Hi all. Previously, I wrote about the fact that usually (yes, almost always) not all the music written for a game ends up on the officially released soundtrack album. In cases like the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which I wrote about in my last blog post, this is not such a big problem, since there can be several hours of music recorded, but it all repeats each other in one form or another. It would be stupid to release 5 hours of repetitive music and in this case it would be very advisable to release an album consisting of the main most interesting and memorable compositions. And in general, it is rare for publishers to publish soundtracks longer than one or two discs – let’s say, the standard size of any normal music album.

But there are soundtracks that suffer much more from this state of affairs. I’m talking now about soundtracks that consist of several hours of completely different music. And due to the fact that you can release an album that is only an hour long or a little more, most of these soundtracks simply do not reach listeners. These obviously include the soundtrack to the first part of Assassin’s Creed, which I also wrote about in the last post of my blog. And the hero of today’s topic definitely belongs to such cases – the soundtrack to the game “Remember Me”, written by Olivier Derivier.

I’ll start, perhaps, with the music written for boss fights, since most of these compositions did not make it onto the album, with the exception of the tracks The Zorn and The Ego Room, and the release version of the second composition was quite changed. Here are some examples:

Alternative in-game version of the published track The Ego Room:

To mix this soundtrack, https://bookmakersnotongamstop.co.uk/non-uk-betting-sites/ I used a gamerip from the game, which was completely unsuitable for listening in the form that it is. The soundtrack for this game is very interactive, to the point that some tracks consist of many, many samples, each of which does not exceed 10-20 seconds. Since the release of the game, some people have posted some of these unreleased tracks on YouTube, but they were not recorded in the best way: in the settings during the game you turn off all game sounds and voices, leaving only the music, record the gameplay, take out the audio track – and the track is ready! It would seem that what could be wrong is a completely suitable method. But in reality everything turned out to be not so good. In addition to the fact that the music recorded in this way did not have a complete composition, another problem arose: in the game, the music track itself changes its volume depending on whether the characters are talking. That is, at the moments of pronouncing phrases, the music becomes a little quieter, after the completion of the dialogues, it becomes correspondingly louder, and when these dialogues are turned off in the settings, these volume changes, of course, hurt the ears and did not allow one to fully enjoy the music. Therefore, I armed myself with an audio editor, installed the game and began to go through each level, listening to where and how the music was playing, after which I collected all the necessary samples from the gamerip and combined them into solid tracks.

Battle tracks generated during gameplay from small ten to twenty second samples, playing in different orders depending on the events taking place:

Several combat themes did not make it onto the official album. Here are a couple of them:

Considering that every fight in the game happens differently, there are a lot of variations in what all these small samples add up to. Therefore, I made two variations of different battle themes (in addition to those that were already included in the release album), distributing the samples across the tracks in such a way that, in the end, all the samples available in the gamerip were used in these several variations.

Quiet tracks that play during exploration of locations, for the most part, either did not make it into the album, or were included there in an abbreviated version. For example, different fragments of the release tracks “Still Human” and “Neo Paris” play separately from each other in the game itself, and in addition, in the game they are presented in extended versions, for example:

Most of the tracks use the same melodies in different arrangements and in different forms, resulting in a variety of compositions. The main motives run through the entire soundtrack. The following example shows this very well:

Also in the full version of this soundtrack you will find some battle themes that were not included in the release, which are not generated during gameplay, but were composed in a more standard way – they consist of a couple of long pieces that loop into themselves and replace each other when certain conditions change:

Or unique musical fragments that play only once during the passage of a certain place in the game:

Like this track, which plays while walking through the slums and ends with a musical passage accompanying the main character’s tense climb up a collapsing pipe.