REDO #2: Sonic Mayhem - Quake II (1997)

Okay, maybe the third time will be a charm. Because of a nagging suspicion that the Rob Zombie theme music must be somewhere on the disc, I discovered a way to extract the audio from the cut scenes. This led to the addition of three tracks to the compilation. I promise, no more redos!

The story goes that when id Software brought in Trent Reznor to do the music for Quake, they were hoping for something that sounded more like industrial rock, something more like, well, Nine Inch Nails. Whether this story is apocryphal or not is immaterial, as Sonic Mayhem delivered the goods for Quake II. The driving hard rock/metal guitars perfectly complement the adrenaline rush gameplay of Quake II.

A note from Sonic Mayhem's official webpage: "We produced all the level music for this release...Eight were put on the original Quake II game. Some of the other tracks were used for the mission packs...The only actual new track we wrote was an all new "Orchestral/Industrial" style theme track for Rogue Entertainment's Quake II mission pack." In putting this compilation together, I used the PC CD-ROM discs for Quake II (1997), Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning (1998) and Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero (1998).

In this time period, the most convenient way to add music to a PC game was to sequence the music as normal CD-Audio. If you pop one of these older PC games into your CD player, the background music plays. That makes it very simple to rip the audio. Games today have the music embedded in more advanced ways so that it is not as easily accessible.

All well and good, but who created the music for the last two tracks on Quake II? Sonic Mayhem don't claim credit for them and they don't sound like anything else on the discs. After some online research, it turns out that the industrial dance "Climb" is by musician/sound designer Jer Sypult (aka Jeremiah Sypult). A post on a German Unreal forum pointed to composer Bill Brown's web page. Sure enough, he has two downloadable tracks for Quake II available. One is "Showdown," which is labeled generically as "Ambient," plus, as a nice bonus, an unreleased track called "Intro," a 1:03 orchestral cue from the game's opening intro movie!

There has been a bit of talk online about Rob Zombie contributing music to this soundtrack. This has bugged me because his music doesn't appear on the PC CD-ROM as CD-Audio. In scanning through the directory structure of the CD-ROM, I discovered a bunch of .cin files. It turns out that this is a specialized audio/video file format container created by id Software. I found a program online called Total Video Converter that, among other things, allows audio and/or video conversion of these .cin files. There are eleven .cin files on the CD-ROM. Eight of them are short computer dialogue bits with no music. One is the id Software opening logo sound. The final two are "ntro.cin" and "end.cin". "ntro" runs 3:30 and is the opening movie, which features quite a bit of panicked dialogue. Underneath the dialogue I can hear Bill Brown's "Showdown," which segues into that "Intro" track from his web page. Running for the last 1:15, however, is a bit of cinematic-sounding guitar music I don't recognize. As it sounds different than the music of Sonic Mayhem or Bill Brown, I have to conclude that this is Rob Zombie's theme music contribution. The music in "end.cin" runs :52 and sounds to me like an additional Bill Brown music cue. The audio in these .cin files was stored as uncompressed PCM audio with a 22,050Hz sample rate (half that of normal CD-Audio). I used Total Video Converter to losslessly extract the audio to .wav and then used Audiograbber to convert to .mp3. I sequenced the various audio tracks in what seemed the most logical way. I've made the assumption that Sonic Mayhem created the id Software logo music.

Check out the intro cut scene for Quake II:



Each of the two Quake II Mission Packs contains ten CD-Audio tracks, five of which are new. "One Bloodbath" on Ground Zero is identical to "Crashed Up Again" from The Reckoning, so it's not included. I apologize to the folks that took the time to download this previously, but, hopefully, with this third revision, I've finally created the ultimate Quake II soundtrack compilation!

Quake II (1997)
Extracted from "idlog.cin" on Quake II PC CD-ROM (1997):
1. Sonic Mayhem - id Logo (0:05)
Unreleased from Bill Brown's web site (1997):
2. Bill Brown - Intro (1:03)
Extracted from "ntro.cin" on Quake II PC CD-ROM (1997):
3. Bill Brown / Rob Zombie - Ntro (3:30)
CD-Audio from Quake II PC CD-ROM (1997):
4. Sonic Mayhem - Operation Overlord (3:28)
5. Sonic Mayhem - Rage (2:17)
6. Sonic Mayhem - Kill Ratio (2:32)
7. Sonic Mayhem - March of the Stroggs (2:51)
8. Sonic Mayhem - The Underworld (2:34)
9. Sonic Mayhem - Quad Machine (3:34)
10. Sonic Mayhem - Big Gun (3:03)
11. Sonic Mayhem - Descent into Cerberon (2:35)
12. Jer Sypult - Climb (1:59)
13. Bill Brown - Showdown (2:00)
Extracted from "end.cin" on Quake II PC CD-ROM (1997):
14. Bill Brown - End (0:52)
CD-Audio from Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning PC CD-ROM (1998):
15. Sonic Mayhem - Gravity Well (2:33)
16. Sonic Mayhem - Counter Attack (3:10)
17. Sonic Mayhem - Stealth Frag (2:57)
18. Sonic Mayhem - Crashed Up Again (2:54)
19. Sonic Mayhem - Adrenaline Junkie (2:50)
CD-Audio from Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero PC CD-ROM (1998):
20. Sonic Mayhem - ETF (2:53)
21. Sonic Mayhem - Complex 13 (2:56)
22. Sonic Mayhem - Pressure Point 1 (3:01)
23. Sonic Mayhem - Pressure Point 2 (2:26)
24. Sonic Mayhem - Ground Zero (4:33)

93.84MB RAR archive
MP3: (1x) Constant bitrate (160kbps) &
(23x) Variable bitrate (209.5kbps average)
Audiograbber 1.83.1 w/LAME 3.97 (--preset fast extreme)

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