Well, it's not as if plagiarism in game music was limited to Yoko Kanno. Try Attacked by Assassins from Baldur's Gate 1 and then compare it to Main Title from movie Lifeforce. The title music from Electronic Arts' Lord of the Rings from early 1990's is a direct copy of Poledouris' Flesh + Blood (1985). I will need to re-listen to Planescape: Torment because I clearly remember one track being quite similar to Silvestri's Predator, but I can't find it right now. Etc.
Orchestral arrangements especially bear "more than a passing resemblance" to older works (e.g. compare The Lion's Banner from orchestral version of Shenmue against Raid on Leonesse from Goldsmith's First Knight - incidentally, both are tracks 4 on their respective CDs... One Game Music Concert CD has a part of a track directly lifted from one Star Wars soundtrack).
Personally, I don't really mind these "plagiarisms". I find them amusing, that's all - just about every composer alive (and dead) today lifted some ideas from his or her predecessors, often without properly citing them, and we still consider them great composers.
|