SciFi Trade² (arc-scifitrade.s3m)

 Well, a lot to unpack from original comments. I composed this song in late summer or early fall 1996.

First off: When I was tinkering around with Scream Tracker (or maybe Impulse Tracker) I had the question: can I load any file as a sample even if it’s not an audio file? And the answer to this question was an emphatic YES. I loaded a QBasic file into Scream Tracker and it played...just like a sample! It didn’t sound good, of course, but it sounded like SOMETHING. And that was good enough for me, so I built a song around it, or at least just an intro. I don’t know if it’s possible to extract the sample and revert it back to its original QBasic code, but if it is, it’s an example of some of the earliest code I ever wrote (which ultimately turned out to be a lucrative career for me).

This song is very similar in structure and style to Colony Rigel 3, another dance techno-style piece I made weeks or months before this one. SciFi Trade^2 begins with a slower intro, and uses a beat loop. Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot of difference in style between the two. The bassline I would later re-use in Uruguayan Gnat Farmer-Arc which I composed a few months later, though I don’t think I used it consciously. Some samples and inspiration come from Jupiter by Trash. The guitar riff was from Run On - On the Run by Subliminal, which itself was a remake of On the Run by GooRoo.

Now, as for the comments...well...first, let me tell you about door games. On a BBS like R-Squared, it was common to have “doors” to external applications that you would access through the BBS. These were usually used for games. The games would typically have simple ANSI graphics and a lot of text. Role-Playing Games and strategy games were common. And I played them a lot.

My favorite door game was Exitilus, but as I noted in my original comments, it was easier to make sci-fi music so I chose to make a track celebrating Trade Wars 2002. In this game, you get a basic ship, fly from planet to planet, and trade for resources. While doing so, you can upgrade your ship (or get a better one) so you can defend yourself, carry more payload, and overall become a more dominant trader. It was clearly Star Trek inspired. It was a very long-running and popular door game (and there are some corners of the internet, I believe, where you can still play it).

Exitilus is a fantasy-themed game that where you both level up your character AND (if you want) also run a kingdom. New players can either join an existing kingdom or create their own, though there may have been limits on the number of kingdoms. The Pro was the original king of our kingdom, boringly titled Camelot (we liked Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and I was the prince. We also took advantage of bugs in the game (usually by accident) to amass huge amounts of money. We would casually give a few quadrillion gold to new people who joined our kingdom. We also learned that if you invade another kingdom with a small amount of soldiers (just one or two) the outcome would always result in your victory, even if you invaded a kingdom with thousands of soldiers with just two. So, we decided to break off our alliance with Sparhawk’s kingdom and invade him and destroy him. And we did just that - he was very unhappy and wrote a long post complaining about us.

You can see in the comments I did a few shout-outs and disses to people we played door games with. In retrospect, it wasn’t really fair to accuse others of using bugs to get their money when that was how we got ours (though unintentionally). Yokozuna was a real-life acquaintance that the Pro and I had shared antipathy toward, which we shouldn’t have because we were just being mean teenagers.

I also denigrated LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) in the comments, but I was just being a teenager. Same with my shout-outs/call-outs.

So anyway that ended up being an awful lot of text but door games were a pretty big part of what I did for fun in 1996, so I couldn’t constrain it much.
- arcturus