
Unreal: The Backstory - bane
https://www.facebook.com/AlexanderBrandonMusic/posts/10153814555037621
======
rocky1138
CC'd my response here:

Living in Waterloo now. I was walking home from work with my friend when we
met a guy flying a drone. After briefly talking, my friend mentioned that he
was a developer #2 on Unreal back in the day. Must have been Schmalz! Crazy to
think you just meet your heroes like that...

When I was 15 when my brother got me a disc of pirated games. On it was an
Unreal directory which contained a tech demo of sorts. a castle with marble
walls and eyeballs you could place with the mouse. Even then the realtime 3d
rendering was really solid. I wonder how far along development was at that
point and how this demo was leaked to BBS' at the time. Do you have any
information on that?

Out of everything, I remember the music the most. Unreal's music has always
been fantastic. Deus Ex, too! Thanks!

~~~
ethbro
The thing that always impressed me was how good Unreal looked with CPU
rendering at decent frame rates. I wasn't able to convince my parents of the
necessity of a Voodoo or TNT card, but Unreal handled my rig far better than
most other games.

------
LinuxFreedom
There is one big white box across the screen that forces me to login to that
web service when I want to read the text, so I actually can not read it.

You, the people, have to understand that you must not use that freedom
destroying web service when you want to keep your freedoms.

It has gone much too far and we have to take consequences, this is a serious
question about your real life freedoms, not a game or a simulation.

~~~
s_kilk
pastebin: [http://pastebin.com/9Z7WRCbt](http://pastebin.com/9Z7WRCbt)

~~~
vog
Thanks for making the article available to non Facebook users!

------
Pengwin
The whole Unreal series and the engine it spawned were, and still are
something i love to just look at.

I remember going through the file system as a kid and looking at all the
nicely arranged but weird files in Unreal Tournament. I liked the music from
the game and wanted to play it, but i didn't know what the weird UMX file was,
but i knew it was music thanks to being placed in the Music directory (A nice
change to Quake 3 where all i found was a giant PAK file). A Google search and
a winamp plugin later and i could play it. Looking at the winamp plugin i
realized that it was not like an MP3 or wave with everything baked in but more
like a midi, there was a whole UI in the plugin which displayed the
instruments and timeline of the song being played. It was a really fun thing
to learn about on top of instagib matches on Deck16.

Looking it up now i see that Alexander Brandon is the composer of Go Down, the
music for Deck16. I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music
from UT and have another listen. It'll be nearly impossible to deal with a UMX
file these days!

~~~
Ralfp
> I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have
> another listen.

It's all on youtube these days. I'm loving Unreal's ambients for programming
work.

~~~
rocky1138
Save yourself the bandwidth and get them in higher quality off modarchive :)

[http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&...](http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules&query=69698)

~~~
Lorin
Modarchive is such a treasure trove of great music... great to see it being
referenced on HN :)

------
rl3
> _But we did establish specific points where music would turn to combat and
> sometimes play or stop for cinematic moments. And that ended up being the
> system that eventually got modified for Deus Ex._

I'll always hold a special place in my heart for Alexander Brandon and his
work on _Deus Ex_ 's score. It still remains one of the most immersive game
soundtracks ever made. Tyrian's score was equally magical.

~~~
Pxtl
Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit remain two of my favourites for music.

As an aside, anybody know the best way to get Tyrian running on a modern win
machine with modern gamepads? I tried tyrian2000 and open Tyrian and no dice.

~~~
voltagex_
Don't forget One Must Fall: 2097 and Epic Pinball!

[https://www.gog.com/game/tyrian_2000](https://www.gog.com/game/tyrian_2000)
is the only one I've seen working.

What issues did you have?

~~~
pluma
Oh my god, I thought nobody else remembered those two.

Epic Pinball to me is still the best pinball game in history and I played One
Must Fall for hours on end despite not actually being a fan of the genre.

EDIT: The soundtrack to OMF (1994) is on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UGRR6MkVmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UGRR6MkVmE)

EDIT2: Different company but same area: The Crusader series (No Remorse
(1995)/No Regret (1996)) had a pretty awesome score as well:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2xs8pQBcZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2xs8pQBcZk)

And of course C&C Tiberian Dawn (1995):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkyB3kTiPQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkyB3kTiPQ)

EDIT3: For sake of completeness, here's Jazz Jackrabbit 1 (1994) and 2 (1998):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6L78lXPHro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6L78lXPHro)

EDIT4: OMF was declared freeware at some point and works in DOSBox so you can
play it online in the browser at the Internet Archive:
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_One_Must_Fall_2097_1994](https://archive.org/details/msdos_One_Must_Fall_2097_1994)

~~~
voltagex_
The last I saw of OMF2097 it was _very_ crashy in DOSBox.

