RGB Classic Games Forum

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Epic Games has released a special soundtrack that includes remastered versions of musical pieces their best games, including such classics as Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball, Tyrian and Unreal. The track can be downloaded here:
http://epicgames.com/community/epic-20t ... oundtrack/

I only wish they'd included more Tyrian tracks, this game has awesome music

They forgot their ZZT year? Epic always touted being founded in 1991.

The company was actually called Potomac Computer Systems at the time.

Nice! I wonder how they recorded the second track (Dan)? It sounds like they might have used AdPlug with the harmonic effect I wrote Which means they would have used the CMF player I wrote too Which would be kind of ironic, because it was thanks to the Jill and Kiloblaster music I wrote the player in the first place...

Unfortunately they're not remixes or anything, so there's nothing really new - I already have all the songs I know in my playlist in their original formats. Although earlier today I did stumble across a pretty nice Jill of the Jungle "Funky" remix.

It's a shame they left out Solar Winds though

Why does this remind me of the music in Xargon? Same musician?

It's still Dan Froelich.

Right! For some reason I had some vague memory of looking up the credits for both games before and finding out that the musicians were different (probably it was actually Xargon and something else, maybe Vinyl Goddess from Mars).

leilei wrote:It's still Dan Froelich.

Dan did the music for JoJ as well as my two main games Kiloblaster and Xargon. I met him at the Shareware Convention in Indiana in 1993. He's a cool guy. A lot of the ideas that were incorporated into Xargon came from the time we spent hanging out during that convention.

P.S. I didn't use all the music that Dan created.

kilodude wrote:Dan did the music for JoJ as well as my two main games Kiloblaster and Xargon. I met him at the Shareware Convention in Indiana in 1993. He's a cool guy. A lot of the ideas that were incorporated into Xargon came from the time we spent hanging out during that convention.

P.S. I didn't use all the music that Dan created.

Interesting! Do you still have those unused tracks?

BTW, did you pick tracks after they were written, or did Mr. Froelich write something specifically for a level (maybe after playing it), or at least for some theme/monster etc.?

MrFlibble wrote:

kilodude wrote:Dan did the music for JoJ as well as my two main games Kiloblaster and Xargon. I met him at the Shareware Convention in Indiana in 1993. He's a cool guy. A lot of the ideas that were incorporated into Xargon came from the time we spent hanging out during that convention.

P.S. I didn't use all the music that Dan created.

Interesting! Do you still have those unused tracks?

BTW, did you pick tracks after they were written, or did Mr. Froelich write something specifically for a level (maybe after playing it), or at least for some theme/monster etc.?

I should have everything that was created for all my projects. I'm having two problems: 1) Sorting through everything. Even though I have good organizational skills I am not sure what I was thinking at the time. Some things are in places I didn't expect. 2) I can't seem to find a good program to convert CMF to MP3. I found code done by Malvineous but I don't want to mess with compiling it right now. If I had something it would make it a lot easier to deal with.

Here is what I wrote in my journal (been keeping one daily for 26 years) on June 1, 1992: "Dan Froelich, the guy who's writing the songs, called tonight. He said he really likes "Kiloblaster" and has a lot of ideas for the music." So he saw the game first and that inspired him to write songs specifically for the game. He would send them to me with ideas about where they should go. I would then put them in the game and begin testing to see if it felt right. We did the same with Xargon.

Something I thought you might find interesting from my journal on June 8, 1992: "Dan Froelich called at midnight and sent me another song over the modem. This one is called "Fugue" and is very mysterious sounding; it creates the kind of tension I was talking about. He said that he'll finish "Hero" and also 2 other full-length songs for this release."

I find it great that you keep journals, memory likes to play tricks on us It's also very interesting that you have had such a cooperative interaction with the other people who worked on the project, and everyone contributed not only in their "major" field but also wherever they could (like Dan's artwork). I fancy this is something that happens super rarely in mainstream game development of today, when many of the people involved in a project may not even know each other.

BTW, I've always loved how the people from Westwood Studios often doubled as actors in FMVs in their early games. Eric Gooch played Seth the Nod commander excellently, in addition to all his marvellous work with the 3D graphics, renders and sprites.

kilodude wrote:I can't seem to find a good program to convert CMF to MP3. I found code done by Malvineous but I don't want to mess with compiling it right now. If I had something it would make it a lot easier to deal with.

It would be awesome if it was also available in a lossless format, like FLAC in an Ogg container.

DOSGuy wrote:

kilodude wrote:I can't seem to find a good program to convert CMF to MP3. I found code done by Malvineous but I don't want to mess with compiling it right now. If I had something it would make it a lot easier to deal with.

It would be awesome if it was also available in a lossless format, like FLAC in an Ogg container.

I would be glad to make all of the music from Kiloblaster and Xargon available in the Ogg format if someone can provide a means to do so.