SingleTrac Music Archive
I've already established that I'm a game-music junkie. I'm really weird that way.

Over the weekend I stumbled across a cassette tape Sandi Geary made me back in January or so of 1995 containing the first-pass versions of music for Twisted Metal and Warhawk. I'd totally forgotten about it. The Warhawk tunes were mostly the same, with few differences from the final version. Twisted Metal had some major changes to it - the city park tune was a lot more "busy" with sound effects, screams, and so forth. One tune didn't make it in the final game - but it was resurrected a year later as the Paris tune in Twisted Metal 2 (with some major modifications - including the twisted version of "Frère Jacques."

Since I have a (mostly) complete collection of SingleTrac games (my PS version of Twisted Metal 2 is MISSING - a neighborhood kid borrowed it and managed to only return the case, and we never saw it again. I had to use a PC version), I thought I'd go ahead and rip the CDs for my listening pleasure and motivation at home and on my new Ipod Shuffle. It reminds me of the thrill of creating games the first time back in those heady days of '94 - '96. Great stuff. Our music really kicked butt back in the day - game music was still mostly MIDI stuff, barely a step above beeps and boops. We were among the first to use recorded music professionals in high-quality Redbook audio.

An interesting side note I heard from my fellow troublemaker, John Olsen: Since almost all of the music for our games were done on Redbook audio, that meant they could be played in a regular CD player (thus my ability to convert them to MP3s). That qualifies them for being audio CDs, and thus eligable for winning gold / platinum album awards from the RIAA (before they became such a hiss and a byword these days...) So Sandi Geary, who was the head of all the audio for our games, was able to send away and get awards for having four (?) platinum albums - for each of our games that sold over a million copies. Because yeah, everyone bought 'em for the music! Being able to play Twisted Metal and Jet Moto was just a bonus.

So for the idly curious - here's what I pulled up. Over 5 hours of music, total, from 10 games:
Warhawk (1995)
Twisted Metal (1995)
Twisted Metal 2 (1996)
Jet Moto (1996)
Jet Moto 2 (1997)
Critical Depth (1997)
Outwars (1998)
Rogue Trip (1998)
Streak (1998 - I think)
Animorphs (2000)

I'm missing the Snowmobile Racing and Snowmobile Championship 2000 games on the list - those were "Second South Studios," a budget games division of SingleTrac. The music for those games were licensed, so they might also be heard in, say, a car commercial. My first exposute to doing games on the cheap!

The last few games on the list are pretty obscure. When we lost Sony's marketing muscle, we discovered how little the QUALITY of the game really mattered when it comes to success. Streak was, in my opinion, a clearly superior "next generation" title to Jet Moto, but it languished in obscurity - the best game nobody ever played (I wasn't on the team that created it, so I feel relatively unbiased about my opinion). I have heard tell that part of the problem was that it was just TOO dang hard for players - I admit, I could never get past the middle-tier races myself. I actually didn't play much of Rogue Trip - it's got the gameplay of the Twisted Metal games and then some - and was VASTLY superior to Sony's attempts to create "true" sequels in-house - but it didn't have the same "feel" and mood that I loved in our earlier games. The grossly fat "Big Daddy" just didn't have the mystique of the enigmatic, charred-face psychopath Calypso.

Outwars - man. Long, sad story. That game just got no love from ANYBODY after we were bought by GT Interactive.

I need to try and convince Matt to make MP3s of the Void War music so I can put them on my I-Pod. Though it usually takes a couple of years AFTER the game ships before I can stand listening to the music again. Matt did an awesome job, and I the music was far beyond the average indie-game fare.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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