Jay-Barbeau
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Jukebox Heroes: EverQuest's soundtrack
I've always felt that MIDI tunes were to computers what chiptunes were to 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. Before storage media expanded and technology increased to the level of using regular instruments, practically every PC game had a MIDI soundtrack at its back (as did quite a few early and misguided websites). MIDI wasn't a file format that stored recorded music; instead, it was a file full of instructions for your computer to assemble a tune on its end. I never really liked MIDI songs the way that I enjoyed old console soundtracks. Songs done in MIDI have a distinct and somewhat unpleasant, flat tone to them, although sometimes composers were able to finagle toe-tapping tunes with it. It certainly is nostalgic to hear, however, to those of us who played games in this era. Before MIDI faded out at the end of the 90s, some of the earliest MMOs released with their scores done in this format. Ultima Online (which we'll get to later on) and EverQuest were two such titles, and today we're going to listen to what EverQuest sounded like back in 1999. The original score was composed by Jay Barbeau, who has since released a remastered soundtrack called The Original, Opus I. But we're not going to go for that remastered stuff; let's listen to the sounds of the past, shall we?
