SKOST

In our recent post on the Shovel Knight release trailer, you may recall one of our questions in our state of frenzied yammering was "Where do we get this song?!"

Delightfully, we have an answer: it's Track 17 on Strike the Earth! Shovel Knight Arranged, newly released alongside the Shovel Knight Original Soundtrack.

Composer Jake Kaufman, aka virt, has made both albums available through his Bandcamp page on a name your own price basis. The page for the Shovel Knight OST also contains a link to freely download a version of the soundtrack that can be played on NES/Famicom software.

The OST was composed by Kaufman along with Manami Matsumae, the chiptune virtuoso behind the Mega Man soundtrack and many others. Kaufman, on the arrangement album page, expresses how honored he was to work with Matsumae, and that she even arranged one of his own tracks:

One of the high points in my life is knowing that Manami Matsumae, one of my biggest inspirations and the composer of the ORIGINAL Mega Man soundtrack, actually arranged a song I wrote for a game. This is completely surreal, and hard to fathom.

Kaufman also says he's perfectly happy to have you fiddle around with his music, too, and just about anything is open game:

Make your own arrangements! Make music videos! Write lyrics! Do crazy stuff! Be brilliant! Be stupid! Share your creativity and love of game music with the world. It's why I make the source files available, and why this album is free.

The soundtrack to Shovel Knight is only one great part of an overall great game, as we proclaim in our reviews for the Wii U and 3DS versions. What parts of everyday life are you planning to infuse with awe and power through these tracks?

[source virt.bandcamp.com, via virt.bandcamp.com]