Unreal: The Backstory

Living in Waterloo now. I was walking home from work with my friend when we met a guy flying a drone. After briefly talking, my friend mentioned that he was a developer #2 on Unreal back in the day. Must have been Schmalz! Crazy to think you just meet your heroes like that...

When I was 15 when my brother got me a disc of pirated games. On it was an Unreal directory which contained a tech demo of sorts. a castle with marble walls and eyeballs you could place with the mouse. Even then the realtime 3d rendering was really solid. I wonder how far along development was at that point and how this demo was leaked to BBS' at the time. Do you have any information on that?

Out of everything, I remember the music the most. Unreal's music has always been fantastic. Deus Ex, too! Thanks!

You, the people, have to understand that you must not use that freedom destroying web service when you want to keep your freedoms.

It has gone much too far and we have to take consequences, this is a serious question about your real life freedoms, not a game or a simulation.

I remember going through the file system as a kid and looking at all the nicely arranged but weird files in Unreal Tournament. I liked the music from the game and wanted to play it, but i didn't know what the weird UMX file was, but i knew it was music thanks to being placed in the Music directory (A nice change to Quake 3 where all i found was a giant PAK file). A Google search and a winamp plugin later and i could play it. Looking at the winamp plugin i realized that it was not like an MP3 or wave with everything baked in but more like a midi, there was a whole UI in the plugin which displayed the instruments and timeline of the song being played. It was a really fun thing to learn about on top of instagib matches on Deck16.

Looking it up now i see that Alexander Brandon is the composer of Go Down, the music for Deck16. I guess ill have to go and find a nice source of the music from UT and have another listen. It'll be nearly impossible to deal with a UMX file these days!

I'll always hold a special place in my heart for Alexander Brandon and his work on Deus Ex's score. It still remains one of the most immersive game soundtracks ever made. Tyrian's score was equally magical.

Unreal: The Backstory During the development of Tyrian, Jason, Robert allen, Daniel Cook and I visited the Epic office in Rockville, Maryland, which at first was a fairly small place, only a few rooms. These were used for the growing shipping and customer service departments. By departments I mean one person each. There was a room where Tim had his office, and a larger room that doubled as a conference room and, in the case of our first few visits, the room where the last phase of Jazz Jackrabbit was completed. Arjan Brussee was present along with Cliff Bleszinski. The two had a funny "smack talk" rapport. When I called Arjan "Ahr-yahn", he turned and said "thanks! For once someone who can pronounce my name right!" to which Cliff responded "oh, so no appreciation for people who've tried this whole time to get it right, ARR-JAAN!" <collective laughter>

The next office was the whole floor of a small office building, also in Rockville but more out of the way, rather than in an office park the building was more surrounded by trees (I don't remember the address). The shipping department grew into a few people, same with customer support, with a very small supply chain room with boxes of diskettes, envelopes and various printing label machines. But quite a few offices were devoted to development. And Tim took the largest corner office. We figured out most of Tyrian's development decisions in here, fed mostly by Domino's pizza and water from the local water buffalos out of red plastic cups.

In these days Tim had something pretty cool going on. The title at the top of the window said "Unreal". And it consisted of polygonal 3d experiments, among the first of which was a red dragon, which started life as a flat texture that got folded around the mesh. 3d art was created in interesting ways back then, with UV mapping, wrapping and unwrapping and binary trees being widely used terms. Tim also got a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation with Alias PowerAnimator. Several developers rendered cinematic single frame artwork for cutscenes using these systems, and you can see some examples in "Traffic Department: 2182", which was the first Safari Software release (Epic's sister company).

Unreal seemed neat. 3d levels sprang up, and the effort was jointly between James Schmalz and Tim. James operated out of Waterloo, Canada, and had a small team that eventually would turn into Digital Extremes, the folks who brought us Warframe and Dark Sector. But from the start it looked special, as the games garnering the most attention in 3d at the time (1995) were Doom and the following year, Quake.

Given that I'd heard the great orchestral MOD composing of Michiel Van Den Bos on the Epic published, Triumph developed "Age of Wonders". I asked him if he wanted to pitch Tim on doing the music of this new effort. He said "sure!" and both of us being at the Epic office at the time, we walked into his office and I asked if we could write the score. Tim said "yeah" positively and that was it. We were onboard.

