" is an invention of record labels who would copyright whole instruments if they could.

Japanese city pop being the inspiration for the songs I grew up with explains why I get "nostalgia I never had" from them, being not alive when those songs came out

I love it when people reference old YTPs

I’m just loving the reoccurring gag of alax entering the room in different weird ass ways everytime.

Honestly, I think its cool that there is so much video game music that is "stolen" from real world songs. In a way, its just a neat little reminder that everything we make intentionally or not is still inspired by our surroundings. I just think thats neat.

The fact is, you can’t base a plagiarism argument on three notes, a popular cord progression nor a common drum beat. Artist don’t create out of nothing, we have influences and the creation process usually come down to mixing multiple already existing ideas and influence to create something fresher. Thanks for having a nuanced opinion 🙏

i love how ever since he found that clip of dk falling off the minecart and posted it on twitter he’s had it in every video since his return

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that despite having Spamton in the thumbnail, you didn't mention that the main beat for NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A is virtually identical to the one seen in the Vile/Sigma Fortress Boss theme from Megaman X.

Finding out the entire sonic 1 soundtrack was a whole bunch of songs I didn’t know was heartbreaking to me

_Super Mario World’s_ copying of “Green, Green” was unintentional, and Koji Kondo wasn’t aware he was doing it until after the fact.

I always like it when you talk about video game music or music in general in the channel, even if I comprehend nothing about music, the video still feels very informational while keeping the comedy top notch

I love this sort of musical nonsense. Its so cool seeing songs that define so many fun memories and there are the cases where it's blantant plagarism, but the others feel more like these composers are putting bits of the music they grew up with, into these games and giving them a new sort of identity and something future generations can take inspiration from.

Y'know, game music taking heavy inspiration from other tunes, can kind of feel like a cool little easter egg and perhaps even give some insight into the composer's music taste.

12:16 to be fair every rockabilly song in a video game sounds like this

The clip of DK falling never fails to get a laugh out of me no matter how many times I see it

Thanks to Koji Kondo "borrowing" a few notes, I now enjoy listening to Japanese jazz-fusion.

for the sonic 1 stuff. I remember hearing the composer was a pop musician and he liked adding a pop style opening to the songs. which is why they sound like that and why the sonic soundtrack is so memorable.

12:51 HOW DARE YOU! RUIN THE MARBLE ZONE THEME FOR ME! WHHYYYYYYYY!?

Apparently music is literally the main thing holding back Mother 3 from being localized; not dissimilar to how rarely Sonic 3 got rereleased (or its music referenced). And that's because one of the causes for it is the same. Japan can get away with ITS Mother 3 rereleases because the copyright laws on music are much more lenient apparently, but the game has several key compositions taken from western pop culture; INCLUDING the man, MJ himself, with M3's Natural Killer Robot sounding like the hit title Beat It (one of my personal childhood favorite). And that's without counting all the other songs it likely "stole" from (we don't know if it's an actual steal for any of them but apparently there's strong similarities). The Mother/EarthBound series in general did that quite a lot, but because the first two games were in an era where you couldn't really tell whether it was direct samplings or just inspirations, they're given more of a pass because most of them are transformative shorter snippets. Mother 3 does not have that luxury, as it does it for several kinds of songs, short or not, transformed or not, with NKR being the icing on the cake (it's a battle theme for a boss fight; it's clearly neither short nor transformative).

Thank you for mentioning Yamamoto. I discovered Stratovarius indirectly because of Budokai. I fell in love with Hunting High and Low in my teen years and it always felt super familiar to me. It wasn't until I heard about Yamamoto's plagarism scandal that I went through and found out that not only was that track stolen for Budokai, but 2 more songs from the same album were also stolen for Budokai. Finding out was somehow felt rewarding and hollow at the same time.

It's so cool to me that the actual main drum groove from the original Knuckles theme is hidden inside the final version of Blood On The Dancefloor, in the chorus. It's used more as an accent in the final track but for Knux, it's the entire song base. It's cool to see it utilised in different ways based on the context

I've been studying music for the past 2 years so far because I love video game music. Accidentally plagiarising music is something that scares me sooo much. I once had a song idea that I let sit in my head for a while, until I wrote it down and immediately realised I was literally copying the melody to "The Clock Tower" from dead cell without even remembering that's where it came from. I really wanna make some bops but I have so many inspirations I'm a bit scared of just straight up ripping off a song.

i knew about green greens , sonic 3 and dooms music but just seeing the expanse of it across the entire video game library is astounding however songs like these are the reason that sillva gunner exists

One example I really like is the Touhou Project series. A lot of the songs ZUN makes, especially the older ones, sound like they are nods to other songs. My favorite example the theme of Momiji Inubashiri(the awoo meme girl) and how it sounds just like a song called Song in Blue! There's a lot of other similar examples in the series and I really recommend you check them out!

