
You really have to keep an eye on it, though--it'll try and slide away from you the first chance it gets.
π³π± | 31
π§‘π @SilverIll's girl ππ§‘
A handful of images from the opening cinematic of the DOS version of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. Who says EGA can't look gorgeous?
...because if you do, chances are you've listened to the fruits of a little-known piece of software known as Microsoft Music Producer.
Released in October of 1996 by Blue Ribbon Soundworks, MSMP was designed to make it easy for anyone and everyone to create background music for things like multimedia presentations - powerpoints and videos and such. The program could generate midi files using a variety of randomly-selected parts of pre-made musical pieces made to fit a range of musical genres. Users could decide the instrument set used, the tempo, the pitch, the overall "mood" of the track, and even the peaks and valleys of the "intensity" of the track to some extent.
Of course, for all its surprising versatility, anyone using even vaguely similar settings would inevitably generate something that sounds pretty dang similar to a midi generated by someone else. And, of course, the images above already spoiled it: this program was used to generate the soundtracks of several games, including but not limited to Airline Tycoon, Speedy Blupi 2 and Graal Online (Classic/The Adventure).
The catch is that the software went completely uncredited in each of these projects, leaving their origins a complete mystery. Naturally one would expect that rumors within the communities of these games would start to spread... and spread they did! The games cannot escape accusations of plagiarism even to this very day, and their relative obscurity has rendered sources of the truth few and far between... until now.
I played each of these games downright religiously when I was a child; I spent months (if not years) of my youth on them, knew their soundtracks inside and out, and the similarities struck me like a truck... And I'd go on to spend twenty more years trying to figure out what the source of these similar tracks was, with an ever-growing obsession. I was convinced that the developers had some sort of connection, an uncredited shared composer, or perhaps even wholesale stole from eachother. The thought of it simply being a case of everyone using the same tools never occurred to me; the concept of a midi generator that actually produced anything worth listening to was inconceivable, especially for the early 2000's... And yet, here we are.
How did I end up finding it?
I just got lucky. I stumbled upon the right forum thread after decades of searching, and... well, there it was. Spelled out in simple terms, knowledge someone had already beaten me to but simply never broadcast to the world. A hell of a mystery no one thought was a mystery and didn't even really need solving -- but damn if it didn't get solved.
The Restauranteur is a restaurant management strategy/simulator game released in 2001 that (despite its french title) puts you in charge of a Chinese restaurant. Players have to research new recipes, maintain a healthy stock of ingredients, buy the necessary equipment and decorate the restaurant to attract as many guests as possible. Where it stands out, aside from its striking visual style, is in its campaign mode: The Restauranteur features three distinct playable characters with their own personal backgrounds and requirements when it comes to a successful business, and their unique personalities could determine the outcome of the game - at least according to the developer's own description.
Sadly, you will likely never get to play this game; it is nigh impossible to find anything regarding The Restauranteur anywhere. The game seems to be completely lost to time.
Three sites seem to have hosted the demo at one point: Softonic, 4players and FilePlanet, all of which either lead to bogus files, viruses, error messages, or all of the above... and to think I had just managed to download the SimGolf demo from FilePlanet a few months ago, too. At least 4players has a lot of screenshots..!
Information on its developers is incredibly sparse as well - screenshots of the title screen list both "Fanone Soft Corporation" and "Futurearena Corporation", and even then I only managed to track down Futurearena's website which does not give us much more to go on.
It was evidently published by Raajmenon, which was run by members of the Australia-based Ellipse Studios who most notably created the game Submarine Titans. You can even find a message from Raaj on the gog.com forums right here, so perhaps reaching out is not yet out of the question...?
Only time will tell if anything can make this game resurface.
If you or anyone you know has any information or materials regarding The Restauranteur, please do not hesitate to send me a message. I would love to preserve this little piece of my childhood in any way I can.