MIDI Week Singles: "Planet Theme" - The Adventures of Rad Gravity

"Planet Theme" from The Adventures of Rad Gravity on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)

Composer: David Warhol

Album: No Official Release

Developer: Interplay Productions

The Adventures of Rad Gravity is one of the games that I had never heard of before embarking on my listening to #AllTheNESMusic endeavor.  When I saw the title I was really hoping that at least one of the songs (assuming that there would be more than one) would speak to me, so I might have been experiencing a little bit of confirmation bias when I thought that the Planet Theme sounded absurdly exciting enough to be included in our weekly feature.

So if this is your first time listening to this song, let alone music from this game, I implore you to listen until the song repeats at about 1:03.00 because, admittedly, I was about to write the song off during its first 20 seconds, but then at 23ish seconds, something odd happens and it sounds a lot more melodic and a lot less spastic in the way that late 80s early 90s science fiction can sound spastic.  Then after a bit, the song goes right back to its early self, but if you stick around for another 10 seconds after the spaz-meister returns, you will be treated to a third melody!  That's right, there is a C section in this song that is just over a minute long before it repeats.

Now, not having every played The Adventures of Rad Gravity, I cannot say how the planet stages where this music is played operates, but I would like to think that nearly half of the game is spent planet-side, which means that you hear this song more frequently than the other three songs composed for the game.  But what do I know?

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  One interesting note, is that David Warhol wrote the music to the Commodore 64 version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Pool of Radiance, where as Seiji Toda wrote the music for the NES release.  Maybe I will have to cover Mr. Warhol's take on the City of Phlan.