I’ve been meaning to release it into the wild for the two months half a year I’ve had it on my hands, but I’ve been unable to find anyone to do some spectral analysis and verify its authenticity. (So basically, I’m still not sure whether it’s legit. Would be great if some of you guys might know how to figure that out.)
https://archive.org/details/methods-of-destruction. Sonic Mayhem’s 1996 debut album and alternative fan soundtrack to Quake, its musical portfolio would contribute to their collaboration with id Software to conceive Quake II’s soundtrack and part of Quake III’s soundtrack.
This album was popularly considered lost until 2012, when a choppy MP3 release of it appeared on a Steam thread. After Sascha Dikiciyan of Sonic Mayhem expressed his wishes to keep his earliest work away from peoples’ ears (I really can’t understand why. I think the stuff is great except for maybe the opening track), the uploader quickly deleted it. However this release would proliferate itself across the internet causing Sascha to eventually throw in the towel and begrudgingly give Kevin Sartori his blessing to release a cleaned-up distribution of that MP3 release.
A bit over a month has passed since Quake II Remastered was released, and I haven’t heard any whispers of an official re-release of this album, so personally I can confidently consider it disowned abandonware.
Here’s some additional links which can clarify the background of this album and its abandonment/availability status:
https://searx.tiekoetter.com/search?q=site:quaddicted.com+methods+of+destruction
https://www.quaddicted.com/articles/methods_of_destruction
https://web.archive.org/web/20120826145029if_/http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2623957
https://web.archive.org/web/20120519134825if_/http://p-l-m.blogspot.com/2012/04/sonic-mayhem-methods-of-destruction.html
Parts of these articles refer to the album having been made available in 2012, this is in regards to the inferior MP3 release.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101003004225id_/https://www.sonicmayhem.com/frames/frame_credits(old).html calls the first track “Data Track” for title consistency with the equivalent track on the Quake II disc, but if my release is legit, this data doesn’t exist. It’s just a 30-second loop of silence, just like what you’d hear on some custom Quake maps when they load “Track 1”. I can’t say I’m not a tiny bit disappointed by that, but it makes sense. There’s plenty of CD players out there which don’t know they’re meant to skip this data, so sneaking a little text file or something into there isn’t worth potentially compromising the listening experience for those buyers.
