The story of how I wrote this orphaned soundtrack is one of hard work, ingenuity, and really poor decision-making skills.

It was the second week of August 2019. Summer was almost over, and I felt completely discontent with myself. In the span of nearly three months I had created a grand total of 2 full compositions, a few half-hearted sketches, and a couple of unfinished covers. Aiming to work through these feelings of laziness with some old fashioned productivity, I set out to write a quick progressive rock piece for my band, but these goals were interrupted by the return of a certain 'indie' game developer to the FamiTracker.org Discord server.

This particular individual (who will remain nameless to preserve his privacy) had arrived to beg for a composer to write music for a game he was creating. The few people who responded to his request were largely disinterested, and for good reason; he was and still is notorious on the server for his stubbornness and lack of ethics. He made it a habit to ask composers for his games to all but plagiarize existing music pieces, appearing to have no idea why this would pose any problems for both the composer and himself, and to become frustrated when their pieces failed to be exact carbon copies of his 'temp tracks'. Moreover, he would insist that his hired writers work without pay, promising 'exposure' as the reward for their creative efforts, despite his clear lack of popularity in independent game circles. With all this in mind, joining his next software project seemed like an obvious exercise in futility.

There was one clear difference between this project and his previous ones, though: this was for a game jam, a popular type of contest and event among game developers that forces them to create an entire video game within a limited time frame (in this event's case, a week). I figured that the serious time constraints that a game jam provided would temper his more controlling aspects, letting me work without any copyright-unfriendly demands. Additionally, the developer's usual promises of 'exposure' would actually mean something in this event, as the game jam would connect me to other participating developers, offering me a unique networking opportunity. And, of course, I needed to compose something to preserve my self-esteem.

So I said yes. Through the work of technological wizardry that is Discord, the developer and I got to work discussing the soundtrack. Through a series of questions, I managed to work through his vague descriptions and develop a sense of what kind of game I was working on (in short, a Cave Story clone-in long, an unoriginal Cave Story clone), and what kind of tone he wanted from my soundtrack (something "similar to Capcom and Natsume"). I was initially tasked with creating the themes for the first level, the item and save rooms, and some short fanfares for deaths and items. Thanks to the limited amount of time I had to write everything, I made the core of the music as limited as possible-repetitive melodies playing on top of even more repetitive accompaniment, all done with just the 4 basic sound channels of the 2A03. Of course, I still had to make everything sound good, but I devised a way to work around the limitations of my creativity. Seeking both to go beyond the scope of the generic sound design the developer's instructions provided and to honor the words of the legendary game composer, Tim Follin-"The music here, the game-somewhere over there!"-I composed the soundtrack not with Mega Man and Shatterhand on my mind, but with Camel and Niel Baldwin, using odd rhythms and harmony to make up for weak composition. As one last layer of compositional 'practically', I made most of the soundtrack out of a few small leitmotifs, meant to represent the player character and his foe, an evil doctor (again, Cave Story clone).

My schedule was quite difficult. The developer demanded about 3 tracks per day at first (and would message me bihourly if I he felt I wasn't performing up to par) but later whittled that rate down to a mildly less rushed 2 tracks per day. I found myself bringing my headphones and laptop to places where I really should've been turning my attention elsewhere, trying to squeeze out a few more bars of satisfying music from my tired brain. By the end, I had succumbed to turning every piece of music into a looping ostinato with simplistic chord changes on top, but I was okay with that, for the most part. Those last few songs I finished were all at the end of the game or for bosses, I thought-players don't pay much attention to the music during fast paced combat sections, and by the time they reach those underwhelming final levels, they'll already have been exposed to the more thoughtfully-composed earlier pieces. It seemed as if everything was coming together.

Then the last day of the game jam arrived. The previous day, the developer had abandoned his normal incessant quota checking for silence, but I assumed that he was just working on the game and didn't want to interrupt his coding to bother me another time. On this day, though, he came back. I expected him to ask me about the boss theme, as he did before, but instead he came to me with some rather disappointing news: "I won't be able to finish the game for the jam. Can you work with me past the jam, given that the game will be free?" followed by him adding 5 additional tracks to my to-do list.

Part of me wanted to continue. After all, I was almost done with the soundtrack, and those 5 extra tracks couldn't be that much of an ordeal. But when I sat back down at my computer and opened up FamiTracker to write the next theme, I felt a certain motivational emptiness as I tapped a dull sequence of notes into the tracker. Why was I subjecting myself to this any longer? Certainly not for money; that was out of the question when I agreed to the project. And it certainly wasn't for fame or business opportunities, now, as his game was doomed to just a few paltry downloads on itch.io without any marketing. I had pushed myself to my creative limits over the last week, and it was all for nothing-something akin to how one might feel after climbing the 1,710 stairs of the Eiffel Tower only to realize there was an elevator the whole time. Sure, writing all those tracks in so little time was an accomplishment of sorts, but at what cost?
Tired and vaguely irritated, I turned to my fellow chiptune musicians in a Discord voice chat as I explain my story. They encouraged me to quit, to give up what had become a worthless task. I made a few quick adjustments to my module file, and deemed the soundtrack complete.

As it stands, the fate of this soundtrack is a bit of a mystery. Will some enterprising game developer pay me to use its contents in their own game? Perhaps I will, one day, create my own interactive software, and give it a home with its another one of its creator's works. Or maybe it will continue to sit online, unused, only having its own musical merits to stand on? Either way, I'm just glad it's all over.