It's not an actual MIDI like the rest of the soundtrack. It's a sound effect called bonus.voc. You can find it near the bottom here: www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Duke_Nukem_3D_(DOS)
@@ThisIsGamerLisD From that wiki you linked: "The music of Duke Nukem 3D was put together by Bobby Prince, a veteran in the video game field, and the amazing composer, Lee Jackson. The soundtrack fits well into the various levels of the game adding to the ambiance. By itself however, the soundtrack is merely average. None of the tracks are really that memorable, but they do properly fit the game. " What the fuck?
A very informative and well put together video friend. Best iv seen on youtube. I love how youve placed an image of the level, the name of the level and the tracks name. Love it. This is a labour of love. Thank you
It's a mixed bag of a soundtrack. Overall 3/5 I'd say. Some hits and some misses. *My favourites include the following:* - E1L1 @2:17 (obviously, put your #1 track first) - E1L4 @15:34 - E2L7 @59:45 - E3L6 @1:41:33 - E4L10 @2:41:40
I just realized some similarity between this game and Doom's soundtracks. They both contain strong, fast and energetic intro and first level music, while most of other levels contain slow paced, atmospheric, creepy and moody kind of music.
+Ladislav Loukota no they weren't "exclusively" i said, this because many DEV back then was still in the era of "discovery" so there was much "trying" and not only focus on the money search for how they created Broodwar for example, if you're seriously interested
"Hollywood Hollocaust" its probably the "best first level" ever made on a videogame (together with Super Mario Bros 1-1 level?). The desing, location, music and ambience is superb 😌 That level will stay on your head for a long time... unforgettable.
" I never knew that every single level in the game had it's own music track," one of the many reasons why this game is awesome,and was so diverse compared to the other fps of its day.
The same could be said about many oldschool FPS' of the day. Today however.. Just grey clots of generic soldier guys shooting generic terrorists. The imagination, the creativity - is gone.
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and their clones also had tracks which were mostly unique, although the later levels often reused tracks from the earlier levels . Conversely, Duke Nukem 3D seems to truly have a track for every level.
There is something oddly charming about this period in video game music, when video games didn't have to rely on square waves, triangle waves and noise waves (how 8-bit music was made), but instead they had samples (although granted, not that much since space was a huge problem), and all these new midi instruments that somewhat mimicked real instruments but still sounded synthetic. I think more people should explore on this brief moment! It's been mostly forgotten since not too long after this, video games could finally have music made with real instruments. When people think of old video game music, they're usually referring to the 8-bit NES era of music, but rarely do I ever see the 16-bit era of music get any love.
I disagree, it's mostly Americans who go on about NES music. In Europe people talk about 16 bit Megadrive, SNES and 8 bit Commodore 64 music and Amiga Music. The SID Chip in the C64 is legendary.
This style was actually rather prominent on the PS1 and Saturn which used midi-style formats for sample-based chiptunes, often mixed with redbook cd audio or streaming audio files in the same game. You also had .mod music on PC up until Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex if not a bit later. Not to mention SNES and Amiga, the latter being from 1985 though we didn't see the sound chip start being utilized well until around 1987.
One of my favourite moments is in the E2L8 level with the Plasma 1:03:10 track. When you go outside on the big field with the big satellite antenna. The calmness of that track hits hard with the atmosphere of the outside of the moon and the "dead nature" that 2d sprites bring to that landscape (also mildly creepy side effect that the sprites always faces you since they have no 3rd dimension). No 3D game can replicate that effect; 2d is effectively art that the human mind can play with.
I also love sometimes when sprites always faces you when you move. There's still 2D sprites in 3D games that faces you no matter where you go, but they are harder to notice than before and less numerous.
Dark Side was a great level from the music but really wished it was longer-yes I’d love to see a few levels get supersized. Also the following level Overlord is so meh.
@@issiahfuentes9226 what is funny that he composed music for the DOOM and Duke Nukem II (which was create in kindly same way - ripped from metal hits) and Duke was released 3rd December 1993, than 10th December 1993 was DOOM day :D
I forgot how creepy the music was on ep. 2. The assault commanders always scared me the most when I was younger. Hearing them shouting and knowing that I was walking into a barrage of rockets when I stepped around the corner.
I'm 15, and I prefer games like Duke 3D, Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein and even games from Atari/Commodore 64 like Boulder Dash. Modern games are good, but I like playing oldschool games.
Due to the limits of the hardware, game musicians of old had this unlikely freedom of being able to concentrate more on composition than sound engineering. Just smashing out bad ass melodies and riffs without worrying too much about how "steel guitar" would sound across different sound cards. And if you listen to this now and are honest with yourself, you realise the instruments sound like shit ... but we don't care, because we accept that as a technical limitation. So instead we listen to the composition ... and composition is where all the effort went ... and thus some of these tunes are fucking brilliant.
