Here’s the news item from a couple of days ago from TTLG:
Over at our our forums we were pleasantly surprised when MysteryDev posted this thread regarding the ‘real’ System Shock 2 soundtrack. How real? Well, according to MysteryDev’s words, ‘real as in ripped from a CD that Eric Brosius burned’.
A few more details regarding this soundtrack:
* These are the real arrangements created by Eric himself, authored as full soundtrack songs and burned as an album. It's not a fan interpretation or anything else short of the real songs from the real composer.
* This was personally crafted by Eric Brosius from the original audio, meaning that unlike the 22khz audio files from the shipping game this release is CD quality.
* The audio quality is much higher than what's out there; this was ripped from the original CD and encoded at 320 q0 mp3
Basically, this is not only the best quality version of the soundtrack, it’s the version of the soundtrack that Eric Brosius himself created. It’s not a fan compilation; this is the real deal.
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack since yesterday, and I can confirm that it is indeed much better quality than the sounds that were ripped from the game’s audio.
The soundtrack is excellent background music for coding.
A word of warning though: the last track is the audio of the final cutscene, and so if you haven’t finished the game, there’s some spoilers in that track.
Considering the game’s music was created to be dynamic, and loop/repeat as much as needed, I wish the music had been released in the small cut samples. I’d make a program that dynamically played the music by choosing samples based on a set of heuristics and then it could just play a single song forever.
Could. But the soundtrack is good enough as is that I’m too lazy to do anything with it. But if they were already split up, I’d definitely try my hand at making it dynamic.
Speaking of which, is there such a thing as an actual soundtrack album for Thief or Thief 2? I’ve seen the bits available at thief-thecircle.com so I’m wondering if there is more than that out there anywhere.
This was a pretty cool listen. The funny thing, it didn’t remind me of playing the game one whit, because I always played with the music at zero. It just felt better with the softspoken polite butlerbomb droids’ "pardon me, sir?"s not being layered with the NOW YOU WILL FIGHT music segments leaping out of the speakers. Even moreso when they managed to get right up behind you before speaking.
I would kill for a Thief1/2 sound track but from what I gather from the TTLG forums is that both Thief 1 and 2 don’t have continuous sound tracks and that all the audio is split up into a bunch of little files that play in a certain order depending on where you are in the level. I’m probably explaining it wrong so hopefully one of our resident MENSA programmers can clear things up.
Sadly it doesn’t look like Eric Brosius has any kind of Internet presence. I can only find references to him at Mobygames and other miscellaneous sites but boy oh boy I’d eagerly buy his wares if he had any for sale.
About the Thief:DS soundtrack … I did actually download that earlier, and I likes it. But it’s more moody/ambient than what I remember from Thief:TDP.
I guess the main thing I remember from Thief:TDP is the intro track, which I just now grabbed to have another listen to. Excellent stuff.
Unfortunately I can easily believe that there is a lack of actual coherent “tracks” for the rest of the game. (Were there bits during the individual mission intros?) Toooo bad. Like JMR, I’d snap up a Thief soundtrack or even concept album if Brosius had one available.
(Tangent: so my post count makes me a “Bad Girl” now eh? A fiendishly clever mechanism to make me post more in hopes of acquiring some different title.)
Bad girls are awesome, and a bad girl with a name like Johnny Law probably has a huge revolver, paratrooper boots, black daisy dukes and a leather jacket. And a bitchin’ Harley.
Holy shit, that music really takes me back.
That was one scary game. Even the second time through when I knew what to expect, I still jumped in my chair lots of times. I usually dislike respawning enemies, but I have to admit that in SS2 it did add to the awesome atmosphere by maximizing the feeling that I’m never safe and have to constantly watch my back.
