OrganicSuperlube

Oh, it's great stuff, great stuff.

You really have to keep an eye on it, though--it'll try and slide away from you the first chance it gets.

πŸ‡³πŸ‡± | 31
πŸ§‘πŸ’™ @SilverIll's girl πŸ’™πŸ§‘


...because if you do, chances are you've listened to the fruits of a little-known piece of software known as Microsoft Music Producer.

Released in October of 1996 by Blue Ribbon Soundworks, MSMP was designed to make it easy for anyone and everyone to create background music for things like multimedia presentations - powerpoints and videos and such. The program could generate midi files using a variety of randomly-selected parts of pre-made musical pieces made to fit a range of musical genres. Users could decide the instrument set used, the tempo, the pitch, the overall "mood" of the track, and even the peaks and valleys of the "intensity" of the track to some extent.

Of course, for all its surprising versatility, anyone using even vaguely similar settings would inevitably generate something that sounds pretty dang similar to a midi generated by someone else. And, of course, the images above already spoiled it: this program was used to generate the soundtracks of several games, including but not limited to Airline Tycoon, Speedy Blupi 2 and Graal Online (Classic/The Adventure).

The catch is that the software went completely uncredited in each of these projects, leaving their origins a complete mystery. Naturally one would expect that rumors within the communities of these games would start to spread... and spread they did! The games cannot escape accusations of plagiarism even to this very day, and their relative obscurity has rendered sources of the truth few and far between... until now.

I played each of these games downright religiously when I was a child; I spent months (if not years) of my youth on them, knew their soundtracks inside and out, and the similarities struck me like a truck... And I'd go on to spend twenty more years trying to figure out what the source of these similar tracks was, with an ever-growing obsession. I was convinced that the developers had some sort of connection, an uncredited shared composer, or perhaps even wholesale stole from eachother. The thought of it simply being a case of everyone using the same tools never occurred to me; the concept of a midi generator that actually produced anything worth listening to was inconceivable, especially for the early 2000's... And yet, here we are.

How did I end up finding it?
I just got lucky. I stumbled upon the right forum thread after decades of searching, and... well, there it was. Spelled out in simple terms, knowledge someone had already beaten me to but simply never broadcast to the world. A hell of a mystery no one thought was a mystery and didn't even really need solving -- but damn if it didn't get solved.


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