Listen to N64 GoldenEye's soundtrack in beautiful, uncompressed form

Some gaming memories are written in pencil, easily smudged or erased. Some are written in pen. The music for GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, at least for me, has been carved in marble. And now you can hear what the music sounds like with no compression, before it was hacked down a bit to fit onto a 12 MB cartridge.

Pretty amazing, huh?

This video is likely taken from files that have long been hosted on composer Grant Kirkhope's page, and he offers some thoughts on the game's score:

"When I first got [to Rare] in October 1995 I was put to work on the Donkey Kong 2 conversion from SNES to Gameboy. I got this out of the way quite quickly and was then asked if I’d like to help out on GoldenEye as Graeme Norgate was doing Blast Corps at the same time and was really busy. I knew we had the license to use the original Monty Norman theme so I got started. It was immense fun to write that video game's music, I don’t know how many times I listened to all the past theme tunes from the movies, probably hundreds. It was the first time I’d had to do any sound design too, finding lots of gun shots and over the top ricochets was obviously my first task!"

Listen to those songs and let them take you back; it's great to hear them in this condition. Just in case you're curious about how they sounded in the game, here's a version of one of the songs direct from the game.

You can also see what other games Kirkhope has scored or worked on; he's responsible for a lot of great music. This is a fun way to listen to some to wonderful music during your Friday morning.