Warriors of Might and Magic Soundtrack (GBC), Matthew Simmonds, 2000
By the late 1990s, the Might & Magic franchise was going strong, with a number of successful main line games and the recent establishment of the Heroes of Might & Magic series. Not surprisingly, publisher The 3DO Company were keen to branch out further, making the most of the valued brand name. Its first attempt to do so in 1999 via 3d-action RPG Crusaders of Might and Magic didn’t cause much excitement. Interestingly enough, The 3DO Company tried again with a similar game concept a year later – however, Warriors of Might and Magic didn’t meet with much more enthusiasm amongst gamers and critics than its predecessor.
While the PS1 and PS2 versions of Warriors of Might and Magic didn’t cause much of a stir, the same goes doubly for the Game Boy Colour conversion – not necessarily a surprise, given the game’s poor reviews and the sheer number of games being published for the platform in 2000. However, the one positive thing to come out of this run-of-the-mill 2d-action RPG was an outstanding soundtrack by Matthew Simmonds (maybe better known under his demo scene handle 4mat). At the time the in-house composer for developer Climax Group, Simmonds had started out in 1989 as part of Amiga demo scene group Slipstream, before transitioning into a professional game music career in the early 1990s. Interestingly enough, Simmonds is one of the few game music composers who remained active in both the game industry and the demo scene decades after first starting out.