There’s really no such thing as plagiarism in music. Its one of the things that people in the popular eye get horribly wrong

I love your coverage of such a wide variety of music genres and groups, I'd love to see this formatt of video on the channel more frequently

A recent example of this I personally really like is the similarities between the intros to, orb of dreamers from 2008’s Littlebigplanet. And chirp from 2011’s Minecraft. There was some talk about c418, the composer of Minecraft plagiarizing from ( I believe his name was Daniel Pemberton ) the composer of lbp. But the truth is that they both just ripped a sound loop from apple’s garage band app and called it a day. lol As someone who adores both series, and came to the conclusion that one copied the other long before I ever heard anything online about it, that’s a very funny end to that story.

surprised that you didn't mention pretty much the entire mother 3 ost considering people theorize that its why it wasn't ported

8:16 you can't run forever..

One of my favorite examples of this is from Garou: Mark of the Wolves, where Rock Howard's theme, Spread the Wings, has part of Robert Miles' song Children in it, and it's pretty blatant too. It's likely why the song hasn't ever been reused for Rock in his later appearances, giving him new original themes instead.

13:32 The name of the song is “Love Won’t Wait”, earlier in the same album.

I think my favorite example of really weird blantant style rip-offs is Mujoe’s theme in the Bomberman Jetters anime. It’s very similar to a certain comedy show about nothing.

10:01 this part was in Henry Stickmin series somewhere too one of the endings I think

8:56 The part where he collapsed absolutely made me laugh xD

One I’m really surprised you didn’t mention is the Mario Bros. game start jingle just straight up being Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Although with a name like that…

13:21:My same reaction, I listened to that many times. I can’t believe that I did not make that connection.

I actually have seen already a lot of Sonic songs that are inspired or have the same melody as other songs, I have created a private playlist just for that actually, lol, some of those in the video I already knew, but I found some new ones too, cool! The ones that I already had on my playlist, here just to share, are these: Peter Piper (Run DMC) - Launch Base Zone (Sonic 3) (both melody and "Go!" samples) Americana (The Offspring) - Won't Stop, Just Go!/Green Forest (Sonic Adventure 2) Ghetto Red Hot (Super Cat, especifically the Hip Hop Mix) - Red Mountain (inside part)/Red Hot Skull (Sonic Adventure) Push The Feeling On (Nightcrawlers) - Reactive Factory/Work it Out (Sonic R) Step Daughter (Casiopea) - Bridge Zone (Sonic 1 GG and SMS)/Believe in Myself (Sonic Adventure) (that already sounds like Bridge Zone) Music Sounds Better With You (Stardust) - Dreams of an Absolution (Silver's theme, Sonic 06) I also got some tracks that are just samples used in Sonic Songs instead of melodies, like used in Sonic CD or Sonic Rush ("Work that Sucker to Death" and "Feeling Hot, hot, hot", just some examples) Also, I already knew some of the Nintendo ones too, and discovered some news as well, also pretty nice

12:11 Wrong game. You meant to show a cartridge of Super Mario Bros. 2 USA

14:00 Oh boy! Now we’re into Sonic and Michael Jackson.

10:08 An AD cut off the fart with reverb which made it funnier

I like the way that they changed Sonic 3 & Knuckles' music in most compilations while Sonic 1 has more songs that actually sound like their original song lol.

I am no music genius nor lawyer, but I am pretty sure copy cord progression is not plagiarism.

Local man finds out nothing is original New title: "Video Game Music Inspirations", but I guess it's more "RU-vid" to say they "stole" music lol

7:12 Now I just wanna hear the two mixed together

Taking "inspirations" is a thing every composers tend to do and i think it quite beneficial when you need some help to get more creative.

3:10 Peppino scream meme

new thumb-man vid!!11!!!