Given that it would be about 3 years before the game got released, we ended up writing a lot of music. Now, I honestly don't remember what Michiel's deal was but to the best of my knowledge it was separate from mine. Given that percentages were how we worked things on Tyrian, I asked if the same could be done for Unreal and the first contracted amount was 4%. Eventually, the game grew and grew and the amount shrunk to 2% or 2.5%, something like that. By the time I asked for a buy out because I owed money for taxes that year, I had pulled in around $100,000 total. So clearly the game did pretty well. At first, Michiel and I wrote a theme that still isn't in the game, but is found on YouTube (it was called Underworld and we worked on it jointly). Theres also a longer 7+ minute version. The real inspiration for our stuff wasn't as much orchestral but "fantasy". And not Tangerine Dream "Legend" stuff, more dark and percussive and full of reverb. The artwork used for inspiration for the team started off with two art books Tim had in his office: Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews, depicting vast fantasy landscapes. Cliff was greatly interested in doing levels like this but soon discovered players didn't want to spend 15 minutes walking across a 2 foot wide impossible stone arch bridge.

As such, the score that made it in (Suspense.s3m was another theme that didn't make it in mainly because it was used so much early on people got tired of it) was well over 2 hours. But it wasn't just ambient themes.

Tim and James both pushed for interactivity. I was not so enthused about it at the time but they convinced me that it would make the game more interesting. Yep, you heard it here. I didn't come up with interactivity as a way to go until prodded by my team leads! Hah... fancy that.

So we discussed what would be realistic. Area music, not so much, at least with the player going back and forth across a trigger and not having the ability to crossfade or transition at the time. But we did establish specific points where music would turn to combat and sometimes play or stop for cinematic moments. And that ended up being the system that eventually got modified for Deus Ex.

The Unreal sound system (now referred to as vanilla Unreal) began life as an 8 bit system. It was awful. Using 8 bit samples for anything was noisy and terrible in quality. While I didn't fight for interactive music, I DID fight for 16 bit sound, which finally made it in thanks to Carlo Vogelsang. His MOD and audio sound system was called Galaxy and it melded eventually into what Unreal would use for it's overall sound player.

Some designers were enthusiastic about the music and what they wanted, with Cliff being the top requester for specifics. The Skaarj attack early on and the lights going out were his idea. "Lights go out, you hear the Skaarj for the first time, shit yourself, and the music comes in, BAM!" I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. Cliff established all these moments, of which there weren't that many to be honest. I think if the game lasted about 5 years he'd have added a lot more. Pancho Eekels was another enthusiastic designer. "The music just keeps getting better and better. Dusk Horizon is awesome!" I remember that from an email. He ended up using Dusk Horizon since he created Nyleve's Falls outside the Vortex Rikers crashed prison ship at the start of the game.

Playing was wonderful. The levels were such a departure from Doom and even Quake, with it's more full 3d but dreary brown maps. Unreal was gorgeous. There were lens flares which caught your attention. Huge cliffsides, emerald green temples and arena boss fights. It was always a treat to play the game. Eventually GT Interactive was chosen as the publisher after the game was shopped around. There was interest everywhere... Microsoft, Activision, the usual suspects. But GT won the bid. The team split up with most of the core dev group going to Canada for, 6 months? Can't remember. I visited once, though I can't remember at all why as I don't remember actually writing music or integrating it while I was there. But a bunch of designers and programmers were all crunching away and I could tell people were ready to push it out the door. Boy, were they ever. The game originally was to be nearly TWICE it's original size, but half of the maps were organized into the Unreal Mission Pack, Return to Na Pali. And we wrote more score for that as well, with the grand total being around 3 and a half hours for both the main game and mission pack.

Oddly enough originally I was slated to do sound design as well, but James Schmalz stressed the sheer amount of work involved, and Dave Ewing was brought onboard to do sound design. Eventually Dave would move into level design. But working with the team, from James, Tim, Cliff, Mark Rein, Michiel, Pancho, "Myscha the Sled Dog" aka T. Elliot Cannon, Shane Caudle, Cedric "Inoxx" Fiorentino, Erik De Neve, Steve Polge (who still is at Epic along with others, and who created the Quake Reaperbots as well as the AI in Unreal Tournament), Carlo and Dave, was overall an excellent experience and the game of course would go on to be the start of the Unreal engine, one of the most used engines for games in the world. I'd say the music continues popularity as a "cult classic". The same year, Jeremy Soule burst on to the scene with one of the first if not the first orchestral scores to a game with Total Annihilation. So Unreal got a bit overshadowed. But for sure, people have said and I agree that the score is unique. Nothing had come along quite like it, and nothing has been made quite like it since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV8enCp651c