@@Beansman-gp3ws You don't understand his point. The "instrument sounds" (not PCM , they were generated on the chip with sine,triangle, sawtooth) were different on different sound cards at the time. For another guy they sounded like shit but it still had to work somehow. As composer you can not reliably tell how the sound is going to play on the users soundcard. Only thing you could reliably do is the sequence of midi notes, so you invest the most effort there
Adult content warning makes so much sense on this game. As a kid, I just wasn't ready for it, I couldn't get up to higher levels and I just used cheats to horse around with all the weapons and did a lot of other immature stuff. Two years ago, I've played this game again, went through all the episodes and all the levels (OK, still only on Let's rock difficulty, but c'mon, I'm a working man :)) and found it highly entertaining and even requiring some thinking, especially in the higher levels. That was the point when I searched for the soundtrack. For example the Lunar Apocalypse, it is such a great episode! And the music? Just listen to 39:11 -- it so perfectly captures the atmosphere of being alone in a large space complex occupied by aliens. One thing I truly love in this world is mixing engineering with art, putting brain and effort to create a fascinating result. Many games from the 90's have accomplished this, and Duke Nukem 3D is definitely one of them.
E1L1 Stalker is literally in my opinion one of the best songs ever written in a video game. If the combination of running around shooting things and this song didn't get you into a first person shooter type game, then nothing ever was!
Man that kind of mentality it's what made the games back in the day being so timeless. Things were at it's peak. You can see good games now days but most of them lack something in some department or another
Old 3D Realms games had some really immersive music. I remember playing the first level at night with headphones, and the whole atmosphere coupled with the soundtrack made for a fantastic experience. Those where you feel it even with your stomach.
@@farmervillager1376 The thing is, game devs would reuse tracks for different levels quite a lot. For example, in Wolfenstein 3D, there are 6 episodes, but there are only three different sets of tracks. That means that episodes 1 and 4 use the same tracks, instead of episode 4 having unique music. (Same goes for episodes 2/5 and 3/6.) To add insult to injury, even a single episode isn't spared from track reuse in Wolf3D. An episode has 10 levels, 4 of which have repeating tracks: Level 5 always plays the same track as level 1, level 6 repeats level 2's track, all the way up to level 8, that reuses level 4's track. In this context, the fact that Duke 3D has a lot of unique tracks, is quite a big deal.
That was on a time when developers did truly care for the quality and soul of the video game. They really deserve more recognition. Damn at least to be on Spotify or most of the music library that there are for music in general it's just music at another level...
Yeah, back in the 90s the games had so much soul und design-love in it. They were not so generic like modern games. You feel the handmade-work from a little company in it, not a mainstream-entertainment-mega-company. Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Wolfenstein etc. you will remember this games and even single levels, music and secrets/easter-eggs even in decades. Try to remember something from modern games like CoD in the next years.
Also each level was also like a puzzle from a zelda dungeon so it forced you to actually think while you were shooting. Many times you must observe what happens when pushing buttons to know what is needed to progress in the game. Fact is game design was smarter in old games and required more backtracking and player attention. Sometimes you will get ambushed if you were to rush through sections. So if you speed run the game becomes more intense. Lack of regenerating health meant every shot and healthpack counted. Sometimes rushing forward with machine gun while kicking your opponent was needed to end them quickly while picking at them slowly with a pistol and strafe-dodging was fine. But you were not forced to face an enemy from the exact same direction like today's games! Levels let you explore in the order that suits your style of play. IE sneaky(circle around behind to get the first shot off), guns blazing (best when well equipped), or cautious and conservative (kill everything you encounter but don't waste ammo so you have enough to tear the boss a new asshole). I miss that old game design.
@@UToobUsername01 I think part of that was because levels were designed to be played both single player and multi player. I think it was Unreal and then Half-life where they really started separating the two out. It was a pretty obvious choice as games evolved - increasingly scripted and curated linear single-player experiences don't translate well to the need for circular deathmatch arenas without dead end hallways. Even so, I think something was lost from the flow of the levels when they could no longer be played multiplayer.
