The Original Original Soundtrack

[Ron_Stard]

Regarding the Match Of The Day track, there is also attached a Belgian tune called Eviva España from 0:51 to the end of the file:

https://youtu.be/mLWSnAZh32o?t=23

[Mindless]

Good catch.  I've updated it on The Cutting Room Floor.

[GuyPerfect]

I've spent a lot of time reverse-engineering various Lemmings games lately. While collecting distributions of the various Amiga games and demos, I saw all those not-public-domain tracks and got super curious about it.

In the usual Psygnosis demo with the dirt-and-grass "LEMMINGS" splash screen, all of the instrument sample and song files are on the disk, but only four tunes are actually featured in-game: cancan, doggie, tenlemmings and mountain. Regrettably, the data that associates instrument samples with tunes only contains the mappings for those four songs, so the original "copyrighted" soundtrack can't be restored this way.

There was an earlier demo from December 1990 that was distributed via Amiga Format (#18) and CU Amiga Magazine (#8). This is old enough that the game's mechanics haven't been finalized: Builders don't shrug, Bombers have a question mark over their heads instead of the head-shaking animation. In this demo, only the files for three tunes are present: cancan, doggie and tenlemmings. This is presumably because the demo had to share space on the coverdisk with other demos.

But here's the kicker: the track listing data in this older (oldest?) demo contains instrument mappings for all 20 pre-release tunes (the four in the Psygnosis demo plus the 16 copyrighted songs). The data from both demos can be used in conjunction, and by their powers combined, the forbidden publisher-unfriendly version of the soundtrack can be fully restored. As far as I've been able to determine, this is what Wanted Team must have done, because their SoundPlayer files (and subsequently Mindless's MOD files) all use the correct instruments.

The order that the songs would have played in-game is as follows:

Code Select Expand

01. cancan
02. doggie
03. tenlemmings
04. batman
05. missionimpos
06. daysnight
07. addamsfamily
08. birdie
09. entertainer
10. hogan
11. matchespana
12. mountain
13. ateam
14. oblasuper
15. panther
16. petergunn
17. raindrops
18. richman
19. scoobydoo
20. twist

[WillLem]

Awesome! Best of luck putting this together, it'll be interesting to hear the fully restored soundtrack.