Spotify and Apple Music are now featuring the original music of The Simpsons: Hit & Run.
The 2003 video game inspired by Grand Theft Auto includes instrumental songs such as Simpsons Hotline, Flowers By Irene, and Petty Theft Homer, but the music is only now streamable as the complete soundtrack.
Go Simpsonic WithThe Simpsons, Testify, and Songs in the Key of Springfield are among the other Simpsons albums that are now available on Spotify.
Using a mod, Hit & Run was transformed into the animated program Futurama in August last year. The demo was marketed as a complete conversion mod for The Simpsons: Hit & Run with the intention of recreating Hit & Run’s gameplay in the Futurama setting. The replica included original 3D models made to seem like an expansion pack for the game.
Matt Selman, the co-showrunner of The Simpsons, admitted in 2021 that he would love to see a remastered version of the Hit & Run.
Fans around the world have been waiting for the return of Age of Empires and Dynamedion has been excited to take part in its development. In collaboration with World’s Edge Studio and Relic Entertainment, Dynamedion announced their work on producing the soundtrack of the upcoming release, Age of Empires IV.
The Dynamedion team provided more than 620 minutes of music in the most massive project of its nearly 20-year history. The soundtrack is intensively complex: perfectly timed transitions are designed to carry the players smoothly from one phase of gameplay into the next. The intensity changes depending on what is happening as well, from combat to ambient, from tense to raw. They were further designed to imperceptibly change as the players advance through the ages. The scores of the comprehensive soundtrack were written by top composers from Dynamedion, including Tilman Sillescu, Henning Nugel, Armin Haas and Alexander Röder, who have been working on the project since 2018.
The lead composer of the project Tilman Sillescu said, “We’ve used such techniques that we implemented in Age of Empires IV in other games before. But we’ve never used so many techniques at the same time and so complexly intertwined. Each cue had to be coordinated with many others, loopable and with transitions, so that all transitions worked smoothly. It was a big, architectural task, almost like a big Wagnerian opera with overlength!”
The company was responsible for composing and orchestrating the main theme and music for nearly all the featured civilizations, including the Delhi Sultanate (Haas), Mongols (Sillescu), Holy Roman Empire (Sillescu), Rus (Nugel), Abbasid Dynasty (Nugel), Chinese (Röder), and English (Röder). Every effort was made to maintain the authenticity of the sounds of each civilization. The historical music of each group was carefully analyzed and woven into the soundtrack, and orchestras and musicians from around the world were tapped to take part. For example, the Mongolian themes include a professional Mongolian throat singer and an actual Morin Khuur ensemble recorded on location.
This is not your typical game soundtrack, but rather a truly global endeavor. Recorded in 11 studios across the world, it features three live orchestras, two choirs, and over 20 soloists, utilising culturally specific instruments and virtuosos from the relevant regions.
The work required very close interaction with Relic Entertainment. “I had never experienced such a meticulous approach to cultures before,” Sillescu shares. “Relic really wanted the civilizations to be depicted as seriously and accurately as possible.” The collaboration with Lin Gardiner, the Relic Music Lead, was a special experience for the team of composers, assuring an unrivaled complexity and immersion in the soundtrack for the gameplay process. “We have a long-standing relationship with Dynamedion and they have delivered again on an epic, globally recorded soundtrack that is guaranteed to thrill diehard fans and newcomers to the Age of Empires franchise,” says World’s Edge, audio director Todd Masten.
Disney has released the soundtrack for the Disney+ Original Pixar SparkShort, Out, Pixar’s first project with a homosexual protagonist.
The Out music album is now available on digital platforms including Amazon and includes two tracks by Jake Monaco, who previously scored music for two other Disney+ Original shorts for Pixar – Lamp Life and Forky Asks a Question.
The third track that has been written and performed by Natasha Adorlee. The track list includes – Burying the Bone (4:32), OUT (0:51) and Pink & Purple (3:28) by Adorlee.
Directed by Steven Clay Hunter, Out revolves around Greg (voiced by Kyle McDaniel), who is going to move in with his boyfriend, Manuel (voiced by Caleb Cabrera) and fears to ‘come out’ to his parents about it. But hell breaks loose when his parents show up on the moving day. What follows is a hilarious ride as Greg has his body swapped with his dog Jim with some divine intervention.
This 10 minute animated short shares a lesson of living authentically though it’s easier said than done. Greg decides to come clean to his parents only after listening to his mom’s confession, and the film ends on a positive note to hopefully make parents realise and understand that being gay is ‘normal’ and isn’t a ‘disease’ to be ‘cured’ or ‘rectified’.
Out is streaming on Disney+ and Disney+Hotstar in India.
