2018 Electronic Track of the Year
The hard work is finally over, we've finished our picks for the best video game music of 2018. Just as we've done last year, we'll upload a new award video each day until our final Original Game Score of the Year Award is uploaded. Once the videos are uploaded, we'll enable the award page for 2018 on our site to archive our nominees and winners. We wait to do this because rather than just skim our choices for the year, we encourage each of you to hear and see our nominees considering most of the smaller games nominated, the average gamer hasn't heard of and their accompanying scores are simply outstanding. It's a great way to not only find new games to play but discover new music you may have not heard of otherwise.
I just want to say, It never ceases to amaze me how ambitious and innovative video game composers continue to be year after year. Always pushing boundaries and never afraid to try something new. We look forward to this time of the year because after listening through the years top scores, we're always eager to share as much of this fantastic music as possible with everyone we know. This year, we reviewed a whopping 126 Original Video Game Scores—which is more than double the amount compared to last year. It was a challenge because we found most release date lists on video game media sites do not include every DLC or Indie titles(perhaps one exist that we are unaware of). So, it takes time to research and document when a certain title is released, in addition to when or if it's soundtrack is available and if the music is original or stock. Which brings me to thanking those of you who contacted us to let us know of a lesser known game soundtrack release and composers that send us a copy of the soundtrack you wish us to review. It saves time and it saves us some money—it can get quite pricey purchasing these soundtracks out-of-pocket as you can imagine.
As for our award videos. What we do each year is chose five nominees for each genre that were released between October of 2017 to October of 2018(after this date, scores released will go into the following year). For each genre—Rock Track of the Year, Vocal Track of the Year, ect.—we allow arrangements of remastered titles to qualify but for our Original Game Score of the Year, the soundtrack must be an original release and not a remix of any kind. We then choose at least five track samples that best represent the score and sync them to recordings of gameplay/cutscenes that we've captured from the featured game throughout the year. We than include album information such as: game titles, proper track titles, composers, arrangers or vocalists. After each of our nominees are shown, at the end of the video our winners are revealed. I personally wish we could include many more soundtracks because of how much great video game music is out there this year but we did our best to showcase some of the finest music the video game industry has to offer.
Enjoy our 2018 Awards!