The soundtrack for the first Flash game that I ever properly released: a side-scrolling shooter in which you played as a two-headed cybernetic dragon alien thing.

I apparently started on the game on 30/08/2005, and finished just a couple of months later, according to the dates on my files (I was still in school at the time too, so I must have worked on this alongside that). I remember so little about it though! I know that it was a remake of the very first thing I made in Flash, which was essentially based on a "Make your first Flash game!" tutorial but with a fire-breathing turquoise dragon instead of the tutorial's laser-shooting spaceship... The 'Draco System' and its inhabitant races were aliens I came up with as a creative little child, and I remember that when I made this game, it felt like nostalgically reviving fond memories from my childhood, which feels strange to me here years in the future because now this is a nostalgic thing of the past!

It's very different to what I went on to focus on, and the same goes for the music. I remember thinking at the time that "this isn't like what I usually compose!", though this was during the Cambrian Explosion period so I'd only composed a few things before this. I think I was still using a track-based composing program called Direct Music Producer - recommended by a book about game-making I'd read - rather than the notation-based Sibelius I've used for most of my composing.

I'd recently played the game Zero Wing, out of curiosity about the origins of the (now ancient) "all your base are belong to us" meme, and had the music from that in mind when writing this. I think. It's all a blur, really, it was so long ago!

Like all the music I composed around this early period, I had no formal training or knowledge of music theory or anything, so the construction is naive. I find it interesting how structural the pieces are despite this though; most of them have an Intro + A section + B section + Loopback form.

Some other random memories:

The Travel music and the climax of Ortekia are lifted directly from my piece Ramble 7 (included in the Cambrian Explosion album), meaning they must be from around the same time.

A chord progression in the icy Crystalite track was based on (unreferenced memories of?) the Ice Cap Zone in Sonic 3.

The Ortekia track - which is far longer than the others - is a medley combining variations of themes from previous worlds... though I think Ngregka might not be included, as I made that last, or something? Interesting to think that I tried something like this so early in my composing though.

Here is an exciting fact: the album art is just some 'box art' that I made for the game at the time of its creation; I made a mockup game case design and everything. Weird. I would have used some art I made during the same period, as I have with the other early albums - and I do have three pictures of Cyber Orteks from 2005 I could have used - but I wanted to reuse the game's font in it, but can't because I have no idea what it is. I no longer have Flash so I can't open the file and find out directly, and websites for identifying fonts from images can't identify it. How annoying!