Dustin Naegel got in touch recently — quite a while ago, if I’m being honest; mea culpa — to let me know he’s finished a project he’s had in mind for years: an orchestral re-arrangement of Nenad Vugrinec’s MIDI score for Ultima 8: Pagan.

If the name rings a bell, it should. Dustin contributed music to the Ultima 9: Redemption soundtrack some years back, and we covered a handful of his Ultima remixes in 2021. This new album is a rather more ambitious outing. It’s been up on his Bandcamp page as of August 18th, name-your-price, and it runs to seventeen cues from Pagan plus a few bonuses (including discrete versions of The East Road and Fisherman’s Reef, and another pass at the Ultima 6 intro theme).

I’ll let Dustin explain why he felt the original MIDI needed this kind of attention:

Like many games scores from that era, Pagan’s music is purely MIDI-based. In very simple terms, you can think of a MIDI file as a digital sheet of music that still needs to be read and played back by the application itself. And this music playback depends heavily on the specific hardware (such as the extremely expensive Roland Sound Canvas) or software synthesizer you are using (like the widely distributed MS Wavetable Synth).

Unfortunately, even on the best hardware synthesizer, the playback of this music — which Vugrinec has crafted in extreme detail across all MIDI parameters — is never truly satisfying, since the assignment of the respective instruments and articulations always remains a matter of chance, and both professional mixing and mastering as the final stage of music production are of course lacking. Direct MIDI playback is therefore very unsatisfactory on any hard- or software and simply does not do justice to the compositional quality of this music.

His solution was a mix of synth and orchestral VSTs, with an eye toward not entirely abandoning the 90s MIDI character of the thing. He’s also rather taken with how much leitmotif work is hiding in Vugrinec’s score: themes for characters, places, and events on Pagan, which he argues is “every bit as good as a fully orchestral film score.” I, for one, have always thought Pagan’s music got a bit of a short shrift compared to the rest of the series, MIDI warts and all, so I’m inclined to hear him out.

I haven’t sat down with the whole album yet, but Dustin has posted a couple of videos if you’d like a taste first: Carthax Lake (The Path of Water) and Britannia Burns, his title for the endgame cue. The latter, he notes, brings the Pagan theme back around in B-flat minor, the same key as the intro, which is a nice touch.

You’d do well to start at the Bandcamp album, and to follow Dustin’s YouTube channel, Stereozentrum, if this is your sort of thing. And if you like what you hear, a few dollars in the name-your-price box wouldn’t go amiss.