If anyone knows enough to debug why it's crashing, let me know.

------
santaclaus
Did Epic ever release source like id software? How rad would it be to pump
Unreal through Emscripten and pull it up in the browser...

~~~
jonny_eh
The latest version is available as open-source on github apparently:
[https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-
github](https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github)

~~~
greggman
the source is available to look at. It's not "open source". See definition of
"open source"

~~~
chrisrogers
The OP asked for 'released source'

~~~
hueving
But the comment being replied to mentioned open source.

>The latest version is available as open-source

------
facorreia
I still remember the impact that Unreal had on me. Such a revolutionary game,a
real jewel.

~~~
jonny_eh
It was greatly overshadowed by its bigger hit of a sequel, Unreal Tournament.
I still fondly remember the original's remarkable technical and artistic
accomplishment though.

------
abtinf
I fondly remember sitting in an IRC channel with the devs and enthusiast fans
well before the game was released. Treated to lots of screenshots and rumors
about the game.

~~~
eswat
I miss those days where you could easily connect with the developers in a
small tribe like that. I grew up chatting with Epic/DE devs and modders in
those days and it was a terrific experience.

Now developers are either beyond reach or stick with mediums where it’s more
like a sounding board for them to talk at you than for both of you to have
serendipitous discussions.

------
xgbi
For those who (like me) don't quite like the 1/3 of screen banner asking you
to login to view the article, here is the content:

Unreal: The Backstory During the development of Tyrian, Jason, Robert allen,
Daniel Cook and I visited the Epic office in Rockville, Maryland, which at
first was a fairly small place, only a few rooms. These were used for the
growing shipping and customer service departments. By departments I mean one
person each. There was a room where Tim had his office, and a larger room that
doubled as a conference room and, in the case of our first few visits, the
room where the last phase of Jazz Jackrabbit was completed. Arjan Brussee was
present along with Cliff Bleszinski. The two had a funny "smack talk" rapport.
When I called Arjan "Ahr-yahn", he turned and said "thanks! For once someone
who can pronounce my name right!" to which Cliff responded "oh, so no
appreciation for people who've tried this whole time to get it right, ARR-
JAAN!" <collective laughter>

The next office was the whole floor of a small office building, also in
Rockville but more out of the way, rather than in an office park the building
was more surrounded by trees (I don't remember the address). The shipping
department grew into a few people, same with customer support, with a very
small supply chain room with boxes of diskettes, envelopes and various
printing label machines. But quite a few offices were devoted to development.
And Tim took the largest corner office. We figured out most of Tyrian's
development decisions in here, fed mostly by Domino's pizza and water from the
local water buffalos out of red plastic cups.

In these days Tim had something pretty cool going on. The title at the top of
the window said "Unreal". And it consisted of polygonal 3d experiments, among
the first of which was a red dragon, which started life as a flat texture that
got folded around the mesh. 3d art was created in interesting ways back then,
with UV mapping, wrapping and unwrapping and binary trees being widely used
terms. Tim also got a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation with Alias
PowerAnimator. Several developers rendered cinematic single frame artwork for
cutscenes using these systems, and you can see some examples in "Traffic
Department: 2182", which was the first Safari Software release (Epic's sister
company).

Unreal seemed neat. 3d levels sprang up, and the effort was jointly between
James Schmalz and Tim. James operated out of Waterloo, Canada, and had a small
team that eventually would turn into Digital Extremes, the folks who brought
us Warframe and Dark Sector. But from the start it looked special, as the
games garnering the most attention in 3d at the time (1995) were Doom and the
following year, Quake.

Given that I'd heard the great orchestral MOD composing of Michiel Van Den Bos
on the Epic published, Triumph developed "Age of Wonders". I asked him if he
wanted to pitch Tim on doing the music of this new effort. He said "sure!" and
both of us being at the Epic office at the time, we walked into his office and
I asked if we could write the score. Tim said "yeah" positively and that was
it. We were onboard.

Given that it would be about 3 years before the game got released, we ended up
writing a lot of music. Now, I honestly don't remember what Michiel's deal was
but to the best of my knowledge it was separate from mine. Given that
percentages were how we worked things on Tyrian, I asked if the same could be
done for Unreal and the first contracted amount was 4%. Eventually, the game
grew and grew and the amount shrunk to 2% or 2.5%, something like that. By the
time I asked for a buy out because I owed money for taxes that year, I had
pulled in around $100,000 total. So clearly the game did pretty well. At
first, Michiel and I wrote a theme that still isn't in the game, but is found
on YouTube (it was called Underworld and we worked on it jointly). Theres also
a longer 7+ minute version. The real inspiration for our stuff wasn't as much
orchestral but "fantasy". And not Tangerine Dream "Legend" stuff, more dark
and percussive and full of reverb. The artwork used for inspiration for the
team started off with two art books Tim had in his office: Roger Dean and
Rodney Matthews, depicting vast fantasy landscapes. Cliff was greatly
interested in doing levels like this but soon discovered players didn't want
to spend 15 minutes walking across a 2 foot wide impossible stone arch bridge.

