F-22 Lightning 3 (Novalogic, 1999) Complete Soundtrack

This was one of my favorite childhood flight simulators. And as I grew up, I realized just how intricate the interaction between the game and the music was. The composer of the electronic soundtrack, Alan Koshiyama, created a bunch of short audio snippets that, when strung together, sound like a full track. But certain in-game events trigger different audio files, usually within 4 seconds. This way, the music reflects the status of the game. For example, if a missile is fired at you, the game music switches from its regular "cruising" track to a more ominous "inbound missile" track, and then switches to a new track based on what happens after the missile reaches you.

To acquire this soundtrack, I mostly just recorded the in-game audio and made a few audio tweaks before rendering. Novalogic used a special .SBF zip file to store the audio snippets, and only select software can unpack this. I managed to do so - that's why I included the names of each audio snippet in the video. I used Cool Edit Pro to import these audio snippets (about 120 of them). However, the music had to be imported mono 8-bit. And, because Cool Edit Pro was basically reading a ASCII text file (that's how the files were exported), there was a lot of clutter in the audio. So even after noise removal and other modifications, it still sounded gross. You'll hear the ".SBF" version during a part of the video, and you will definitely hear the difference. For this section, I didn't know how to trigger the music in-game, so the ".SBF" version had to do.

You can learn a lot about a video game's production history by analyzing the music files. I can see exactly (to the minute) when the files were originally uploaded and saved; I can see titles/subtitles/remarks about the soundtracks that, presumably, the composer created with during production; I can see how the game accesses and reads the music files and how in-game events trigger certain responses.