Feeling kind of ticked off late tonight, so I have a story to share in order to cheer me up.

As some of you might know, pretty much all videogames have some sort of soundtrack. It's a forgotten business, really, because they don't get the same exposure (or CD's published) that movie soundtracks do--and even their movie counterparts are largely overlooked. But, seeing as the number of hours that are spent playing a videogame, a composer in that field has a more difficult job. Consider having 20+ hours of music written for a game. Originally, with short games, this wasn't an issue. Music wasn't always present, and it was often reused. But it's come a long way--from MIDI-based soundtracks to a full ochestra playing a score (well, sometimes) today. One company that has certainly been there the whole was has been LucasArts. In fact, they revolutionized part of the industry with their iMuse system which allowed for seamless music change based upon user interaction, either by a scene change or a scripted event. In other words, in the SCUMM Bar in Escape from Monkey Island, a tune plays when you're in the main bar, clocking in at around 2 minutes. The same piece is recorded two more times with slightly different instrumentation and ornamentation, still at the same two minutes. Now, when you're in the bar and talk to the bartender, the music "jumps" to the bartender music, which introduces a flute to the instrumentation. When you're finished talking to the bartender, the music "jumps" back to the original file, humming along without missing a beat (literally). The same effect is applied when the user interacts with the captain sitting at another table, only with different instrumentation. It's a lovely effect.

Anyhow, LucasArts has always had a great crew writing the music, but namely it's been the Big Three from around 1990 to 2000 until they all left the company. Those three would be Michael Land, Clint Bajakian, and Peter McConell. They all did incredibly fine work, especially on the Monkey Island series, Outlaws, and Grim Fandango, as well as original music on a few Star Wars games.

Soo, in late 2000, the final game in the Monkey Island series came out: Escape from Monkey Island. Besides being a fantastic game, the music absolutely rocked. All kinds of styles were used, using previous melodies and plenty of new ones, all orchestrated out. The result was a very fine soundtrack. Unfortunately, the way LucasArts decided to script the game was to put the ambient sound effects straight into the music file. So, while all of the fans were able to rip the music files out of the game (which doesn't always work cleanly, because the files need to be loopable. They tend not to have an "end"--instead the iMuse script tells it to go right back to the beginning or some other point of the track), we have birds chirping and waves crashing along with the wonderful music. Worse, some of the best music was trapped inside FMV cutscenes, which not only had sound effects but voice-overs as well. What a crisis! None of this would be a problem if silly LucasArts actually released a proper soundtrack (they did for Outlaws and Grim Fandango, which was pretty good, but not comprehensive, and certainly not the Monkey Island tracks) like the folks at Square-Enix with the Final Fantasy games.

Well, I finally worked up the courage to do something about it. Or at least try. I wrote a glowing e-mail to Clint Bajakian, the lead composer for EMI. I told him how great the music was, and lamented over the lack of a soundtrack, especially for the great music such as in the final showdown cutscene. The result? Intially:

Wow, what can I say – this is the single most supportive message I’ve received of my music.  I am really glad you like the material and wish LucasArts would release a soundtrack CD, but after all, it is
up to them. I would like nothing more than to give you the mixes I have from EMI, that is nothing more except one lone thing: to remain professionally ethical towards LucasArts, my client and former employer of nine years. If it weren’t for this one obligatory commitment, I would burn you off a CD no charge.

Well, that wasn't going to happen. But, I was ecstatic over the e-mail. I was some 14-year old kid giving the most support message to a fabulous composer? Eee. I shot off another e-mail, just to make conversation, and told him how much his music fit the atmosphere of the games perfectly and could easily be made into a movie score. I told him how I ripped out some of the music myself, but again, the sound effects and looping problems. Shortly, I got an e-mail back...



Ahhh, so I'm not sure where he got the idea that I was in some position to recommend his services. But never mind that--at that link I was able to download a seven-minute MP3 of the music from my favorite cutscene from towards the end of the game. Wow.

As far as distributing it goes, I did not do so until I obtained permission from Clint to send it to the maintainer of a small LucasArts music fansite. Clint made it public on his own website as well, but didn't make it known that it was there. You see, a short 30 second clip was available when I first e-mailed him. Clint simply replaced the file with the full version, but presumably no one said anything about it. His website is gone, now, and he's at a new company, Bay Area Sound, the Senior Music Supervisor at Sony Computer Entertainment America, but naturally I still have the MP3.

That's that. I feel special. :-)