Music From the NES Era

An interesting person responded to a personals ad I'd left on craigslist with an email including this:

Question. Favourite NES-era video game soundtrack?

And that... Led me down such a personally fascinating trail of consciousness that I want to share it here. So I quote here my answer, just as I wrote it to him:

I like the specificity of your question. When you ask specifically NES era... Oddly enough, my reflex answer is: Actraiser! Never actually played it, but watched someone play it, and the music was really good. ^^ However, as I suspected, and a Google search confirms, that was one gen later, on the SNES. Well, in that case, Mr. Mario is certainly good, but I have to give it up to the classic, the legendary, the original... Legend of Zelda. In my highschool music class, I played one variant of the iconic overworld theme on my trumpet for one of my tests. I think I earned some serious geek cred for that with some of my classmates. 

Of course I have, since you said NES era, been thinking exclusively about the NES as opposed to other games released in roughly the same era but on different platforms; there were a lot of DOS and Sega games with good soundtracks too, like the first three Sonic games, Wolfenstien, Commander Keen, just to name a few... 

And then, a memory so obvious, so huge, so personally important but so removed from general public consciousness that I didn't think of it at first, hits me in the side of the head. 

No. I do have a favorite soundtrack from that era. It was a DOS simulation game, released in 1994-95, simply called "Wolf". 

Playing that game encouraged and developed a lot of early formative attitudes in me about environmentalism and respect for animals - as they are more complex, more intelligent and wiser than most of us humans give them credit for, or did back in the 90s anyway. 

And it was under the influence of that game that I had an early sense that I was what I would later understand to be part of the human subculture called furries, more specifically the therian or otherkin sides thereof. 

It was under the influence of that game that I experienced what was possibly a visual hallucination one night in my childhood when I knew with utmost certainty that I had not been asleep... that was one of the reasons I pursued a belief in magic and mysticism with vigor and desperation into my preteen years, hoping that I might somehow see again what I had seen once... until doubt and self-loathing finally managed to half convince me that I had been wrong, and that my faith was not merely misguided, but childish. Only ever half convinced, though, I continued to attempt to test and practice magic as I understood it, and I have some pretty amazing stories about it. 

My insistence from the age of around five before I knew any better than to make such assertions that I had the soul of a wolf earned me the nickname of "wolfie" and contributed to earning me a place as the most bullied child in my tiny home village of 700 right up until I turned 18 and left. 

The music was very soulful, and took obvious inspiration from native american musical themes. I think I have the soundtrack saved somewhere, I can show it to you if you like. 

Wow. For such an innocent question, I sure managed to follow it into a deep, dark place.