The Final Fight

Video game music composer, Chris Huelsbeck has launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce a Live Orchestra Album for the game Turrican II. This is to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the platform game that was originally released for Commodore 64, and Amiga among other systems. According to Chris Huelsbeck, 2016 also makes it 30 years since he began his professional career as a video game composer.

Mock-up examples for the Collector’s Edition CD and Double Vinyl

According to the Kickstarter page, Turrican II – The Orchestral Album will feature nearly an hour of completely new, never before heard, orchestral arrangements. Tracks currently planned for the album include The Final Fight, Freedom, The Great Bath, Concerto for Lasers and Enemies and The Desert Rocks. They will be revealing more tracks as the project progresses through development.  As far as a release date, they have stated that depending on the campaign’s success, all backers will get to hear Turrican II in full orchestral beauty as early as December.

The project has managed to secure the well-known and talented, FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague to perform the music. You may be familiar with them from one of their many previous video game projects, such as the Final Fantasy Orchestral Album and soundtracks to games such as The Elder Scrolls Online, Civilization: Beyond Earth and Halo Wars.

So at this point if you haven’t jumped over to the Kickstarter page (and I am not sure why you haven’t) then you are probably wondering about what kind of rewards you could expect if you decided to back this. First, let me tell you that helping the world receive this album should be a reward in itself, but for those of you interested in other things…. let’s see what we have.

Collector’s Edition including CD and Double Vinyl (mock-up)

So depending on how much you want to spend (anywhere from $5 to $1500) you could receive many things including… a Deluxe Collector’s Edition Box Set, a physical CD, and booklet, digital album, or the ultimate reward number 0001 of the 1,000 special Collector’s Editions.

The people behind this have consistently delivered awesome content in the past and there is no reason to believe this album will be anything else. It has a goal of $75,000, and with 18 days to go, it has already reached almost $20,000. If you are a fan of Turrican, video game music, or just music, you should absolutely consider backing this one, it is going to be awesome.

Brian Cowan

Brian Cowan loves playing video games, football, Magic, and pretty much anything else that he can use as an excuse to waste time. When he is not doing the above or working, he is usually writing or reading.