MIDI Week Singles: "Orc Campaign III" - WarCraft: Orcs & Humans (PC)

 

"Orc Campaign III" from WarCraft: Orcs & Humans on the PC (1994)
Composers: Gregory Alper, Rick Jackson, Chris Palmer, Glenn Stafford
Album: No Official Album Release*
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

It has been a long many years since I have visited Azeroth in any form.  The first time was playing a demo for WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness back in 1996 then buying the Warcraft I & II Battle Chest Edition at Target.  I really only dabbled a bit in the original WarCraft mainly because there was the shiny and new WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness that ran so much better and had so many more options.  But I did play both Orcs and Humans and listened to the music on the CD ROM a lot.

At first, this track is pretty unremarkable.  There is ambient drones playing in the background and war drums chugging along.  But then at 0:39, you have what sounds like to me the horn section that screams WARCRAFT!!  Something about those MIDI horns is what brings me around, then coupled with that ambient drone and war drums and you have music fit to raid and pillage the puny human settlements who were foolish enough to build so near to the Swamps of Sorrow.  Then around 2:12 the song really picks up (or at least I think it does) with the bass repeating their melody and then when the strings and then the bells come in. . .AH!  I love it.

I mean, I guess the song does kind of show its age for being a track in an RTS game, but this was the mid 1990s and WarCraft was not an especially fast running game, but it suits it just fine.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Nothing's Gonna Stop Us

P.S.  I say that there was no official soundtrack because you could just as easily listen to the music from the game by using the CD ROM as a music CD either on your computer or in a regular CD player (after skipping Track 1 which was the Data Track).  I was definitely spoiled by this and never understood why all CD ROM games did not have this ability?  It also helped that the game CD worked on both Mac and PC, because I first played the game on my sister's Mac and then used it on my on PC laptop after graduating from high school.