MIDI Week Singles: "Gall Spaceport" - STAR WARS: Shadows of the Empire (N64)

 

"Gall Spaceport" from STAR WARS: Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64 and Windows (1996-1997)
Composer: Joel McNeely with themes by John Williams
Album: No Official Release*
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: LucasArts

I know May the Fourth was, on the fourth, but we're only two days out, and it's Revenge of the Sixth, so I thought it would still be appropriate to use music from a STAR WARS game for today's article.

Without getting into the weeds about the production phase of the music used in the game, I primarily want to point out a couple of things about this song.  First, the first 25 seconds of the song are taken specifically from "The Departure of Boba Fett," composed by John Williams for The Empire Strikes Back.  This makes sense as it's Boba Fett that you're hunting in the Gall Spaceport in an attempt to rescue Han Solo on his journey to being delivered to Jabba the Hutt.  The last half of the song, from about 0:30 through the end of the song before it loops at 0:49, is an original composition by Joel McNeely, although I could've sworn that this actually appeared somewhere in the original trilogy; although YouTube's copyright seeking algorithm disagrees, so I'll trust it on that.

Lastly, this song only lasts about 50 seconds before it loops.  That's a ridiculously short amount of time for a song to start looping when the stage can take anywhere between 13 and 35 minutes, meaning you could be listening to this snippet of song 16 to 44 times.  But I find that it works.  The fact that I'm surprised that the music in this stage is looped every 50 seconds is a testament to being immersed in the STAR WARS galaxy in 1996-97, both in terms of having a John Williams quality score (albeit one being piped out in mono and compressed down to a 16-bit audio file), and playing a background part in the expansive story between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

It's all just a really good, dread-inducing bit of music that works in the Gall Spaceport setting, knowing that you're going to have to fight not just Boba Fett, but Slave 1 as well before the end of the level.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

*While there is the official Shadows of the Empire soundtrack that was recorded and released to accompany this multimedia project, it is not a one-to-one soundtrack from the N64 game.  The 1997 Windows port does use longer tracks from this soundtrack however.