0:14 I can now confirm that this is now the "thanks 5 watching" of Alax's new era of content

I learned a lot from this video and I'm a huge fan of the music content you've been making. It's very interesting to what songs some video game tracks used as inspiration.

This is such a good video, my favorite one you’ve made so far. Would love a part 2!

please keep making videos like this I need to inject them straight into my mind like it's chicken soup. Which means it's time for me to go on a rant (well, at the end of the video, you asked for it). Here is some of what I can offer in this regards: I can tell you while K.K. Slider's songs obviously have inspiration because they're meant to represent different genres as a whole, probably like half of them are blatantly inspired by or directly quoting a famous song from that genre. Toru Minegishi and Kazumi Totaka well knew what they were doing. Some examples: - K.K. Faire and Tancha Mebushi (Okinawan folk song) - K.K. Condor and Carnavalito (Chilean folk song, these are basically the exact same) - Rockin' K.K. and "Johnny B. Goode", again - Steep Hill and "Ichigo Hakusho o Mōichido"/"The Strawberry Statement Once Again" (Japanese folk rock song by BanBan) - K.K. Moody (aka K.K. Bolero) and "Sabor a Mí" (bolero by Álvaro Carillo) - K.K. Chorinho and "Tico Tico no Fubá" (choro by Zequinha de Abreu, these are also near identical) - Hazure02 (invalid song #2) and "Sparkle" (city pop by Tatsuro Yamashita) Not to mention lots of other general references, like "Two Days Ago" and the Beatles. Aside from that I also like how Mario Maker's edit themes get a bit cheeky, SMB1 Underground resembles "Take Five" (even though it's in 6/4) and SMB1 Underwater quotes Juventino Rosa's waltz "Sobre las Olas" so well I can't help but wonder if it originally inspired Kondo, especially given the meaning…

i love how you recreate the songs with the respect game’s soundfont it’s super duper charming

this video was such a rollercoaster of emotions for me, I've been listening to this songs for my whole life and never knew anything of this, I'm so glad I clicked on this video, excellent work my guy I'm totally suscribing

3:00 this was so clean tho

Video Game OSTs having inspiration from existing songs is always a fascinating topic, and it's more than likely THE thing keeping MOTHER 3 from being released in the West. MOTHER 2 and 3 have SO many songs that take from existing songs, it's almost baffling how they got away with it all. I think it's something to do with international copyright laws, but man does it suck that MOTHER 3 will be stuck in Japan thanks to it. (Yes, there are other smaller factors as well, but it's likely that the music is the main thing keeping it in Japan)

Still can’t wait for Alax to make a Pizza Tower video

Fantastic video! Like your “videogame samples” video, it quite an unexplored topic and on fascinating to delve into. Now I have a bunch of new music to explore that remind me of thing i already like, thank you!

Toby Fox stealing musical motifs is proof that he's the spirit of Spamton.

1:13 "WA-HAT?" that was my reaction

One similarity that I know between two games is a brief musical phrase in Sonic R's "Living in the City" which is also in Persona 3's "When Moon's Reaching Out Stars". You can find this in the former in the phrase "you have to keep the dream alive" and in the latter in the phrase "Wonder how look in your eyes". Not exact, but close enough for conedy

This is a great video, because it not only brings attention to a very real problem that many people might not be aware of, but also explains how some examples of it have been overblown. It's nice to have that kind of nuance.

8:12 Nichojou mentioned!! I was thinking about that exactly. That was my introduction to that song. I love you Alax. I also loooove this kind of videos talking about music inspiration and crossrefferencing and all that. I'm so happy to have you back Alax

this is easily like top 5 RelaxAlax videos, your love and attention to these sorta things is INFECTIOUS. Defs would be interested in hearing you talk about connecting details like this

Mor Ardain's theme from Xenoblade 2 takes from 3 completely different songs. The most prominent is the chorus to Thriller, but you can also hear a bit of Dancing Queen and Crab Rave in there too.

