A remix Dark Forest Keep, my favourite composition, with higher quality samples to make it sound a little more realistic. Just like with Boss Attack '07, this is my favourite version of the song and I thought about replacing the version in the game with it. But I found that it lost a bit of the 16 bit retro vibe that fit into the game so well so I decided to keep (no pun intended) both versions of it.

Dark Forest Keep (Symphonic Remix)

At the dormitory I lived in at the time the students did a lot of the maintenance work, including administration of the entire telephone and data network. Many of my friends were involved in it, and when they switched the telephone system over to VOIP they needed a tune for the waiting loop - so they asked me to write one, and this is it. It's nothing exciting but everyone who lived in that dorm at the time will probably recognize it immediately so I guess for them it's a nice piece of nostalgia. I hear the system has been completely overhauled since which leaves this tune without a purpose. Feel free to give it a new home.

Patience

This started out as an in-game tune for another game project called "Save The World Again" that never saw the light of day. I don't remember why I called it "Level N". When it was half-finished I had a serious case of writer's block so I gave the source files to my friend and colleague Sven and asked him if he had an idea. He came up with the second half of the song including those awesome "coin" sound effects. Thank you Sven!

Level N

This is a song I made for the music competition of the Breakpoint 2008 demoscene party - it did not even make the preselection. There was lots of amazing competition, this was my first entry and very different in style from the rest so it wasn't really surprising. It did find some love among the attendees when I released it later though. It is a very energetic song that tries to emulate the style of Machinae Supremacy, one of my favourite bands, and pays hommage to a few of my favourite classic video games. For the ending I tried to contrast clean basic waveforms with dirty distorted guitars.

Oldschool ReEducated

Prophecy is unique in that it is the only song on this album that was not written with a specific purpose in mind. I simply started writing, excited to see where it would take me. It ended up sharing the basic structure of Snowball Surprise (although I like this one a lot better). After an epic intro it started getting darker and darker until it got to the point where I was stuck with a song that was completely different from where I had begun. The finale is the brass section literally pulling the song out of the abyss and getting it back into shape, picking up a few extra voices as if learning from the experience.

Prophecy

This is a tune I made for grumbel's other game project, the Turrican-style platformer Windstille. I always was a big fan of the Turrican games, and their composer Chris Huelsbeck has been a great influence for me (I highly recommend checking out his excellent Turrican Soundtrack Anthology!) so I was excited to write music for this project. Unfortunately, development on Windstille went along much more slowly than on SuperTux and I didn't have enough time for both so this is the only song I managed to finish for it. I don't know if it has ever been used in-game but last time I checked it was still in the repository. It was meant for either a cutscene or a nocturnal city-scape setting. It has a bit of a soothing, lullaby-like character for which I always find reed instruments to be an appropriate choice.

Nightfall (Windstille)

This is a tune I was asked to write for an open source RTS game called "Snowballz" that, to my knowledge, was abandoned shortly after its inception. I never got directly involved in the project - the game was written in Python, a rarity at the time, and I never even managed to get the prototype to run on my system so screenshots and a description were all I had to go by. I guess that's the reason why this is my least favourite song in this collection - it is much less inspired than the SuperTux tunes. I thought long and hard about putting it on the album but ultimately decided to do so for the purpose of keeping it alive as an artifact of the time, if nothing else. But if you look at it very closely you'll find that it is the only one I did not put my signature on. I am happy if you like it but I won't be offended if you don't.

Snowball Surprise (Snowballz)

This is a tune I made for WorldForge, an ambitious open source project that aimed at nothing less than creating a free open world and MMO game engine. To my knowledge it is still under active development. I had met some of the developers at the 2004 LinuxTag conference and submitted this short song for their "Ember" client after I got home. Although it was well received it never ended up being used so I focused my attention on SuperTux instead.

Medieval Dance (WorldForge Project)

A variation of Boss Attack using recorded electric guitars instead of synth samples. I wanted to experiment more with recording and this song lent itself well to it. I prefer this version over the original but the latter fits better into the game so I did not update it.

Boss Attack '07

The song that plays during the credits scroll is a remix of Rabbit Holes played on piano and cello. Even though this is the remix and not the other way around, this tune appeared in the game first. When SuperTux Milestone 1 was released with the Credits Theme, development on the forest world had already been underway and I had already composed Forest Dance and Rabbit Holes.

SuperTux Credits Theme

A remix of the victory tune with more epic samples. I thought it would be nice to have a special version of the melody for special victories - boss battles, end of a world or section, or the end of the game. I don't think it has ever been used in the game though.

Tux Victorious

A variation of the (unfinished and unreleased) Nolok Theme, The Fortress, and Boss Attack, all in an epic (by retro game standards) orchestral arrangement. I wrote this tune at our second in-person SuperTux Developers' Meeting in Kalrsruhe, Germany, which was dedicated to implementing the tree boss and the wisp catching mechanic. The current version of the game still has that placeholder sprite for the boss we created back then.

Tree Boss

This is where the transition of the forest world reaches its climax, and a majestic tune was required. To this day, Dark Forest Keep is still my favourite composition - a dark and epic piece mostly inspired by Michiru Yamane's excellent soundtrack to Castlevania - Symphony of the Night. Perhaps more directly, it also draws from the much, much lesser known song "Hoch schlug die Gischt", a 1972 sea shanty parody by the late German singer-songwriter Ulrich Roski that happened to be in my playlist at the time. As random as this sounds, what both of these sources have in common is that they clearly took their inspiration from Johann Sebastian Bach, one of my all-time favourite composers. I started writing DFK on a weekend and then skipped uni the following Monday in order to finish it. After I uploaded the song, artist Stephen Groundwater used it as a source to create the matching tileset - as an easter egg, he gave the castle the house number 55, same as the building I lived in at the time. I then used his tileset to build the first Keep levels, and the inspiration came full-circle.

