Jonathan Shaw

Composed: December 2013

     Ah, the start of my curiosity into video game music.

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     This is a piece that I only just rediscovered and retroactively added to the list in October 2017. Essentially, it is an "Overworld" theme - a theme that plays when your characters are travelling around the open world map, or the "Overworld" (such as in 'Golden Sun', which was most likely the game I had in mind when writing this theme). The context as to why I wrote a theme like this was due to my older brother and our plan to create an RPG video game. And so I tested the waters as to whether or not I could write the music for it by writing this cheeky little "Overworld Theme".

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     Of course, our plans never got far, but these first experiments sparked my interest into video game music (which I am still fascinated by to this day) which would lead to several other video game-related compositions further down the list. As for this piece, while it is deviously simplistic, there is a pleasant charm to it that proves it was written by an experimenting novice. I do actually like this theme somewhat; it brings back memories of early RPG themes that used limiting hardware and had to make do with about 3 musical voices, or in Golden Sun's case, about 8 voices.

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     One note I will stress is that the original score for this piece was lost in its entirety. For some reason I had lost the original Sibelius file and only had a recording of the piece as a reminder that it existed. Thankfully, it was a rather simplistic piece, but what you are looking at below is my own re-transcription that I wrote in January/February 2014 using the surviving recording (which ironically I have now also lost - the recording below is from the re-transcription).