List of video game soundtracks released on CD
Wikimedia list article
The practice of releasing video game soundtracks on compact disc began in the 1980s. CDs began to decline in the 2000s as they were replaced by other lossy-compressed audio formats such as MP3. Despite the decline, video game soundtracks continued to be released on CD and included in game collectors' editions. In the 2010s, successful indie games such as Undertale included physical collector's editions featuring their own video game soundtracks on CDs.
History
The earliest CD recordings of video game music date back to the 1980s. Koichi Sugiyama was an early figure in this practice, and following the release of the first Dragon Quest game in 1986, the Tokyo Strings Ensemble released a live performance CD of his compositions. Haruomi Hosono released the first generally recognized video game soundtrack album, Video Game Music, and the practice experienced its "golden age" in the mid-to-late 1980s with hundreds of releases including Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever, Namco's Video Game Graffiti, and Koichi Sugiyama's orchestral covers of the Dragon Quest series. By the early 1990s, compact discs (CDs) were gaining traction as a storage medium for music and video games. By 1987, Sega was selling 50,000 to 100,000 game soundtrack CDs annually. NEC had been the first to use CD technology in a video game console with its PC Engine CD-ROM² System add-on in October 1988 in Japan (launched in North America as the TurboGrafx-CD the following year), which sold 80,000 units in six months.
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