It's a little game I've been playing with music. Each week of the year is another year in the history of music. The last week of the year represents the current year. So count backwards to this week, the 22nd week of 2015, and you get 1984.
This year in music was really important for me. I was 17 and music was my main side interest to school and sports. The album I listened to the most that year was probably Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to the movie Birdy staring Matthew Bodine. This soundtrack stands alone as a great dark moody listen; based on tracks from Gabriel's previous solo work, especially Security. There's lots of African rhythmic drum work set in a moody synth environment. You could probably use it as the soundtrack to a dark moody game like Limbo to great effect. A Souls game might also go well with it; although, the album isn't so much creepy as brooding and mysterious.
While I was collecting music for my 1984 playlist, I looked up games and found a few to play. Arcade game 1942 by Capcom came out this year, and Namco's Tower of Druaga, one of the first action RPGs. I pulled out my Namco collection for DS to play during the week, and on the weekend, I'll play 1942 Joint Strike, a modern remake of the 194X series, on XBLA. After that, I'll get back to my "magic 12" list and dig some more Super Mario Galaxy and Skyrim.
Then, what the heck, I looked up books. Frank Herbert's fifth Dune novel Heretics of Dune came out, and the first TMNT comic, but I decided on Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October because I've never read one of his books and I really liked the movie adaptation.
So that's what I'm doing this week. Most of the time I'm scouring the libraries and record stores for music I don't have already. 1984 was a great year for metal, although, at the time, I was mostly unaware of it, satisfied with my ex-prog favs solo projects like Gabriel's Birdy, Steve Hackett's Til We Have Faces and the Against All Odds sountrack, which featured several Genesis members' solo tracks.
Toodle bye.
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