Monday, November 15, 2010

Forgotten Soundtracks - The Music of KGB / Conspiracy


I was talking with Sketch awhile back about adventure games and he brought up a game called Lost Eden, developed by the French studio Cryo. It was a name that rang a bell - I know they closed in the early 00's, having lasted half a decade subsisting on sub-mediocre Myst clones. I remembered a rather dull first person game called Dragon Lore, but if they're known for anything, it's probably their conversion of Dune, which also ended up on the Sega CD. Somewhere in the midst of investigating their back library, I stumbled upon a game called KGB. It was later re-released on CD under the name Conspiracy: Starring Donald Sutherland, an ill-conceived multimedia product that shoehorned full motion video of the actor playing the role of your hint-giving deceased father. As ridiculous as that sounds, it didn't hurt the core game, which is still fantastic, even though it's probably the most relentlessly difficult adventure game ever made.

I'm still in the middle of writing an article on it - in the meantime, you can check out this Rocks Paper Shotgun entry for part of why it's awesome, and this Adventure Gamers review for why it's so terribly frustrating. It's divisive, yes, but I think most people could agree that the soundtrack to this game is amazing.

The work of Stéphane Picq, who worked on Cryo's other games, it's a fantastic piece of electronica, alternatively eerie and exciting, darkly moody and eminently danceable. It has no right to work given the intensely serious setting, but it somehow comes together. There are approximately five songs that simply play on loop throughout the whole game – in other words, the music doesn't change based on the setting – but each of track is excellent nonetheless. I've posted the whole soundtrack from the PC version as embedded Youtube videos - I've also stuck up a compiled ZIP file with all of the music plus a few tracks from the Amiga version. Please do enjoy!


Burokrat


This is my favorite track. The distorted synth thing that comes in at approximately 2:08 totally makes this song.

Machine


Gorbi


Gulag


Paradise




Kursk


Grab all MP3s on Megaupload


5 comments:

  1. this is both cool and nostalgic. (I haven't played this game, but the music reminds me of the good old days :D )

    ReplyDelete
  2. that looks really similiar to the first dune game... is there a correlation between them?

    ReplyDelete
  3. oops i fail at reading ^_^'

    dune was so cool... it's a shame this site still has no dune article tough i guess having to cover both the adventure game and the strategy game would be a pain...

    ReplyDelete
  4. I had started a Dune article way back when, but as usual it sorta fell off. I might cover at least the first game for the adventure game, then pick up the rest for a later site update.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is good stuff! All your articles about FM synth music in games recently inspired me to include more FM sounds in the music I'm working on, so thanks for that!

    ReplyDelete