If you tried to come up with a gaming product that would cater primarily to hipsters, you would be hard-pressed to beat this: new London-based record label Data Discs will be releasing vinyl editions of the soundtracks for the 90s beat ’em up Streets of Rage and the cult classic Dreamcast adventure game, Shenmue.
Both albums will ship in September, but pre-orders will become available when the label’s website launches on May 30. Fancy, exclusive editions will be available through the site. Data Discs “specialises in remastering audio from classic games, along with carefully selected modern titles, and releasing them as beautiful pieces of wax,” the label explained (via Eurogamer). “Our aim is to showcase the creativity of game composers and bring their (often overlooked) works to audiences both new and old.”
Both Streets of Rage and Shenmue‘s soundtracks feature the work of composer Yuzo Koshiro, who is considered to be one of the greatest composers from the 16-bit era of video games in the late 80s and early 90s. His music for the Streets of Rage series is held up as particularly influential for subsequent electronic and chiptune music. Koshiro collaborated with Data Discs on the remastering of these new releases. Data Disc’s Facebook post about the Streets of Rage album promises that all three games’ soundtracks will be be similarly remastered.
Streets of Rage was a side-scrolling beat-’em-up released for the Sega Genesis in 1991, during the heyday of that genre. It spawned two more sequels for the platform. While waiting for the remastered edition, you can listen to its beloved soundtrack here.
Shenmue was an impressively ahead-of-its-time open-world adventure game developed by Sega and released on the short-lived Dreamcast in 1999. It pioneered many features common now in open-world games such as a day/night cycle and NPCs that walked around on their own schedules. Although it was critically acclaimed at the time, and is still held up by fans as one of the greatest games of all time, its high development costs (the most expensive video game made at the time) and the Dreamcast’s overall weak performance led to the game being a financial failure. You can listen to a few samples from Data Discs’ remastered soundtrack here.
