Today’s soundtrack is an odd one – I’ve never played the game, but have used the album extensively as the soundtrack to a completely different game. Introducing Josh Whelchel’s score for The Spirit Engine 2 – my unofficial soundtrack to Minecraft.
The Minecraft soundtrack is a nice piece of work, but just as Minecraft is many things to many people, what people want from the background music is equally diverse. I got on the Minecraft bandwagon quite early and the servers were simply incapable of delivering the whole game to me, so my first few hours had no audio at all – no music, no sound effects, no warnings. Which was fun. The upshot was that I spent a lot of time trying out various albums from other games. I settled on The Spirit Engine 2 almost by accident – I put it on and got so engrossed that I soon forgot that Josh Whelchel had not, in fact, written the actual music to the game.
The soundtrack is wonderful background music, great to work to, great to explore and mine to. It even has a few tracks to run away from Creepers to. My two standout tracks are Calling of Fate and Misty Hollows – where the rest of the album is excellent ambience, these two work perfectly well as standalone tracks to simply listen to.
Bonus: Oblitus
Oblitus is a game that’s been in development for several months now and is looking very interesting. Whelchel is doing the score for this two and has released a couple of demo tracks:
When I commented that these reminded me a lot of parts of his Spirit Engine 2 music he replied:
Woo nostalgia! That’s great, because that’s the simpler kind of writing I’m trying to get back into! You just made my night :DDD
Five years after The Spirit Engine 2, it’s great to hear that he has’t forgotten that wonderful style.