@@ingolifs Well it is possible to make single player games where levels feel like places that can be fully explored for extra ammo and supplies and bonus items. It's called not limiting us to a straight f*cking line. Old games knew from examples like Zelda and Metroid that you should be backtracking just to re-aquire the dropped weapons of dead enemies just in case you needed a different strategy to deal with the enemies and so levels felt more strategic in order to complete them. They didn't assume that once you go through an area once like an on-rails disney ride that you would never need to come back so it meant that you as a player could take advantage of your knowledge of the area and the items in the area to assist you later. This is why games like Halo and Cysis have memorable levels since they don't insult your intelligence while the console game Call of Duty sequel's single player campaign just feels like a on-rails disney ride. It is due to memory limits that the levels in your modern day call of duty game have to flush out the previous area you went through and not because it's a better design. But it affects the way you play a game because when you approach enemies you will ALWAYS have to face them in scripted ways and there is no emergent behavior of enemies since everything has to appear in the environment in a specific stage or wave at a specific time and never because you caused them to appear due to lack of being sneaky enough. In the real world, if you go into a environment sneakily you should not alert so many guards and reinforcements so trying to avoid conflict is a genuine strategy in war because you want to minimise risk to yourself. But in linear level designs you have no choice since the levels are story-driven and scripted experiences rather than being player-driven experiences where you shape how the game will react to your actions by what you do and how you do it. Good game design allows players to be flexible in how they deal with a level so that you can choose to use silenced weapons and only take out the necessary enemies or you can go loud and shoot everything. It was standard in older games to let players use their brains to determine which way they wanted to go and choose the order in how they would kill things. Nowadays they don't let you do this with a few exceptions. And it is annoying when games are dumbed down for kids. We need a balance of dumbed down shooters and the traditional ones where you are rewarded for actually behaving intelligently and luring enemies into traps, ambushing them, walking past them by hiding in bushes and not making noise, and spying on the area to observe patrol patterns like in Golden Eye so as to not attract attention. This allows us to feel more involved in the game. Games that do not let you act with caution and just place you into an area forcibly are admitting they don't really want to design complex games and so these types of games have poor replayability. It's a sign of less talented game developers who just make games as generic summer blockbuster high budget titles for children to rake in as much cash as possible by appealing to the lowest common denominator. There is a reason why classic games like Dues Ex, Halo, Golden Eye etc are respected because they don't insult the player's intelligence and let them act in a way that is based on common sense. Levels are memorable in these games because players can replay the game in different way and it alters how the enemies react to that style of play. Eg in Golden Eye you can karate chop enemies from behind just like in the movies to avoid making any noise and this prevents other guards hearing anything. But if you don't want to be sneaky you can deliberately let them see you raise the alarms and get into an intense shootout if you want to as a test of your skill with guns but it will come at the expense of longer mission times. (some challenges are based on how quickly you finish a mission if you want to unlock fun stuff in the game which forces you to replay the levels to improve your efficiency and this makes you a better player as result of experimenting on other methods of completing the missions. But today's games don't care how good you do something because they are designed in such a way that players are just stuck in a series of shooting galleries rather than giving you time to think about what you want to do before doing it. You just react to what is there and that is all the control you have)
It was so cool, I even made a remix of it (with, of all things, a few notes of a kawaii bossa nova song that got stuck in my head at the time) soundcloud.com/acuddle/essai-noo-4 😅
@@cedriccalefati1079 yes. yes yes and yes. Metroid Prime 4, please don't be a slave to deadline and actually have good music, not like metroid dread or samus returns.
@@TachyBunker Metroid 3 prime corruption had good music. I remember cranking the window A/C up when I played on the snow level or area, I felt like I was in the game with the music.
"Aliens, Say Your Prayers" has a motive that reminds me of the track for the Vigilance Platform mission in Crusader: No Remorse. Nice soundtrack, astonishingly well recorded, and I'd say it's way better than Doom 2.
Well, these are still the same MIDIs as every other version you've heard, it's just that the ones in this video were recorded from a Roland SC-55. This is how it was always supposed to sound, but most people couldn't afford one of those.
ThisIsGamer Very interesting.. I'm not aware with the terminology youre using bud, so excuse the ignorance.. I've downloaded the OST countless times for this game and they've all sounded really bad, like polyphonic, where this sounds .. just close to what I remember back when I first played it.
Bunka Fas MIDI is the music file. MIDIs would sound different from sound device to sound device because each had a different sound bank. The sound banks consist of several instruments (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI#Program_change_events). The reason the first song is called Grabbag is supposedly because Lee Jackson chose the instruments in the song at random and hoped for the best. More expensive devices generally sounded better because they had things like reverb, ex: Roland SC-55 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55). Here is a video that compares Grabbag against several sound devices: Duke Nukem 3D - Title Music - Grabbag - Comparison I hope this isn't too confusing!
