The Unreal Source Collection

While I am always thankful for the internet celebrity I have from my music, most of that fame comes from derivative work and covers. You can exalt others for only so long until you realize you could be making something uniquely your own – and I wanted to make music for video games. But ah! A dilemma: nobody wants to hire a rank-amateur, so how do rank-amateurs get better without the prerequisite experience? My solution was to make and fake the opportunity.

In the early millennium, Epic and Valve Games publicly released their game engines (Unreal and Source, respectively) to be fruitful and multiply in the pc scene, Epic even going so far as to have a contest for the best original mod. It was a garden-spot for original indie games full of big ideas and, to the best of my knowledge, not a whole lot of then-recognizable music.

So I picked a few titles and made original songs as if the team had actually hired me. These songs are unfinished, imbalanced, and hot-pink raw at points – and they will always hold a very special place for me. And why not? I was able to make music for games… even if nobody knew but me.

Download Link

The Unreal Source Collection.zip

Curation

2006 . Millennial Age . Chicago
Eastwest Symphonic on Tracktion

A few Guildhall students made a full-conversion mod for Half Life 2 called Eclipse, where you guide an Elven woman with telekinetic powers. The opening level has pastoral vistas with patches of green on sun-baked stone. But the world is also in neglectful ruin – verging on apocalypse.

I tried to capture the duality of decaying beauty, while also trying to unsuccessfully reign in my love of how realistic the flute sounded in my newly purchased soundfont (at the time).

I would estimate this song is about 66% fleshed-out.

After you traipse past the ivy-laced ruins in the first few levels of the game, you proceed underground to a temple, presumably, where all the great secrets of your people lay buried, secreted away from the desolation above.

The tone I wanted was something holy, powerful, and comforting. This is the first time you, in your isolation, glimpse anything familial. But I didn’t want to go about it in a cliché way. I was heavily influenced by the music of Éric Serra at the time, so it felt natural to go with a repeating piano motif and brace it with a crystalline echo. Easily my favorite in the collection and the primary reason these songs were exhumed in the first place.

This song is, by my estimate, nearly 90% complete.

Spellborne was far from an amateur effort and was published in 2008. For whatever reason (perhaps because it was made with the Unreal engine?) it was thrown into the mix. What I clearly remember is that as soon as I saw the image on the left, I was immediately inspired.

There was so much variety to the scale of the people, and the idea that it was underground gave it a weight I had never seen in a fantasy world before. I immediately thought of something ponderous but stately, like an elephant in rich finery. The concept intersected nicely with the brown-note powerful brass section in my new soundfont…

I would estimate this song is about half done.

A horror-themed full conversion mod for the Unreal engine, Hollow Moon takes place on an abandoned base on the moon, and plays out in black and white.

I wanted to capture a sense of looming fear, not the kind that pounces without notice. The kind that slumbers beneath the dead walls of the world, and on the day you arrive, an eye stirs.

I was heavily influenced by the works of John Frizzell at the time, borrowing his liberal use of a rising chorus and wailing strings to realize this sound.

This song is about 75% complete