Read below for information on a free song from the CD!
Back in 2003 I composed the music for the video game, "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2." It was my first adventure composing for XBOX and Play-stations.
Still, I was far from new to games. At the time this was also my thirteenth journey into "Dungeons and Dragons" and "Middle Earth," having written more than a dozen previous TSR game scores. Other scores from this period included the TV special "Dragonstrike," and the games "Planescape, A Guide to the Outlands.", "Ravenloft, A Light in the Belfry," "Hail the Heroes" and "Terror Trax" (among others).
It was a great ride, but one of my great regrets was that despite having the best technology of the day, the scores were not up to what I knew I could do with a live orchestra. The budgets just were not there for these games.
So when I embarked on "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2," I had decided things were going to be different. I was going to record the score with a live ensemble, even if it meant paying for it myself and making nothing. All I wanted was to hear the music as I had intended.
But as is often said, men plan and G-d laughs.
I won't go into all the details of the debacle that followed, but you can read a bit about it here: Interplay Entertainment Facing Bankruptcy. The short story was this: I kind of got left holding the financial bag for the music, and what should have been the greatest score of my career became a financial nightmare - at no fault to all the wonderful people that I was working with directly at Interplay.
The upside to all this turmoil was that at the end of the day I ended up keeping the rights to my music.
Flash forward to about two and a half years ago when I decided that despite the effort it might take, I needed to go back to the raw musical material and recreate my "Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2" score anew. I still didn't have the budget for a full orchestra (maybe some day I'll win the lottery and this will be my first project) but with the help of some new tools such as "The Vienna Symphonic Instrument," I thought I might be able to create a viable representation of what I wanted to hear.
The barriers were fairly high: Many of the sounds I used back then came from synthesizers that have long since been recycled for scrap metal The sequencer files were not compatible with my modern gear. It was also next to impossible to even determine which versions of the music were the ones from the game and which were discarded demos - so many of the mixes were lost.
Inspired by the many fans who had contacted me wanting the score, over that next two and a half years, whenever I had downtime, I went through the process of recreating every track of the score from scratch - or at least the 9 tracks that could be recreated. I decided to release the music on what is now my second "Dungeons and Dragons" music release: "Songs of the Dragon Vol. 2." The CD also includes two tracks from another project that I thought complimented the D & D scores.
As a thank you to all the fans of the game who have contacted me, this link will download one of the recreated tracks - "The End Title Theme."
Download: "The Battle Rages" aka "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 End Title"
You can also preview or buy the entire CD from this link:
Wow. Thanks for going through all the trouble. I'll pick this up as soon as I'm able. I never got to play the sequel and think it sucks you had to go through so much. That said I love the songs and hope to pick up a copy of the game some day. After I buy your collection of course.
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