Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
114 M PS E . O R G was going to be like. Alex just split them up between us randomly. Most of the time I just made music, they picked the music and put it into a map that fit with it the best. It was really an easygoing work environment. I have a background in electronic music. Being in Europe, that dance music stuff came early to me. But the software I was using had its limitations. As much as someone says, "It should sound like this," what they're referring to is something way more advanced than we were capable of doing with the software that we had. We got close but not quite there. You try hard, but you can't really get there. The UT music has charm though. That's what I love about that soundtrack to this day. We tried to get everything out of that software, and it shows. EM: After creating these music tracks, what was the implementation process like at the time? Was there any interactivity for the music in this game? AB: Well, UT was all action all the time. So, we just played looped tracks during gameplay. The first Unreal game did have a more exploratory, adventure game feel to it, with some narrative and some exploration. But UT was different. You knew what was going on at any point, and music just needed to pump the adrenaline. PH: Impulse Tracker was already out when we were working on Unreal Tournament. So I used Impulse tracker, not Screen Tracker, to make music for UT. It had some advanced features like new note actions so you wouldn't have to fade manually between multiple tracks to crossfade. You could just use envelopes for that. I had a tremolo effect on one of the instruments, which was just a volume envelope that stutters up and down. And it turns out that when the songs were implemented in the game, they used the Unreal Engine player to play those songs. And they worked slightly differently from Impulse Tracker. So, the volume envelope length was one tick off. So the stuttering, the terminal would not be in sync. I had to change the length of the envelope to make it match, to make it work in the game. AB: I didn't know that, oh my god! UMX files… PH: It was a great format at the time because it's basically just a bunch of samples and node data. Nowadays, you just use streamed music like mp3 or whatever format you have. The music is baked as is, and it just streams without any problems. But when you use tracker music, you have a bunch of samples, and you play the notes. And there's a bunch of commands that change the volume, pitch, and whatnot. They may not actually play right—the different playback engines may play it slightly differently. And we had to account for that. SD: You guys used Amiga, right Alex? I was on it as well. AB: At first I was on Amiga way back. But for all the Epic Games stuff I ever did, it was all PC, starting with Scream Tracker. Purple Motion was part of future crew at the time, but so was Peter! And you would get one of Peter's awesome sounding tracks if you downloaded Unreal Tournament pulse gun gameplay "It was really a time when you had to be inventive, especially in audio. Layering was completely new." –Sascha Dikiciyan