Ongoing History Daily: Plagiarising video game music
Rock has been around for at least seventy years which means that with each passing day, it’s getting harder and harder to find an original way to order the twelve notes in our Western musical scale. The result is that artists are accidentally reproducing melodies previously created by someone else. And this is happening across all genres.
Dimmu Borgir is a symphonic black metal band from Norway who released an album called Stormblåst in 1996 which features a song entitle “Sorgens Kammer.” After it came out, the band was accused of plagiarizing the theme of a video game called Agony by the game’s musical composer. Blame went to the band’s classically trained ex-keyboardist. W
Whether or not the melody was deliberately lifted was never really settled but Dimmu Borgir ended up re-recording the song without that piano bit.
A lot of famous video games ripped off bands too. One of the most biggest was the original Doom.
Some info about it: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Musical_inspirations_behind_Doom's_music
Lots of videos on the subject. This one is pretty succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H3BB2gKKeY
Apparently Lemmings originally was all knock-offs which they realised something like two weeks before shipping and hurridly created a new soundtrack out of music in the public domain. Stuff like Pachebel’s Canon (the most famous Lemmings track), She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain, Ten Bottles of Beer on the Wall, Greensleeves, and lots more.
…neat… while googling this, I found a post with the apparent original cut soundtrack: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1933.0