The development of this game began, if I recall, in early 1999. Originally intended to launch in 2000, it changed publishers four times between inception and ship, and ended up delayed by a year. Unfortunately, this allowed Baldur's Gate II to ship underneath it...which did it no favors. Ah, well.(1)
I composed dozens and dozens of cues for this isometric turn-based RPG. With over 100 hours of game play, I didn't think a "cinematic" style score would be viable. Instead, I chose to create short, one-shot pieces that would introduce or highlight key areas or moments in the game.
Mostly around 0:30 - 2:00 in length, these cues weave thematic material through many variations. I was trying for a Ravel-by-way-of-Elfman kind of orchestration, focusing mostly on woodwinds and percussion -- including mallets and piano -- to create an open, textured sound. (And then at one point a producer said, "I don't like the xylophones. Xylophones make me think of dancing skeletons." Ugh.)
Still, even that was pretty ambitious: I had only the original Siedlaczek Advanced Orchestra and some basic choir samples to work with, loaded up between an EMu E4 and an original version of GigaSampler. I think I did pretty well with that setup, but the production values definitely show their age (and...well, I'm not that great an orchestrator, either...).
The "Collector's Edition" came with a soundtrack album on CD, and the music did get some good critical notice:
Other successful elements include a musical score packed with nuances. Where games of this type tend to favor bombast over subtlety in their music, this one goes in the other direction and blends sweeping tones with minor notes that hint at a sense of humor and wonderment.
-Games Domain
The music that also accompanies the game really sets the tone for high adventure.
-Gamezilla
Here are some examples of these short cues -- I wrote something like 40 or 50 of them, but I don't have them all anymore. These are a just a few that I'm fond of for one reason or another:
Amazingly, someone put the soundtrack on YouTube. This was posted 12 years ago...and the game was already 11 years old at that point! I came across it while putting this page together and saw that someone in the comments had posted a link about four minutes into the last song. I followed it and had a moment: I had completely forgotten that we'd included this absurd (but awesome) "remix" as a "secret track" on the OST CD. Total memory hole. What a treat!
(1)When it finally did release, the launch was a disaster. After development was complete, Ubisoft, the eventual publisher, stuck some terrible installer app on it as part of a copy-protection scheme or something. This installer had a catastrophic bug that could erase critical data from the user's system drive. Just awful. This was devastating for those of us who'd worked on the game, since we had nothing whatsoever to do with it, but obviously that wasn't clear to the buying public. Look, the game might have had some gameplay issues, but it wasn't actively malevolent when it left our hands. So frustrating and dispiriting.