The Quest of Adventure
Progressive rock, energetic
First, the title. "The Quest of Adventure" was originally the title of a screenplay for a roleplaying game starring... um... well, the South Park kids, to be honest. There was a huge great span of time in the recent past where I thought I liked South Park; I was drawing the characters, doing voice acting, writing music, and writing stuff inspired by it. Like it was with Doom, something happened a couple years ago that irreconcilably tainted South Park for me to the point I can't look at it anymore and I'm kind of ashamed to have been associated with it. I was basically the "South Park Guy" on Tumblr from July 2016 to about 2021, but fortunately that part of my life is over now. I hope everyone whose ship comics I turned into radio theatre have graduated beyond South Park to something more interesting and less racist.
Anyway, the screenplay I mentioned was based on "The Return of the Fellowship of the Rings to the Two Towers"—which, to this day, I still think is good TV. That's a quality half-hour of television right there, right up there with "Ear-sy Rider" and "Deal Me Out". It saw Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, Butters, a random kid from Middle Park, either Craig or Tweek, and possibly also Wendy on a quest to return Backdoor Sluts 9 to the video store in Conifer. Well, like I said, it's been quite a few years since I even thought about that project.
This song had nothing to do with the South Park thing. I have written music for that project, but this isn't part of it. This actually started out life as a MIDI sequence I called "Nineteen 80", which I wrote at around the same time as the Classical version of "Korobushka". It was only the 4th song I'd ever written that had a sequenced drum part, after some skater rock I wrote in high school and a techno song from college. I may have said this before, but I have the worst time with titling my new songs. Sometimes they sit in my composing folder for a week or more while I try to come up with a title. I had just finished listening to Devo's entire canon of work and some of Men Without Hats', and I decided to try writing a song in that style. Well, we didn't quite make it there, mostly because of the strings. I just can't not use strings! Since the song was trying to be like the '80s, I decided not to think too hard and just call it "Nineteen 80". The MIDI sequence sat around in my composing folder for the next 9 years; I'd listen to it occasionally, trying to think of some reason to use it for something.
When I started using FL Studio in 2020, I decided to try loading the song into FLEX GM to see what I could do with it. After about a year of messing about with it, trying fruitlessly to get it to sound any good with Spitfire VSTi's, I found the Emulator X3 and a number of Emulator III-XP patch libraries, including the most famous Marcato Strings sound since "West End Girls", and I decided I was well-equipped enough to turn it into game music. The first version of it had no guitar, it was just basically an HQ version of the MIDI original. At the same time I added the Linn LM-1 to it, I also decided to use one of the GM canvas soundfonts I'd been hoarding to give it a lead guitar solo. I re-titled it "The Quest of Adventure" so I could at the very least use the title for something, and here it is.
"The Quest of Adventure"
written by Tina Rosenthal (LCI)
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