FlixMix (1993)

So, I wrote music for three lev­els of a PC game (FlixMix, pub­lished by Celeris in 1993). My career goal at the time was to write music for video games, so this was a pret­ty good opportunity.

The game ran in DOS, sup­port­ing only the low­est-com­mon-denom­i­na­tor music hard­ware; a sound card first released in 1987. So, the clips you’re about to hear might sound a lit­tle dated.

On top of that, there were com­pro­mis­es made to reduce disk space, and while I’d sub­mit revi­sions to com­pen­sate for each wave of those, opti­miza­tion con­tin­ued for months after my involve­ment in the project con­clud­ed. What was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished did­n’t sound bad, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but it did­n’t sound a whole lot like what I’d written.

Here’s what the pub­lic heard:

Lev­el 2: Quixot­ic Box Paradox

Lev­el 4: Mish­mash Mesh

Lev­el 7: Jug­gle Jumble

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have the “good” ver­sions any­more. They’re on an unla­beled disk some­where; I did­n’t think I’d need to keep track of them.

I do have this, though…

I dug up my old files for one of these a few years ago, and spit out a copy with more up-to-date tech­nol­o­gy (and way too much reverb):

Mish­mash Mesh — Remix

(Per­mis­sion to share these was gra­cious­ly giv­en by the pub­lish­er, whom I gen­uine­ly feel are good people.)

Any­way, this expe­ri­ence has had two pro­found effects on my career:

  1. I aban­doned it. Com­plete­ly. Walked away, nev­er looked back.
  2. As a web devel­op­er now, I fre­quent­ly have to weigh the cre­ative vision of the design­ers I work with against a sea of tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, and in these con­flicts, I will always side with the design­er.

    Fierce­ly.

    Irra­tional­ly.

    I’ve been on the oth­er side of that, and I know how it feels.

*shrug*