Amiga game from 1993
Composer: Jon Hare/Richard Joseph
Cannon Fodder was a very popular game and was one of my favorites I played quite often on Amiga 500. The game also received high scores between 93-95% in several game magazines where one of the reviewers from the magazine Amiga Computing got headache in trying to find errors in the game without any success. The game was converted to several other platforms, Atari, PC DOS, Sega Mega Drive and SNES. Even Gameboy Color but not until seven years later.
Without sounding too narcissistically, but to guide these young soldiers from a bird's eye view with one mouse button and bursting the enemies with the other was hysterically entertaining. Especially when you could continue bursting the enemy's dead body, before it magically disappears, endlessly and see it bounce and jump like a playful child on a trampoline with a fully-sprouting ketchup bottle. No wonder why the game was criticised by the media for being too violent and to glorify war. The most irony and dark humored was the lyrics of the theme music and the image of recruiting new soldiers in front of a hill with graves of already fallen soldiers.
Cannon Fodder's theme song has almost never been so popular with the brutal but ironic and catchy lyrics that was easy to sing along with -"War! Has never been so much fun". The original is otherwise still top notch but there is a remake with a nice polished quality which sound really great. John Hare himself has interestingly enough played this live in various performances. The most recent I could find was in 2014.
The most beautiful music in my opinion must be the one which is played during the recruitment and after each completed mission during the list of the heroes (Heroes in Victory) and the fallen (Lost in Service), a sad sounding one maybe, but still very beautiful. The Remixes with electric guitars enhances the feeling to a new level - especially the one by Von Havel.
Cannon Fodder 2, the sequel of the following year, the title theme sounds like a pain in the arse but it was quite forgiven when I heard the next soundtrack being played during the recruitment screen.
Selected original soundtracks
Enjoy my selected favourite remixes below, mostly electric guitar, as well as symphony perhaps, remakes and a vocal with Jon Hare himself.
Which remix do you like best?
Don't forget you can vote on nearly all remixes by clicking on the green arrow that appears during playback. (registration required, free of course)
Interesting fact -the first five names or so in the troops are nicknames taken from the game developers. The first two were best known who were most likely the ones you wanted to keep in life as long as possible. Some were so stubborn the level had to be re-played only because Jools or Jops happened to die during the mission. I confess to be one of them eventhough the mission could be completed without them
Jools (Julian Jameson) programmed the game. Jops (John Hare) designed the courses and also the music along with R.J. (Richard Joseph).
Lost in Service which I call name is Narcissus and was first written by a teenage Jon Hare as a love song in 1984 and appeared live on stage the same year. Nine years later, he used the melody to the game Cannon Fodder and at the same time, he also made a live recording of his original music. Source Soundcloud and Youtube with comment from Jon Hare.
The Cracktro music to Cannon Fodder 2 is also really awesome, especially the remix, and it can be found among the demoscenes (or to the right among related articles) called Anarchy Menu 1 by 4-Mat (Mathew Simmonds), a member in the demo group Paradox.