Loradon's 2nd Anniversary

The 12th of February is the second anniversary of a little game called Loradon Online. It's a nice community-driven free MMORPG, based on the old Nintendo classics, which has managed to gain some popularity over its time.

Today the game's design lead, "Zero", gave a nice nostalgic speech about the history of the game. He posted it to the website which you can find here:
Loradon Online

I happen to have a special attachment to this game because I wrote the music. So now it's time for me to tell my little nostalgic story.
Back in December 2003 I got my shiny new keyboard - the Yamaha PSR-550, for writing music for my games. In around February 2004 I stumbled upon Loradon on vbgamer.com, downloaded it and played it. This was back when it was single-player. You can try a version similar to the one I played back then on the downloads page. (choose Loradon Classic).

The game showed great promise, but it had no music. I went back to the site and read the story. (I believe it's since been taken down). Zero's story was a fantastic tale of fantasy and adventure. That night I sat down at my keyboard and recorded a piece which came into my head as a result of that story, calling it "Legends Theme" (which I later discovered was the title of the World of Warcraft theme... oops). The next day, I thought, "what the hell..." this game has no music, here I have music which I wouldn't have had if I hadn't read that story anyway. So I emailed Zero and sent him a MIDI sample of the first few bars of the piece, and by three o'clock that day I found myself in the position of Composer for Loradon Online. My nickname was "Legend" and the song was now called "Loradon Theme"... you can now hear it in the game's menu screens.

I had a great time working with the team, and ended up writing seven pieces for the game before uni got the better of me. So although I'm no longer really writing music for the game, we're still good friends, and I hope I can work with Zero again some day.

Here's what he said about me in his speech:

Legend our best musician to this day and a great friend - A man with music in his heart, glad you could make it.

Aww... thanks Zero, buddy!

So best of luck to the Loradon team with their future developments. I advise everyone to have a go at the game - it is fr*ee after all (heh heh). And I hope you enjoy the score.
Download Loradon Online

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