3:35 that is objectively a great song

“What do they want to do? Create a new key called H?” Germany: *looks off to the side*

One of my favorite games, Pikuniku, for its ending, uses a slower version of “Here comes the sun” my the Beatles. This is probably by favorite uses of the song ever. It makes the ending seem so wholesome, almost like the robots are leaving from the sky and opening it up to see the blue skies shine down

a few songs also fall under the same umbrella as "Hard Times" due to Masato Nakamura being both the composer for the first two sonic games, as well as part of a band called "Dreams Come True". the credits theme from sonic 2 is the same as a song called "Sweet Sweet Sweet" or "Sweet Dream" in english, which was updated for the credits of sonic 06 (featuring Akon, funnily enough)

Earthbound isn't surprising that game is full of references to popculture, but with all these others you are a walking playlist that can link song to other songs, the song encyclopedia

12:58 Is this gonna explain why it always sounded so familia- o... okay then. I definitely never heard that before... Back to the drawing board then

1:00 "The Only time a month was copied was when Augustus Caesar copied July"

The Mario underground theme led to me finding one of my new favorite albums

I'm absolutely in love with the music content. Please keep making more

In Toby's defense, the scene with Oh My Love was a spoof of the opera scene from final fantasy VI

9:54 Hi, weirdos. Here's another prank, but this one involves Ice Cube instead of Bubble. Just take the Ice Cube Recovery Center, and just carry over the edge of a cliff, maybe, with a tree, yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah. That's mandatory. And attach a spring from the tree to the Ice Cube Recovery Center, and then, melt Ice Cube. Melting kills her, right? (yeah) okay, good. Ice Cube is recreated, in the Ice Cube Recovery Center, she'll like weigh it down and the Ice Cube Recovery Center will tilt down off the cliff, and Ice Cube will fall out and she'll crash to the bottom of the cliff and Ice Cube is recreated in the Ice Cube Recovery Center, she'll like weigh it down and Ice Cube Recovery Center will tilt down off the cliff, and the cycle repeats! Yeah, isn't that cool? Pretty funny? (This program, was brought to you, by Blocky's Funny Doings International)

A great question is how did you find all these songs. Like this is an impressive amount of research.

14:53 Hard Times is un ironically one of my favorite songs

5:37 That is oddly so accurate

This is my #1 fear with composing in my music side-hobby. My first album ended up having some of the worst, most melodically-unsatisfying songs I've ever heard because I was so paranoid with people accusing me of stealing other songs, and prioritizing originality over actually sounding good. I used a(n unadjusted, might I add,) clarinet as a bass in one of them, and the mix was awful. The song was mainly on string instruments, but somehow the layer that shares a name with the string category specialized to it was just _too_ cliché for me at the time of making it. Not complaining about the video itself though, it only proves my current opinion. Awesome video as always.

11:11 another great example is how the original lavender town on 1.75 speed matches gaster's theme

2:53 is it just me or is that don't stop believin' by journey

As someone who spends a lot of time watching random video essays, I really took "in conclusion.. why does everything always come back to sonic" way too much to heart

Loving this regular content, man. Keep it coming. 🎉

Another example of this is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' menu theme is is extremely similar to Angel by Massive Attack. This is because during production they used the song as a placeholder menu theme and it fit the vibe of the game so well, the composer for the game was inspired by that song for the actual menu theme. This inspiration also carries over to the (as of now) unreleased sequel, which has had it's menu theme released on youtube.

4:32 Is so inspiring i am going to make a whole paragraph on it

You missed out on the biggest Sonic example; Chaos 6's battle theme from Sonic Adventure straight up uses the Mission Impossible riff. It's not even REMOTELY subtle.

11:20 On the subject, compare Final Fantasy's "Who Are You?" to "Gaster's Theme" and "ANOTHER HIM".

Great job showing the samples back to back at the same tempo (8:25); really makes the connection clear to understand! Also noticed song you played at 13:32 is "Love Don't Wait" by Bobby Caldwell, not "What You Won't Do For Love."

Haha Alax, I just had to come say you are the only RU-vidr I've come across that makes me laugh out loud, your video's are so entertaining and this one taught me alot! Keep it up mate

There’s a reason why Sonic music always hits.

Gosh the edit at 0:34 is AMAZING, that slapped

This may be my favorite video of yours. My mind has been completely blown away by everything you showed

12:00 NOOOOO

I love how you edited the music in all of their soundfonts, that must've taken a long time and it shows!

Did anyone else feel a sponsorship? 10:48

Your videos are always good but I really enjoyed this one. I learned a lot and it was fun listening to all the similarities in the songs I thought I knew

This little music series thats starting is really enjoying to watch! I would love more of weird music oddities in video games, like the re1 directors cut soundtrack

9:52 it’s just so in character for him to do that lmao, fucking plagiarize a song for himself! BRILLIANT!