3.04.2006

You Learn Something New Every Day

Here's what I learned yesterday.

I hang out on the Elder Scrolls message board quite a bit, mostly looking for news about when their new game "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" is coming out. I also chat about "TES III: Morrowind," the current game. One of the topics I was on yesterday was about "What music do you listen to with Morrowind?" One nice thing about the game is that you can drop your own choices of .mp3 music files into the music folders and it becomes part of the game's soundtrack. Well, one thing I mentioned in the conversation was that I was considering using some of the .mp3 music files from my "Civilization IV" game for "Morrowind," but that the problem was that there was so much music to choose from in the CIV IV soundtrack.

So I was listening to the .mp3 files, looking for music that would fit for exploring and other up-tempo music that would be suitable for combat music. And that was when I learned something I didn't know before. I was listening to a track from the "Industrial" era music file titled "DvorakSlavonic7." As soon as I heard it, I smacked my forehead and said, "So, THAT is where it came from!" The music, which was from Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, was used for the 1985 computer game "The Bard's Tale," which I was playing twenty years ago on my little Commodore 64 computer. I already knew that tune by heart, although the orchestral arrangement in the .mp3 file was light-years ahead of the primitive version that played on my computer game two decades ago.

And yes, that file has been copied to my adventuring music, along with several other Industrial era tracks from Brahms and Dvorak. For some reason, the Medieval era music, which is mostly chants and religious choral music, doesn't fit as well with the game's ambience, and the Renaissance era music, which is heavy on Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, also isn't quite right. I may change my mind and add some of those later, though. If I don't like the result, I can always just remove the files that don't fit from the folder.