Video game music has come a long way since 1980 when Namco released Rally-X, the first arcade game with a true musical soundtrack. Modern gamers now expect high-end audio that meshes seamlessly with the action. But that’s not always what they get—sometimes the quest for game music winds up in some dark places. Here are 10 games that shipped with some of the most nightmarish tunes you’ve ever heard.

Action 52

This unlicensed NES cartridge is notorious for being stuffed full of low-rent garbage—52 different games, none of them good. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the ineptitude of offerings like Star Evil and Hambo’s Adventures, but the soundtracks of these games are as bad or at times even worse than the graphics. Atonal, piercing, and often repeating the same four-second loop for the entire game, Action 52 is a whole K-Tel compilation album’s worth of the worst the NES could produce.

Taz-Mania

Sega’s Game Gear was a pretty solid little handheld with a crisp, bright color screen. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as endowed in the audio department. The people who got the worst of it were Illinois-based developers NuFX, who cut their teeth on the Atari Jaguar before that system tanked. Taz-Mania was their first title for the Game Gear, and something obviously went very wrong. Both the music and sound effects are atonal and grating, but the real problem is how the software interacts with the console’s 8-bit CPU. If there’s too much going on in the game, the music will change tempo, making it even more maddening.

Death Crimson

This obscure Japan-only Sega Saturn game is well known as one of the stinkiest on the system, and one of the reasons is the atrocious music. Composed by Kunitaka Wantanabe, these tracks are MIDI nightmares composed of endless noodling and goofing off on some of the most odious synthesized instruments imaginable. There’s a rule in game music that less is often more, but Watanabe stuffs a million notes into every measure of his soundtrack. Maybe it’s because the game has almost no sound effects? Impossible to say.

Resident Evil Director’s Cut: DualShock Edition

Some of the music for this update of the groundbreaking original Resident Evil is perfectly decent, but the whole story behind the soundtrack—and the extremely bad entries in it—is insane. When Capcom decided to put a new version out, they hired Mamoru Samuragochi, a famed deaf composer known as the “Japanese Beethoven” to devise a score. What he delivered was…uneven, at best. There are a few bangers, but many of the tracks are utterly perplexing. What happened? Well, it turned out that Samuragochi had been a fraud all along, paying a music teacher at Toho Gakuen University to compose all of his work for 18 years. Wild.

Metal Gear

It’s important to recognize that a lot of video game musicians were making things up as they went along. Variances in hardware could make music that sounded fine on one system turn out awful on another. One of the best examples is the MS-DOS port of Hideo Kojima’s original Metal Gear. For some reason, the game’s music has been pitched up to a massive degree, meaning that all of your sneaking around is accompanied by shrill whistling tones arranged into some semblance of a melody. It really wrecks the mood, and your eardrums.

Beverly Hills Cop

Harold Faltermeyer’s iconic “Axel F” is a simple and potent bit of synthesizer wizardry. But British developers Tynesoft simply weren’t able to make a default Windows sound card capture the timbre. The result is one of the most blaringly loud and squealy takes on a movie theme of all time. Thankfully, it doesn’t play throughout the game—in fact, the main action has absolutely no music at all, which in this case is an improvement.

Extreme Paintbrawl

Game music is designed to intensify the emotions that the player should be experiencing. But Todd Duane, the composer of the tracks for 3D shooter Extreme Paintbrawl, might have made things a little too intense. The entire game was developed in two weeks off of the Duke Nukem 3D engine, and Duane’s MIDI tracks are frenzied, bizarre prog-funk workouts with lots of barn animal noises, flatulent basslines, frantic drums, screaming, and more. They’re so over the top that you might think the whole thing was a joke, but our guy was totally serious about rocking out this hard while you shot digital paintballs at bots with bad AI.

Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood

A role-playing game set in the Sonic universe developed by BioWare? Just a weird idea to start with, but things got even weirder when we heard the soundtrack to Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood. Sega’s blue hedgehog is notorious for all-time great soundtracks, so why did we get some janky MIDI? Apparently, BioWare had a full soundtrack composed for the game but had to pull it just before the game went gold for unspecified legal reasons. Panicked, they grabbed MIDI versions of old Sonic songs from fan sites (!) and jammed them in with no rhyme, reason, or even a complete SoundFont, leading to several of them lacking essential instruments.

San Francisco Rush

Music is important for racing games—the right tunes can amplify the sense of speed and get you in the groove. While the soundtrack for San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing in the arcades and with the PS1 port was solid but unspectacular, something extremely weird happened when the game came to the Nintendo 64. That system wasn’t notable for high-quality audio, due in part to its insistence on cartridges instead of CD-ROMs for storage, but this game pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor with insane MIDI compositions involving pitch-shifted vocals, spastic drums, and mind-numbing repetition.

Rocky & Bullwinkle

We didn’t want to put too many NES games on here, but this one has earned its spot. Nintendo’s console could accomplish some audio miracles in the hands of a talented composer, like the genius Tim Follin. But it was also capable of truly dire, atonal messes. THQ’s adaptation of the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon fails on pretty much every level, but its soundtrack might be the worst thing about it. Level themes don’t loop properly, repeat forever and in some cases get even more unlistenable because of a glitch in the sound effects programming. This is truly music for a mental breakdown.