Unconvinced Pete: iMUSE and Monkey Island 2 – A Follow-Up

A while ago I wrote an article about LucasArts’ iMUSE system and in it I pondered how well (if at all) they would be able to implement the music in Monkey Island 2: Special Edition using digital audio instead of MIDI. Prior to release my nerves were jittery to say the least. People’s memories work differently for different things and music figures very strongly in mine. This means that music is important to most of the things I am nostalgic about: I was only half-joking when I told someone “I’d gladly wait another few weeks for the special edition if I could hear the soundtrack now.”

Not helping my nerves was some tantalising information about iMUSE running up to release. First Jesse Harlin, the music arranger for the special editions turned up on a short ‘making of’ style film, insisting that they were using every trick in the book to recreate iMUSE’s smooth transitions. “We’re there,” he said, promisingly. Yet on the video itself, iMUSE was not in evidence.

On the Facebook page for the series, LucasArts promised that iMUSE was working and I hoped to hear for myself by watching videos of it being demonstrated at E3. Curse my damned luck, the background noise in all the E3 videos is such that it was impossible to get a clear idea of the music. I would have to wait until release to hear for myself. Now that the game is out and I’ve had a chance to thoroughly scrutinize a few different versions, it’s time to report my findings. The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than I expected.

The good news is that a very good attempt has been made of replicating the seamless transitions of the original game’s soundtrack. Particularly in the town of Woodtick, which I demonstrated in my video, they’ve gone to great lengths to make it work. I’ve had a chance to peek at the music files used and it looks like each location in Woodtick has about ten short transitional tracks, so that it always segues smoothly into the outdoor theme no matter where it is in the music when you leave a room.

However, there’s a catch: it only seems to work perfectly on the PC version. The PS3 version does it well enough; the transitions are there but occasionally I could hear the join. The 360 version, on the other hand, surprised me by having no iMUSE transitions at all. This appears to be an oversight, one which I hope can be easily fixed in a patch, but nevertheless will rightly be a disappointment to fans who were promised iMUSE. The differences are aptly demonstrated in this YouTube video.

There are other music problems which are present across all versions, mostly in the form of timing issues. Some music is cued in too late or early, and some incidental cues which are supposed to be married to the on-screen action now appear out of sync with it. Most disappointingly, during a singing sequence, the sung vocals are noticeably out of sync with the accompanying music. It is unfortunate indeed that these timing issues exist, especially since the biggest technical feat of getting the Woodtick music working was pulled off so admirably. I can only imagine that the music problems made it to the final release because they were too far down on the list of priorities to be fixed, and perhaps because the people testing the game did not know it well enough to report them as issues.

That, I suppose, is the key: newcomers to the game are unlikely to hear any problems (aside from the out of sync singing, perhaps) and the music itself has been arranged and recorded beautifully. The complaints I have are ones that most people simply wouldn’t realise. This brings me back to the original point of my iMUSE article: is it worth spending the extra effort to make game soundtracks more like interactive scores and less like background drapery?

I’m still not sure how to answer the question, but I did find one thing interesting from the commentary track of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Talking about iMUSE, original designers Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman remembered how they hired programmers whose sole job it was to make the iMUSE transitions work properly. They were urged never to undertake anything so complex with iMUSE again because nobody noticed. In the words of Tim and Ron, “I noticed!”

The quality of a game is not simply the sum of all the good things that people are likely to notice about it; it’s in attention to those little details. It’s in those things that people might not necessarily miss if they were absent or notice when present, but together add up to something that intuitively feels special. For that reason I will always be grateful for the effort LucasArts went into in implementing iMUSE twenty years ago and – with a few reservations – applaud the attempt at reproducing it for the special edition. Now let’s get that fix for the 360 version, eh?