Dark Forest Keep

For the ghost forest levels I wanted a tune that sounded eerie and menacing. The timpani that would later reappear in Dark Forest Keep were supposed to mimic Tux' heartbeat and keep players on their toes while the variation on the "Psycho" strings, a common horror movie trope, hopefully delivered a sense of impending danger. Just like the SuperTux game itself, Ghost Forest draws some direct inspiration from the Super Mario series, specifically the song "Koopa's Road" from Super Mario 64.

Ghost Forest

This tune was meant for a cutscene in which Tux was chased and cornered by a willowisp (the little glowing creatures buzzing around the tree boss) and in a flash of lightning (on the last beat of the music before it fades out) the forest world would change into the ghost forest. I wanted to create something eerie and dramatic for this scene that ended with Tux feeling lost and in despair.

Wisp Hunt

Riding the Wind was created for levels that took place high above the clouds or treetops. Even though it is called "Forest 3" in the game, it was meant for both the Forest World and the Ice World. The latter did have the excellent and incredibly catchy "Mortimer's Chipdisko" as its main tune (which will probably be forever associated with SuperTux even though it wasn't specifically written for it). But by the time I finished writing the music for the forest the first world had much less musical variety so I wanted a tune that worked for both and somehow connected the two. Like with Forest Dance, I was aiming for upbeat and fast-paced, but with special emphasis on the pacing. This song was also the first time I started experimenting with drum patterns more.

Riding The Wind

Rabbit Holes was created back-to-back with Forest Dance and represents the underground part of the forest. The level design was supposed to change from the faster platforming oriented style of the ice world and the forest overworld to something more puzzle and exploration focused, so I paced the music slightly slower and made it a little darker and more mysterious. The added brass section was chosen to emphasize these changes in atmosphere while maintaining a "foresty" sound.

Rabbit Holes

The tune that plays when Tux finishes a level. Clearly inspired by the corresponding "flag pole" tune from Super Mario Bros.

Level Done

When we released SuperTux Milestone 1 the game ended with the castle stage because we didn't have the time to finish the boss. That's why Boss Attack didn't appear until the Milestone 2 previews. For the battle I wanted a song that tied in well with the fortress music and delivered even more drive, and this is what I came up with. I cannot listen to this song without the "gna gna gna!" grunts from the Yeti popping into my head.

Boss Attack

This is the second song I made for SuperTux' Ice World. After the overworld and the cave had their tunes the final level that took place in Nolok's fortress needed its own music. For inspiration I looked to Chris Huelsbeck's castle music from The Great Giana Sisters and created a variation that then became its own thing over time. Just like the cave, this tune started on the tracker and received an upgrade for Milestone 2, which is the version you are hearing now.

The Fortress

This is the first piece of music I submitted to the SuperTux project, and incidentally the first piece of music I ever created. At the time, grumbel had just finished the cave tileset and the change of scenery required a change of music. This is the updated Milestone 2 version of the tune - Milestone 1 had a tracked version with a slightly different melody and harmonically matching drip sounds (which a commenter on YouTube noticed years later).

The Cave

This is the first piece I created for the (then upcoming) Forest World. There were supposed to be four parts to it: Overground, underground, Ghost Forest, and The Keep. The plan was to have a level set for each of those parts that transitioned into each other, and I wanted to reflect that transition in the accompanying tunes: Forest Dance, Rabbit Holes, Ghost Forest, and Dark Forest Keep. This tune represents the forest overground with its upbeat melody and fast pace to keep players on their feet. Flute and strings seemed to be a fitting choice of instrumentation and give the song a danceable, slightly medieval atmosphere.

Forest Dance

A variation of the main theme that is used in the introductory cutscene. Nothing super special, just a penguin about to have a romantic picnic in Antarctica.

Introduction

This is the theme song that plays in the main menu of SuperTux. In addition to the game itself I wanted it to reflect both Tux as a character, and nerd culture at the time. The comparatively upbeat and happy main melody of the theme is my musical interpretation of the "friendly and sympathetic animal mascot" that Tux was designed to be. To represent nerd culture, I loosely based the bass pattern on the line "I hate the DMCA" from Don't Eat Pete's descramble.mp3, a musical version of the DVD decryption algorithm whose publication caused quite a stir back in the late 1990s (and enabled us Linux users to watch our legally purchased movies on our computers). To represent the game, the theme was supposed to include one melody from each world/milestone - you'll recognize the melodies from The Cave and Forest Dance worked into it. This means that if another world ever gets added to the game, the theme will need to be updated as well.

SuperTux Theme

This is a song I made years ago, for a video game project that sadly never made it past the design stage. In the game, the protagonist was supposed to slowly realize that he was a character in a video game which, apart from raising all kinds of philosophical and theological questions, would have given him the opportunity to communicate with, and even rebel against the player.

After being stuck in mixing limbo for a long time I am finally releasing this song. This version is a re-upload with comments enabled - so let me know what you think! The cover image features concept art from the game, with a drawing made by @Pecc0r (https://twitter.com/pecc0r). Enjoy!

Wansti

Popular tracks