Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’m not a gamer. Sitting in front of a game console for hours at a time is probably one of the most unappealing, pointless things I can think of, and frankly, I find others who whittle away their lives in front of their Contonda (inside joke) equally as unappealing. However, more than a decade ago, I used to play some games, mostly made by a company named Sierra On-Line, and I suspect some of my readers did too. The graphics were great for the time, but the real kicker was the music. As far as I know, Sierra was the first game company to use MIDI soundtracks in their games, which sounded best when played on the Roland MT-32 Sound Module.

Oh how badly I wanted one of those! Five hundred dollars was a little steep for a 14 year-old at the time (and maybe it is now too). I’ve debated buying a used one on eBay for 1/10th that price, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it. Maybe it would be nice to buy it just to say I have one finally. In any case, the MT-32 was, and still is, a great sounding piece of music hardware.

I wasn’t totally devoid of music for my entire adolescence. After getting my first job, I saved up enough to buy the successor to the MT-32, the Roland SCC-1 Sound Canvas. It was an excellent sounding synth, and I still own it to this day, although I don’t have a PC to put it in. It’s packed away in its original box. I spent hours arranging music using some piece of software, the name of which escapes me at the moment. At one point I was actually a semi-decent self-taught piano player, although I can’t do any of it now since I’ve been out of practice so long.

I eventually outgrew what few games had interested me and stopped fooling around with music. And then one day, by chance, I ran across a website that is actually the point of this article: Quest Studios. Through some arrangement I don’t understand because I skimmed the explanation, the creators of this site have permission to distribute MP3, OGG, and MIDI versions of all kinds of soundtracks from Sierra’s old games. MP3s and OGGs are often recorded by either an MT-32 or Roland GS synth, and MIDIs are provided in MT-32 compatible, GM, or GS formats.

I spent several hours completely raping their album collection. Then I spent several more hours converting songs from OGG to AAC (get an iTunes plugin at MacUpdate to do this) and correcting the ID3 tags for each song. And NO, that is not as much of a waste of time as parking your dead ass in front of a game console.

I’ve spent some time since then re-listening to the old soundtracks I still enjoy. Is it great music? I dunno. Sentimental, yes. Fun, maybe.

And as one last step, I downloaded DOSBox and a few of the old games just to see them again. Wow, how far we’ve come.