What is the first thing you get on your ears after the start of World of Padman, apart from the sound of the intro? Right, the music loop of the main menu. This brute rock composition comes from the wonderful Ronny Rasmusson, alias RaZZ, from the Swedish industrial band Dieselkopf. This music loop was created in 2003 from parts of the track Overture, which has been part of our game since the release of the WoP stand alone.
In the early days of World of Padman as PadMod, anno 2004, music and sounds were clearly limited in quality due to the id-Tech3 engine for performance and memory reasons and the source code had not yet been released. Therefore the files had to be saved in WAV format with a maximum of 22kHz, which can be heard clearly. Nevertheless, the music packages quickly grew to over 100 MByte, which was very large for the usual internet connections at that time. Thanks to ioquake3, on whose source code World of Padman is based, and the implemented support of the audio format Ogg Vorbis, these limitations are history for a very long time. Already with the release of the WoP stand alone many music tracks were delivered in a better quality of 44kHz, only the menu music loop was somehow forgotten.
Since Ronny now provided us with the track Overture in high quality, we were able to put the menu music loop together again. The new version is now 10 seconds longer in total, because the calmer middle part takes a bit more space. But the transition to the last part of the track is more groovy thanks to an additional drum break. Just listen to it. By chance we received the soundtrack of ENTE’s PadShop from 2001 in 44kHz (thanks Ronny!), which we of course don’t want to withhold from you.
We can’t and don’t want to say yet if, when and in what form the revised track will find its way to you, but it could be a first step towards a new patch for World of Padman, after now almost 9 years.