San Francisco Bay Area composer Dren McDonald is announcing the release of The String Arcade, a recording of classic video game music reimagined for string quartet. The crowdfunded album sells for $9.99 as a digital download from Loudr, iTunes, and other channels. In addition, BandCamp offers a $11.99 CD version and free streaming. All profits will be donated to the Alameda Music Project, a tuition-free afterschool program that provides intensive classical music instruction to underserved children in grades K-5.

No, this isn’t a repeat. This isn’t theme songs. It’s theme music. No words allowed this week! Ok, maybe one word allowed.

There once was a time, mostly back in the 80’s and early 90’s, where a TV show had to have a catchy theme that explained what you were about to watch that played under the opening credits, like the Gilligan’s Island theme. And these opening themes were sometimes very long, the various Star Trek themes were upwards of two minutes each! The average runtime of a half hour show (minus commercials) back then was close to 25 minutes. Nowadays, it’s barely 21 minutes, and rather than catchy songs, they go with descriptive show titles like The Mob Doctor or Animal Hospital that explain the premise. Theme songs have given way to just splashy title cards with a show’s title to make way for more commercials and more profit. The last TV show with a truly good theme was Friends, and that’s stretching it. I for one greatly miss them. I went for themes that to this day I can still belt out. Man, TGIF had a lot of awesome songs, I think the only thing I missed was Step By Step.

With the Olympic Trials upon us, and their endless overproduced puff piece human interest stories, it got me thinking about my favorite uplifting or inspirational music.

I hit up Too Many Games last night, and managed to sneak my way into the secret shows of both BrentalFloss and The Minibosses. And I recorded video of both of their sets. Come see them both after the jump.

I was never much of a gamer, the list below is pretty much every console game I ever played. This is mostly because my console collection went from Atari 2600 when I was a kid, to NES for like my 8th birthday, and then I didn’t get anything else besides a Game Gear until I bought myself a PS2 my Junior year of college, and that was just so I could practice DDR at home before making an ass of myself at the arcade. And when I did get a game it was like one from the clearance rack once a year at christmas. So I missed a lot of good games. But those few I did manage to play had some great music. My list is all things I can hum off the top of my head.