ThisIsGamer No not at all, this is very interesting and may explain why my nostalgia had been ruined when re visiting a LOT of my childhood games OST's, I'll check out the links now, much appreciated :)
My fav list of memorable Duke music when I was 8/10 years old! And still to this day. My homage list: 1> 35:43 - E2L1 - Future Military Conquests (Most memorable to me) 2> 59:45 - E2L7 - Aliens, Say Your Prayers! (My favorite track) 3> 2:41:40 - E4L10 - Departure (To me my most relaxing and mystique aquanautic track) 4> 1:41:33 - E3L6 - Gotham (Most listen to wile studying) 5> 2:45:12 - E4L11 - Restricted Area (One of the few patriotic Military tracks in Duke, just amazing) 6> 2:10:06 - E4L1 - Missing? Impossible! (To me my most funny track) 7> 2:22:53 - E4L5 - Lemon Chilllllllllllllllll (Hearing this track made me always play like i was Clint Eastwood "go ahead and make my day") 8> 2:13:21 - E4L2 - Preparation D (Hearing this track i always did think, better than McDonald) 9> 2:17 - E1L1 - Stalker (For sentimental value, most heard and memorable to me)
1:19:16 - E3L2, "Going After the Fat Commander", sounds almost exactly like "Never Let Me Down Again" by Depeche Mode, once it gets past the introductory portion, with the drum solo.
1:11:55 Please listen to this, it's from a little known secret level. Takes a bit to get to the main chorus part, but it's so gorgeous. Beautifully dark, and haunting. Surprising to find such profound music in a game like Duke Nukem 3D.
A hard F for one of the classics. I'm glad DooM Eternal looks great and DooM 2016 was bad ass. But it's a shame that franchises like this and so many more will never get the sequels or reboots they deserve. Thanks Randy.
I see why 'Aliens say your prayers!' is your favourite track, it has that Bobby Prince signature style while sounding like b movie's soundtrack while mixing in a distinctive 90s synth, its just badass
"Ready for action.." "Damn.. Im looking good." "Your face, your ass.. Whats the difference?" "Aahhh.. Much better.." "Hmmm. Thats one doomed space marine.." "Blow it out your ass!" "Damn im good.." "GROOVY..." "ill rip your head off and shit down your neck.." There is something in this game that has always made me come back for more. Many times in the passed ten years i have suddenly got inspired to play. I have seen it all thousand times and yet its all new. Maybe when i grow old im going to show this game to my grand children who are playing their virtual reality stuff. Actually running in some kinda battlefield, waging war with their friends. That kinda gaming has always been my dream but when that kinda technology becomes cheap and common for normal consumers im already too old If not dead. But its ok because if i had born into that kinda environment then i wouldnt know how to truly appreciate it like i would right now.
Death Row is a dog-gone Doom II track! I love Duke 3D but I'm kind of ashamed and shocked at how I've never noticed how great the music is. Or noticed the juxtaposition between what people think DN3D is and the gloomy music and levels. That weird mix was totally absent from DNF.
I like Duke Nukem 3D better than Duke Nukem Forever because Duke can hold more weps and have a HP meter with ARMOR meter in D.N.3D than in D.N.F. but can lift 300 pounds and carry 2 weps and have his ego hold Duke up in D.N.F. I think playing Duke Nukem 3D is a 100 to 0 against Duke Nukem Forever. I hope you don't mind me preaching.... :l
i actually really like DNF, the only thing I really wish they did was allow you to carry all weapons and no recharging health. it should have been more old school shooter than modern.
Good organize that music with stage background!!!Thank u..These game is my favourite Sega cd game at 18 yr ago..memorieable...scarely,horrified,adventurous...like in a puzzle like that in every round..Very enjoyable these game.Game music is excellent!!!
39:13 Damn, i still hate and afraid of this level. Just a shittone of creepy protozoid fuckers, lurking in shadows. And this music... I swear that this beeping sound make me think that is the distress signal sent by a crew that already dead.
I've been jumping between Duke Nukem videos today, contemplating, video game movies suck. But, why not *make a video game a movie*? Like, in the literal sense? If the team who developed the game are the lead producers, & the traditional "movie director" was an adviser, it COULD work! Besides, who know what's best for their game, than the ones who developed it?
Is it crazy that I still have all the original midi files from this game on my computer? People give Doom a lot of credit, but this game pushed the 2.5D game engine to its limits and was pretty damn amazing.
Duke Nukem was the best of its time. The soundtrack is so classic as Duke phases. "Your face, your ass. What's the difference?" "Come get some" "Shake it baby!" "Shit happens" "Ahhhhh much better"
Am I the only that things id software shouldeve took over redevelopment of DUKE Forever becuase the new DOOM is fucking awesome and still feels classic at the same time.
The game's soundtrack was composed for the Roland SC-55 sound module, which is what this video uses, so this video has the music's intended sound. The Yamaha XG synths on the other hand have a quite different sound from the Roland...the instruments are "fatter" and thicker, and the drums are far more punchy, but it was not the synth that the composers used.
Thanks for sharing this. Was working on a Duke video and couldn't process the Midis with my particular software. But yes, Aliens was definitely my favorite track playing this game as well ;)
