Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2 – Martian Dreams Soundtrack

Dana Glover / Tom Hollingshead / George Sanger, 1991

Back in 1991, dedicated soundtrack releases for Western games were still practically unheard of. One of the earliest pioneers was Origin Soundtrack, a compilation drawing on music from several of Origin’s high-profile titles of 1990 and 1991. Exactly how Origin Soundtrack came about remains somewhat mysterious. What does seem clear is that the album was an unauthorised collection. Its producer and engineer was veteran composer Martin Galway, fresh off work on Wing Commander II, and his likely aim was to showcase both his own music and that of other Origin composers in a stand-alone format.

Probably inevitably, the album turned out to be a mixed bag. Music from headline titles such as Ultima VI: The False Prophet and Wing Commander II proves surprisingly bland in this album context. By contrast, Wing Commander‘s pioneering, film-score-inspired writing makes an early album appearance, albeit only as a six-minute medley. Nestled between these better-known games, however, is a score that deserves far greater attention: Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2 – Martian Dreams.

Martian Dreams was part of the playful Ultima: Worlds of Adventure offshoot, which allowed Origin to relax its belt a little with the venerable RPG franchise. The premise is wonderfully eccentric. Set in the Victorian era, the game begins at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago before launching players on a steampunk rocket trip to Mars, where they encounter Vladimir Lenin, Mark Twain, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Rasputin, and other historical figures of the age.

Making musical sense of such a narrative could easily have collapsed into gimmickry. Instead, composers George Sanger, Dana Glover, and Tom Hollingshead strike a near-perfect balance between Victorian pomp, otherworldly evocations of Mars’ alien landscapes, and an appealing sense of fun and adventure. The score sounds like the work of artists tackling an unusual brief with real imagination and enthusiasm.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Martian Dreams‘ eerie mood-building pieces, which make the game’s Martian setting feel genuinely alien. “Turn Back the Clock” is an instructive comparison point with Ultima VI. Both works rely on plinking arpeggio figures, but “Turn Back the Clock” deploys them much more effectively. Several echoing arpeggios drift through chromatic harmonies over droning low strings, producing something dreamlike, slightly grotesque, and richly atmospheric. Tellingly, both cues are rooted in F minor — the score’s tonal home for its Martian unease, as distinct from the C major of its Victorian ceremony. “Below Ground” proves spookier still — the score’s most withdrawn cue, its sparse, slow-moving texture and deeply subdued timbre making it the closest the soundtrack comes to silence. A ghostly woodwind lead hovers above an uncanny rhythmic figure played by a music-box-like instrument with glassy, hollow tones. Simple as these means are, the unease they create is striking.

“Dream Combat” then performs a clever trick by dragging those unsettling colours into battle music. Hollingshead places a shrill violin figure over a cantankerous tuba rhythm, another example of the composers’ flair for creative orchestration. True, the violin’s shrieks can become grating. But that abrasiveness is part of the point: when the line spirals into a mad swirl, it lends the music a convincingly surreal atmosphere.

“Main Theme” opens with a strident, upbeat march carrying exactly the Victorian pomp and circumstance the setting demands — its C major brightness already announcing the score’s ceremonial pole. Then, in satisfyingly cinematic fashion, the piece surges into higher drama, driven forward by blaring fanfares and crisis motifs. Finally — and to great effect — the commotion drains away, leaving only a harp melody suspended over a long violin chord.

The crown jewel, however, is “Daytime”. It begins as a droll, amiable piece that still retains enough stiff-upper-lip formality for the game’s Victorian setting. The music then blossoms into what amounts to a fully realised town theme, feeling both homely and adventurously enterprising. “Daytime” achieves its warmth through unusually deep, rich timbres rather than brightness — the orchestral confidence expressed in colour rather than sheen. Sanger expands here on the gifts he displayed in Wing Commander: the cue’s flexible orchestration, melodic richness, and constantly shifting textures arguably surpass even that earlier score’s celebrated “Fanfare and Theme”. In its wealth of mood and melodic invention, “Daytime” can stand beside the best JRPG town themes of its era — Sanger again pushing the boundaries of orchestral writing for Western game music.

“Nighttime” acts as a graceful companion piece, returning “Daytime”‘s slightly regal character in more relaxed form. Its melody is just as charming, while the elegant string-ostinato accompaniment gives the cue a light dance feel without ever tipping into cheeriness. Finally, “Surface Combat” is brief but skilfully realised, covering a surprising amount of dramatic ground in little time and calling players to arms with a resilient trumpet melody on the soundtrack’s most straightforwardly action-focused cue.

Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2 – Martian Dreams is a rarely heralded stepping stone in the history of orchestral Western game music, and possibly the finest Ultima score (George Oldziey’s intermittently gorgeous Ultima IX: Ascension is too inconsistent to claim that title). Within fifteen minutes, Martian Dreams creates a multi-faceted, planet-hopping fantasy world of Victorian ceremony, alien unease, and adventurous warmth.