Before streaming sites made every game soundtrack instantly searchable, fans often rebuilt the music themselves one MIDI sequence at a time.
Browse VGMusic’s Nintendo 64 archive
VGMusic—the Video Game Music Archive—has been online since December 19, 1996. Its larger collection contains more than 31,000 MIDI files across dozens of game systems, but the Nintendo 64 directory is enough to show how enormous the project became.
As of its September 2023 index update, that directory contained 1,900 MIDI files.
The page is not just a pile of downloads. Each entry can include the game, song title, file size, the person who sequenced it, and comments. Banjo-Kazooie alone spills into dozens of arrangements and variations. Farther down the page are games such as Wave Race 64, War Gods, WrestleMania 2000, and Yoshi’s Story.
That metadata matters.
MIDI archives documented fan labor
A MIDI file is not an audio recording of a cartridge. It is a sequence of musical instructions that a synthesizer or sound module interprets.
For fans in the 1990s and early 2000s, recreating game music as MIDI meant listening closely, transcribing parts, approximating instruments, and fitting music designed for specialized game hardware into the General MIDI ecosystem found on PCs and sound cards.
The resulting file might sound different on a Sound Blaster, a Roland module, or a later software synthesizer. That variability was part of the experience.
VGMusic preserved the files, but it also preserved who made them.
That makes the archive useful beyond nostalgia. Researchers looking at game-music fandom, amateur sequencing, MIDI culture, web distribution, or the history of fan-created digital media can see thousands of credited contributions organized by platform and game.
The site’s structure has barely any interest in modern presentation tricks. You choose a console, choose a game, and find the file. The Nintendo 64 page is more than two thousand lines long because sometimes a giant index is exactly what the job requires.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many archives whose value comes from patient accumulation rather than clever design. VGMusic is one of the clearest examples.
Nearly thirty years after the archive was established, the MIDIs are still sitting there waiting to be played.