This one bubbled up from Bandcamp a couple of weeks after it went up, and I am, as usual, a little behind. Rothbardic — you might also know him as Chlorthos Dragon, or Rothbard Chlorthos if you hang out on (the Ultima Dragons Discord server)[https://discord.com/channels/179598067379470336/179621008704012288] — has posted a twenty-eight-track remaster of soundtrack pieces he composed many years ago for Ultima 9: Redemption, the cancelled Morrowind-based fan remake that tried to give Ultima 9 a plot and ending more in line with…well, at least what its developers thought the plot of Ultima 9 should be.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen music from Redemption come to light; you may recall that we covered Matti Paalanen’s Redemption music which was released on SoundCloud last year, and going back still yet further we can find when Chlorthos released the original versions of these tracks back in 2013. These new ones from Chlorthos are based on the original tracks he composed in the early 2000s, but I’ll let him explain both the plot the music was meant to serve, and what he’s done to the files:

The story picked up exactly where Ultima VIII’s ending left off: a Britannia conquered in all but name, Lord British reduced to a puppet monarch under a Guardian-controlled Republic, and an Avatar whose own conduct on Pagan is very much in question. That question — whether he’s still earned the name Avatar — is where “Redemption” comes from.

I composed a full score for it back in the 2000s, and it’s been sitting as MIDI and mp3 files on my drives ever since. Recently I ran every track through Suno AI to get it closer to what I always heard in my head as a kid, then hand-edited and mixed each track myself to bring it up to a real listening standard. It’s not a copy of George Oldziey’s official score for Ultima IX: Ascension, and neither does it use any of those themes — it’s my own writing, threading in tunes from the earlier classic Ultima games the way any tribute does, the same way Oldziey himself wove “Stones” and “Rule Britannia” into his.

I know the concept of AI is one that rankles some people in the Ultima fandom, though I can’t say I share the sentiment…especially in this case. Suno has a few different use cases, including the ability to take an existing song as input and remix/remaster it, with controllable degrees of variation from the original. For those without access to a small orchestra, or traditional (and often pricy!) score composition software, Suno presents a fairly decent alternative; the music is still very much human-composed, with the AI serving only to add instrumentation that simply wouldn’t be possible in MIDI tracks. The new set runs the gamut from the Redemption Main Theme, through the various Virtue-city pieces, Stones, Bane Gotha, The Final Battle, and a reprise.

The unmodified Vintage Soundtrack, with the original 2000-era tracks, is available as well. If you want to hear what he actually put on the drives back then, that’s the place. And if you like what you hear, there is a “name your price” donation box on the Bandcamp profile.