The beauty of the Heroes of Might and Magic II soundtrack

[Rincewind]

I'm in the process of adding ESS AudioDrive / ESFM support to DOSBox Staging, and HoMM II is one of the few games that supports the Enhanced FM capabilities of the ESS cards.

It struck me again how utterly beautiful and majestic that soundtrack is. Started researching the composers a little bit and stumbled across this very well-written comment that I wholeheartedly agree with:

https://www.greatestgamemusic.com/soundtracks/heroes-of-might-and-magic-ii-soundtrack/#comment-2124

The review is five years old. Still, I’ll comment. The reason the style of music found in this game has produced no imitators and developers is not that it was a dead end – not any more than nature is one, but that truth – of art, but also the greater truth behind art – is not the sort of thing that can be developed. It has nowhere to go but to itself. It has already arrived. Concepts like improvement, setting a trend only apply to second-hand stuff produced by replication. The worst thing that could happen, and likely will happen, to the Heroes games would be the development of an algorithm to churn out melodies “in the style of” Romero, Baca and King. Mix and match the chords, the approaches, and even though an opera can’t be conjured up so easily, a nice track would be produced, ready for insertion into something with dwarves and elves. The reason today’s games use a completely different style – and the common denominator of that style – is that music’s modular, interchangeable character. The tunes are built up like Lego toys and serve definite, predetermined functions. Their combined function is to sell. [...]

Here, on the other hand, Romero and the others do things that might not have sold well. The risk was not perhaps so great for them, the audience in the middle 1990s was better educated, at least obliquely, still resided in the continuity of the classical tradition, more eager for bold actions, tougher, less peevish, natives to ecstasy, owners of their money. [...]

The music of the Price of Loyalty was in good form, it made sense. But it was not stale or deductive. The choices of town melodies there must be surprising to players of today. The identities within are not predictable. Today players would expect savage and crude tunes in a barbarian town, with some blared tally-ho for accents, perhaps, a necromancer’s town would be just sinister and so on. Reared on the ideas of consumption, they come to games knowing what to expect, and they are lost when they don’t find it. [...]

The whole thing is worth reading.

When I'm checking out the trailers of new games, I'm always thinking that maybe I've just grown old and I cannot enjoy things that much anymore.

But then I hear something like the HoMM 2 soundtrack and I know it's not me... I feel just like 30 years ago when I hear this music. It's just that things went to shit.

 

[Zeriel]

It's funny how "gaslighting" is a term so beloved of the consumerist chatterati when it most describes their own behavior. Yes, they're constantly trying to make you believe that you're the crazy one, that you aren't surrounded by a disgusting, decaying society circling the drain, but any brief flourishing of real genius or art instantly proves that wrong. While I won't say any current game holds a candle to the greats of the 80s and 90s, there are some that in recent memory made me realize how close I was coming to buying that line of deception; maybe I really was getting old, but nope, then you play something new that uses old design precepts and it's perfectly enrapturing, hell, maybe even more enrapturing than back in the day because back then you expected everything to be good, now you expect it all to be shit. I remember having that experience with M&M Legacy and Divinity Original Sin 1 for their gameplay elements that were classic and just as fun as when that style was popular.