Jake

Well Eep ook ack! I failed at #Mojole #848. 💛🖤💛🖤🖤💛💛 💛💛💛🖤💛🖤💚 💛🖤🖤🖤💛💛💛 🖤💛💛💚🖤💛💛 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛💛💚 💛💛💛💚🖤💚💛 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I long to update that soundtrack waiting thread. Maybe it’s why I got involved in the remasters to begin with. Who can say.

It was both reasons! The highly detailed textures in the original were very heavily based on photographs, basically textures lifted from the CSI games. It added a really satisfying level of busyness to each screen, but when we tried to actually up the resolution and light it, as you guessed, it didn’t work that well. It ended up looking “old” instead of “a cooler version of what you remembered.” So we opted to simplify textures but add more detail to the scenes themselves, and also looked at how hit the road and Steve’s paintings handled “stylized” dirtiness. We also did want the game to be more of a piece with the other two seasons, while still having its own feel. So the overall density of environments and amount of caked on dirt, graffiti, and gunk is still way higher than in the other games. It also has film grain on by default, heavier vignettes in the corners of shots, and is color graded more aggressively into gunky “old film that’s been left out in the sun” tints, especially in the dark areas of shots. And for what it’s worth, the first two seasons were also not direct uplifts of their original styles. With season one we really looked at hit the road and the covers to the comics for inspiration, and wanted that season to feel closer to those than it previously had. So it’s pretty bright, has lots of high contrast spotlights, and is a little more flat. For season two we wanted things to feel a little more like a monster movie, so there is more underlighting coming up from below. We also decided season two would have a lot of two-tone lighting so many scenes are lit above with one color and below with another. For season 3 the goal was basically, try and make it feel like season 3 but more polished, while keeping it stylistically in line with the other two seasons, so the trilogy as a whole feels cohesive even if each individual season has its own mood and details. It’s definitely a more noticeable change with season 3 since it had more of an overt style to begin with than the previous two. (Or maybe more accurately, all 3 seasons had a style but season 3’s managed to actually punch through and be noticed to a greater degree than the other two.)

Amazing stuff! I hope the clips can eventually go up on archive.org or in the VGHF library or some other place where they can be archived and preserved.

Telltales head of marketing changed mid way through season 3 development and he canceled all merch projects I had just started working on the soundtrack packaging when it happened.

Season one remastered is available on vinyl right now and it won’t be reissued with new tracks (?). There’s just not an audience. Hoping to do physical releases of 2 and 3 as well. Maybe I will print on demand a CD release for you, one of the two people who has ever asked for it 😛

It’s because I did the mix for the menu track, not Jared. Not that he didn’t give it the thumbs up (he said “yeah that’s basically the way I would have edited it, ship it”) but it’s not something that was on either of our minds when considering what the soundtrack should have. And he hasn’t got the source files for it since I bashed out the menu mix in Premiere, so he’d likely have to re-create my edit.

Not on Steam or Bandcamp, because they are done directly through a simple admin interface… but the ones that propagate to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube Music etc yes they are a horrible pain to update because unless you are a huge record label with direct access to all those different backends, they go through a variety of middleware services, none of which are comprehensive in their tools or feature set. Many of them also have intrinsic hooks to their storefronts which are still hardcoded to assume pricing based on CD-length albums, which is part of why many soundtracks have just given up and release in “volumes,” even though for all intents and purposes it should be one album in the digital era. We tried to avoid that for the Skunkape soundtrack rereleases but eventually just decided to split the albums up on those services. (On Steam and Bandcamp they are single albums without volume distinctions.)

Well that I can do https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/upubfd4dvl30eaog0z2o7/env_office_cs_opening_e1_1.wav?rlkey=uane64i9w2y3kqz18xly59eju&st=q8pq9zry&dl=0 This lyric-free arrangement of World of Max was stuck in my brain for so long that I made it the main menu music of the Save The World remaster. Then we didn't include it in the soundtrack oops.

There is very little new music this time around. Season 3 was well covered. But Jared went through and updated the samples on almost every track, and did a new mix and mastering process on all of it, so things sound way better. We also got the usual session saxophonist to come in and add a little bit of live coverage to some key moments that were previously pure synth.

The game is working its way through console cert as we speak. More info including release date coming soon.

A good list, enjoyed hearing what about them spoke to you personally. I know you limited it to adventures but man there are some winners in the rest of the catalog. Dark Forces, Rebel Assault, are both really iconic compositions that are representative of their eras of gaming in a very fast-moving time. The Outlaws box is a real stylistic outlier in the world of retail covers. Afterlife is one I’ve always respected more than loved, kind of like the game itself. Pipe Dream looks like an arcade game because it basically is - it’s effortlessly iconic in that arcadey way that’s actually hard to achieve. I dont think any of these hold a candle to the adventure greats, but there are a bunch of good ones in the mix.

Wow those are incredible. I mean, they are bad! But in a fun way. It’s rare to see games get the “bizarre off-model international movie poster” treatment, but its here in spades.

Got it! Thanks serge.

I think it was Hit the Road I was thinking of that was made on/for general midi as opposed to a Roland thing. Zaarin, whose name I can never remember on this forum, would know better than me. (@s-island) And my Mac music memories were MI2 and FOA.