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Wing One, Take Three
Last Summer, The Fatman published his
Wing Commander soundtrack, "Wing One", through the Amie Street music service. Twenty-six tracks were released throughout August. Sixty second samples of each track are available to everyone, and once you've bought a song, you can listen to the full version online or download it outright. No DRM, just MP3. The Amie service is a little unusual in that songs are very cheap until they're popular. At the time of writing, Wing One tracks were priced between 40 and 90 cents. Wing Commander fans who missed out on the original premiere of this album are in for a treat. The Fatman has three more albums in his Amie Street catalog, including the soundtrack to The 7th Guest. Check them out here.
This is the soundtrack to the first Wing Commander game by Origin Systems. I was asked by the game's producer, Chris Roberts, to write something that sounded something like Star Wars and Star Trek the Motion Picture. My Team Fat writing partner, Dave Govett, had this little tune (the fanfare/theme) in his head already. It took him about a day to get finished music to me--and with that one tune, game music took what is perhaps a bigger step than it had taken before or has taken since. If you don't believe me, do the research. Try to find a soundtrack with stronger musical sensibility, better composition, or better arrangements. This game supported the then-new MT-32 sound card--this was pre-General MIDI, and most games had just used the internal FM sound card--which was considered high-quality at the time! In addition, Chris Roberts insisted on making the soundtrack interactive. There have been other soundtracks before and since, but this one stood out. Wing Commander was the hit of the CES show that year. These days, game soundtracks that attempt to imitate John Williams are commonplace. I don't like to do it anymore. But to my knowledge, this is the first one, and compositionally remains one of the better ones. I believe that for several years after this, game composers were still not asked to imitate John Williams. They were asked to imitate David Govett and Wing Commander.
You will hear the authentic, original MIDI files, playing back on a Roland MT-32 sound module, as you would have heard if you were playing a Brand New Wing Commander game on The Best Game Sound-Equipped Computer Available At The Time. A touch of Roland Sound Canvass (in MT-32 emulation mode) was added just because it was easy to do and made the tones just a tad-bit richer. Other than that...Welcome To The State of the Art in PC Audio, circa 1990!!!!
[KrisV] [# 8538] [Show comments]  
XBox Live Arcade Size Limit Broken
Capcom has announced that two of their upcoming XBox Live Arcade titles will set a new size record for the downloadable game store. Last year Microsoft upped the limit from 50 megs to 150 megabytes for each game and released a new 512 MB memory card. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix will be designed to take advantage of the full 1080P resolution, and Bionic Commando Rearmed will also feature special high res textures. Final sizes have not been announced, but both should come in at more than 150 megs. For the time being, other games will still be held to the existing limit, but it's a good bet that the bar will continue to rise as more higher res Live Arcade games are released. Amazingly, Wing Commander Arena was just 42.03 megabytes.
The last thing I’ll mention is concerning the talks the have been occurring online concerning the filesize of the game with respect to features on the 360 and the PS3 versions. I can officially say that the filesize will not be an issue. With great help from the guys at Microsoft, we will be able to offer the same features on both platforms to the same quality as each other.
[ChrisReid] [# 8540] [Show comments]
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