As such, the score that made it in (Suspense.s3m was another theme that didn't
make it in mainly because it was used so much early on people got tired of it)
was well over 2 hours. But it wasn't just ambient themes.

Tim and James both pushed for interactivity. I was not so enthused about it at
the time but they convinced me that it would make the game more interesting.
Yep, you heard it here. I didn't come up with interactivity as a way to go
until prodded by my team leads! Hah... fancy that.

So we discussed what would be realistic. Area music, not so much, at least
with the player going back and forth across a trigger and not having the
ability to crossfade or transition at the time. But we did establish specific
points where music would turn to combat and sometimes play or stop for
cinematic moments. And that ended up being the system that eventually got
modified for Deus Ex.

The Unreal sound system (now referred to as vanilla Unreal) began life as an 8
bit system. It was awful. Using 8 bit samples for anything was noisy and
terrible in quality. While I didn't fight for interactive music, I DID fight
for 16 bit sound, which finally made it in thanks to Carlo Vogelsang. His MOD
and audio sound system was called Galaxy and it melded eventually into what
Unreal would use for it's overall sound player.

Some designers were enthusiastic about the music and what they wanted, with
Cliff being the top requester for specifics. The Skaarj attack early on and
the lights going out were his idea. "Lights go out, you hear the Skaarj for
the first time, shit yourself, and the music comes in, BAM!" I'm paraphrasing,
but not by much. Cliff established all these moments, of which there weren't
that many to be honest. I think if the game lasted about 5 years he'd have
added a lot more. Pancho Eekels was another enthusiastic designer. "The music
just keeps getting better and better. Dusk Horizon is awesome!" I remember
that from an email. He ended up using Dusk Horizon since he created Nyleve's
Falls outside the Vortex Rikers crashed prison ship at the start of the game.

Playing was wonderful. The levels were such a departure from Doom and even
Quake, with it's more full 3d but dreary brown maps. Unreal was gorgeous.
There were lens flares which caught your attention. Huge cliffsides, emerald
green temples and arena boss fights. It was always a treat to play the game.
Eventually GT Interactive was chosen as the publisher after the game was
shopped around. There was interest everywhere... Microsoft, Activision, the
usual suspects. But GT won the bid. The team split up with most of the core
dev group going to Canada for, 6 months? Can't remember. I visited once,
though I can't remember at all why as I don't remember actually writing music
or integrating it while I was there. But a bunch of designers and programmers
were all crunching away and I could tell people were ready to push it out the
door. Boy, were they ever. The game originally was to be nearly TWICE it's
original size, but half of the maps were organized into the Unreal Mission
Pack, Return to Na Pali. And we wrote more score for that as well, with the
grand total being around 3 and a half hours for both the main game and mission
pack.

Oddly enough originally I was slated to do sound design as well, but James
Schmalz stressed the sheer amount of work involved, and Dave Ewing was brought
onboard to do sound design. Eventually Dave would move into level design. But
working with the team, from James, Tim, Cliff, Mark Rein, Michiel, Pancho,
"Myscha the Sled Dog" aka T. Elliot Cannon, Shane Caudle, Cedric "Inoxx"
Fiorentino, Erik De Neve, Steve Polge (who still is at Epic along with others,
and who created the Quake Reaperbots as well as the AI in Unreal Tournament),
Carlo and Dave, was overall an excellent experience and the game of course
would go on to be the start of the Unreal engine, one of the most used engines
for games in the world. I'd say the music continues popularity as a "cult
classic". The same year, Jeremy Soule burst on to the scene with one of the
first if not the first orchestral scores to a game with Total Annihilation. So
Unreal got a bit overshadowed. But for sure, people have said and I agree that
the score is unique. Nothing had come along quite like it, and nothing has
been made quite like it since.

~~~
Olap84
Firefox reader mode did a stellar job on it

------
highCs
The Total Annihilation soundtrack by Jeremy Soule mentioned in the post can be
hear here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAdOQtAFEs&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAdOQtAFEs&feature=youtu.be&t=557)

------
joshschreuder
Digital Foundry did an episode of their Retro series on the Unreal Engine's
move to consoles, which is well worth a look.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV8enCp651c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV8enCp651c)

------
jarcoal
I remember forcing my parents to drive me to our local Apple retailer so that
I could play this game on a beige PowerMac G3. One of the first games I truly
lusted for.

