Wednesday, January 10, 2024

MIDI Week Singles: "Stage 3" - League of Light (INT)

 


"Stage 3" from League of Light on the Intellivision (1983/2001)
Composer: Russ Lieblich
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Intellivision Productions Inc.
Developer: Activision


Today's MIDI Week Single is a bit of an odd one for a couple of reasons.  First, it is not often that a game from the Intellivision, or really any home console system in the early 1980s is going to have a music score apart from an opening jingle.  Sure there might be a series of tones that would be classified as music in early games like Space Invaders on the Atari 5200.  Having a dedicated music track was exceedingly rare in those days since the Atari 2600 had only two sound channels, the Atari 5200 had a whopping four sound channels, and the Intellivision had only three sound channels; for reference, the NES had five channels, the SEGA Genesis had 10 channels, and the N64 had between 16-24.

The only real context I have for League of Light is that it was developed for the Intellivision in 1983, but wasn't released until the 2001 compilation, Intellivision Rocks on Windows and Mac.  It could have been due to the video game crash of '83, but that is purely speculation on my point as I couldn't find any evidence to back that hypothesis up.

This particular track is from Stage 3 in League of Light as the second stage builds on the complexity of the first stage.  I don't have a good enough ear to say if there are any differences between Stage 2 and Stage 3, but the visual component of the game does look to be more complicated than Stage 2, so it could just be that the same track is reused.

That's really it as I just wanted to share this bit of almost lost video game music history, and even though it was released 23 years ago, I only heard about League of Light's existence about a month ago.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Music Washed Away All The Hate


P.S.  I highly recommend watching a playthrough of the game to get a better idea of what is going on, but even then without some context, it's pretty confusing since you're not watching what the player is actually doing.

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