I was introduced to Plantasia
I was recently introduced to Plantasia, a 1976 album by Mort Garson:
The friends who introduced me to this album did it by skipping around from track to track and shouting "See!! See!!! Doesn't this sound like [videogame soundtrack theme]??" They are absolutely right - there are tracks in here that sound an awful lot like tracks from early classics. There's some real "great artists steal" shit going on here.
A lot of the music which seems strongly influenced by Plantasia is from games I didn't play much of as a child and cannot immediately recall the melodies to without help. So when I listen to Plantasia, I mostly just get a strong feeling of, "Damn, this sounds like JRPG overworld music!" People with a better instant recall of Koji Kondo's works are probably going to be much more shocked than I was. (I was not permitted to play console games as a young kid, so my "childhood videogame music" is shit like this.)
Anyway, this isn't much of a secret or anything - I just hadn't been shown this stuff until very recently, and Mort Garson is in general new to me. I am doing a big car trip tomorrow, so I am loading the fuck up on this stuff. I will enter the world of plant synths. I will transcend the asphalt and commune with snake plants, and shit like that...