Recently, I have (once again) taken a great liking in fiddling about in old DOS games. Why? Short version: because they’re awesome. Long version: because they’re very awesome. No, honestly, they are. There simply are certain things that aren’t as great now as they used to be. One of those things, is music.
My example of showing this, is the game “Piranha”. I found it ages ago on one of those random Demo-discs, that had shareware versions of a few different games. I can’t even remember where I got the CD from – I just have it. And it is – most likely – only because of Piranha.
The sad thing? There’s absolutely no sign the game ever actually existed. A search of “Piranha” gives… well, I guess you can figure that one out, if I say that the amount of helpful links is less than the number already mentioned in the sentence.
But, what is known besides that? In every game, there’s usually a readme-file, an “About Us”, or a way to buy the full game. Heck, even a year would suffice. None of those are present. Zip. Nada. The only real clues are whoever developed the game: “OMT” and “D-DESIGNS”, and the fact that the creation-date of most of the files are somewhere in 1995. Sadly enough – and even sadder, that it was also expected – those names did not yield any useful results either.
The only remaining hint was the fact that the high score list had two entries, upon installing the game: “Delsion – GFX” and “Dzen – Coder”. As expected, neither of those gave any useful search results.
… then again, why am I even doing those searches? While it would be great to be able to get the full version of the game, in some possible way, the point of it all remains: It’s sad to see such a promising game would be forgotten, even though it might never even made it to release.
Luckily, I already got the most important part. The thing that made the game so incredibly awesome. Simply listen to the below, which I just recently recorded and uploaded to YouTube – only because it’s that great.
That is how epic all game music should be. Fittingly enough, the only others I remember, on top of my head, that makes as good music, is Epic Megagames, with games like Tyrian, One Must Fall 2097 and Jazz Jackrabbit, specifically. Oh yeah, and the Tristram-theme of Diablo.