Dustin Naegel got back in touch a couple of days ago — hot on the heels of the Bandcamp album we featured on the Ultima Codex a few weeks back — to let me know he’s finished something I suspect a lot of you will want to queue up for a long listen: a full-album video of his orchestral re-arrangement of Nenad Vugrinec’s Ultima 8: Pagan MIDI score, set against original gameplay footage and stylized renders of locations from the game.
I’ll let him put it in his own words:
Just finished a full album video for my Pagan orchestration with a lot of (original) gameplay footage and stylized renders of many in-game locations. Maybe you’d be interested in sharing this as well:
The video is up on his StereozentrumYouTube channel as Ultima VIII: Pagan – Orchestral Re-Arrangement (Full Album), and it runs the major cues in sequence — from the theme and intro cinematic through Tenebrae, the Paths, Mythran, the Ethereal Plane, and on to “Britannia Burns.” If you only caught the earlier sample clips (Carthax Lake and Britannia Burns), this is the whole meal in one sitting.
Quick refresher for anyone who missed the first post: Dustin’s album is a synth-and-orchestral VST re-recording of Vugrinec’s score, aimed at giving those MIDI cues a proper mix without entirely abandoning their 90s character.
The chapter markers in the video make it easy to wander through Pagan while the score does the talking. You’d do well to start with the full album video, keep the Bandcamp page handy if you’d rather download, and follow Stereozentrum if this is your sort of thing. And if you like what you hear, a few dollars in the name-your-price box on Bandcamp still wouldn’t go amiss…and might even net you some bonus content.
