720° The Ultimate Aerial Experience (Original Sound Track From The Hit Game) (Right-click to download FLAC)
I spent too much money on this not to share it.
I was on a recent episode of the retro gaming podcast Retronauts, (which you can only hear if you subscribe to their Patreon, and you should totally do that because everyone who works on Retronauts is really rad and cool). On that episode we talked about the upcoming massive HORI Arcade Classic Pro stick for the Switch 2 (with PC support). It’s a gigantic controller with modular parts. It includes four different types of control sticks; your basic 8-way joystick, a paddle controller, a trackball, and that weird loop lever controller that games like Ikari Warriors used.
But I joked in the episode that you still can’t use it to play the 1986 Atari Games banger 720°, because that game had a really weird joystick. It was like a wheel, but also a joystick? You could never center the thing. It’s really hard to explain, watch this YouTube video. (I honestly don’t understand half of what he’s talking about here, but you get a good view of the stick.)
I bring it up because that weird-ass joystick made it impossible for seven-year-old me to play the game at all. My tiny little brain couldn’t comprehend how I was supposed to use that crazy thing. Of course, a few years later a port came out on the NES and I got my fill that way,
But even when I sucked at the game, I loved it. The cabinet was super cool, with a fake boombox on top, and as a kid I was just obsessed with skateboarding as a whole, even though my busted-ass body couldn’t even do it.
So I guess maybe that’s why I spent [redacted absurd amount of money] on this promotional flexidisc that was handed out at trade shows the year the game came out. It features selections from the game’s soundtrack – not the whole thing though. If you want that all the tracks, you have to find a copy of That’s Atari Music, Vol. II on CD, although I think that also is missing a few numbers.
But why am I featuring a flexidisc rip when the songs are also available on CD? Well, that’s because I’m fairly certain that at least some of these are different versions of the songs!
Some might just sound different because of the limitations of the format. Flexis aren’t known for their fidelity. But some truly are different mixes. The most obvious example of this is the very first track. It adds the vocal sample “Skate Or Die,” that was on a different track in the arcade version. And the sample is actually really different. In the arcade it’s super-compressed, crushed to fit on the limited RAM space the arcade game had. The flexidisc “Skate or Die” is not only uncompressed, it’s an entirely different recording!
Other tracks have differences too. The “guitar” solo in “Downhill Park” is different from the one on the CD; “Skate City (4)” has all its drums removed;. and “Stake City (5)” moves the guitars to the back of the mix.
There are a lot of other small changes too. Like I said, I’m sure some come down to mastering for flexidisc vs compressing the audio for a video game – but I think it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s cool to me that there’s this slightly different version of this game’s soundtrack that’s just been sitting on a flexidsic for 40+ years, and probably no one noticed how it’s different from the music in the actual game and on the game’s belated CD soundtrack. This stuff was released on a tape too. It would be interesting to track that down and see which versions of the songs it uses, my money is on the flexi.
A few additional notes: The track names for this release were taken from the Discogs page, which in turn seem to be taken from the VGMdb page on the game. The disc itself came with no liner notes or track names. The composer credits are taken from the game I believe – again there were no liner notes.
Earl Vickers, Brad Fuller, and Hal Cannon all have very detailed write-ups at the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation website, if you’re interested in learning more about them, by the way. That’s a hell of a niche wiki. They all had pretty impressive careers. Vickers did the music for Paperboy and Marble Madness! Bangers!