GameBasement RadioBy Jeff Atwood I. In the BeginningI've been playing games for years, all the way back to the Atari 2600 and even the venerable Odyssey2. But I never really paid attention to the bloops and bleeps that passed for music in these older games. It's embarassing to admit this, but my fascination with PC game music began with 3D Realms' forgettable and vaguely offensive 1997 game, Shadow Warrior.
The music in Shadow Warrior was a collection of uninteresting songs that did nothing but get in the way of the more useful combat sounds. Adding insult to injury, they were MIDI format. Back in the bad old days of 1997, most people owned basic soundblaster-class sound cards with MIDI playback that was one small step above a $9.99 Radio Shack synthesizer— in other words, painfully bad. The developers, to their credit, knew how things stood. They realized that most people would probably just disable the music, and included a funny little easter egg in the game. Upon disabling the music via the menus, you are treated to a little Lo Wang sound clip: "What matter.. you don't like music?" We were playing a LAN game at the time, with the sound cranked. A bunch of guys overheard this little sound bite, and we practically died laughing. It was really funny; the one memory I have of that otherwise unremarkable game. I won't dig into the perverse psychology of making fun of your own game, but give George Broussard some credit. He's right. Most game music is just crap. A checkoff item. Can't have a game without music, right? But this little inside joke, as innocuous as it was, made me stop for a second and think about what I was doing. Why was I disabling the music? I realized at that moment that I really did love game music— just not this music. Part of that can be blamed on the limitations of MIDI. The advent of the CD-ROM as standard PC equipment circa 1996 was the defining moment in the history of PC game music. All of a sudden, the sky was the limit: anything music composers could dream up could be mastered onto the game CD as a standard audio track. And best of all, redbook audio sounded exactly as composed. Not just for gamers with high-priced sound cards, but for every gamer with a CD-ROM drive.
Which brings me to the other seminal event of 1997— John Romero's review of Outlaws , which he posted to the Ion Storm website. In the review, John waxes eloquent about the game's CD audio soundtrack. I believe his exact words were (as memory serves), "If you play with music disabled in Outlaws, I will personally come to your house and bitch-slap you." No, I'm not kidding. Yes, there was a time when John Romero was not an industry laughingstock. Regardless, John was right. Outlaws is a fantastic first person shooter. As testament to its greatness, there are active fan sites for the game to this day, over three years after it was released. But what's most remarkable about Outlaws is how unique and effective the CD soundtrack is. It's a homage to classic western movie music; music you've probably heard subconsciously when watching a late-night TV showing of The Outlaw Josey Wales. But why watch Josey Wales.. when you can be Josey Wales? The music really took the game's immersion to the next level. And it didn't skimp, either, with two full CDs of fantastic western-themed songs. What Makes a Good Soundtrack, plus The Legality of It All
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