Re: Video game OSTs worth listening to as albums

19
The Unreal soundtrack is unbeatable.

It's always difficult to judge how music would work outside the game when you know it from the game, since for me this music sounds like the colours and scenery and general atmosphere of the game. Likewise these 90s synthesizer sounds are connected to a kind of childhood fascination for me; there is a kind of mood, an evocative quality, that is close to how I feel and think about computers and computer games; like they belong together.

Nonetheless while I know nothing of that game, I could easily listen to that Shin Megami tune posted earlier for all 30 minutes, and then play it again. So I think I can be confident that it works even outside of all that.

The Unreal soundtrack was put together in FastTracker 2 and stored on the cd as .xm files (technically .umx, but as I understand it this is just a typical .xm locked into a proprietary format; it is still playable like any tracker file, just not modifiable), which had the advantage of allowing high quality music in tiny files, as well as (iirc) allowing tracks to be started at and looped around any point, which makes "event music" easy to implement.

The music was composed mainly by Alexander Brandon, with contributions from Michiel van den Bos and Andrew Sega. The former two are also responsible for the superb Deus Ex soundtrack. Andrew Sega has made fantastic music under the names Psychic Monks and Necros. Brandon has released a couple of solo albums, but oddly enough they all blow.

The Unreal Tournament soundtrack, by the same crew, is even more "album worthy", but not as significant to me personally.
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