Friday, October 24, 2008

A matter of music rights

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Some people asked us why we decided to use two commercial tracks in Portal: Prelude. They claimed it was a wrong idea and that was right, we missed a few opportunities because of this choice (mainly press coverage). Even if we tried to shorten them up and degrade their quality as bad as we could (Scorpions' extract is only 50 seconds long and degraded a lot) a few people still claimed it wasn't fair.

In the next release, we decided to replace the 4 occurences of Rock You Like a Hurricane by the Scorpions with 4 different variations of the Still Alive song (R'n'B, rock, techno and classical). We don't really know if it will change anything special but, well... At least we took care of one of the two commercial tracks.

During the last week, we searched for a replacement song for Believe by The Chemical Brothers (the song during the GlaDOS fight), but to be honest, nothing came out of this research. We are totally unable to find a free song that matches quite correctly the feeling of Believe. And as you may not know it already, we chose this song because of its rythm and also because of its video clip, as you can see:

Yesterday, I wondered if I could directly get in touch with their label, to try to get their permission to keep this 3 minutes degraded extract in our free project. But it could just bring us even more problems. So, if you know any free-of-use (free or creative commons licensed) track we could use to replace it, we'd be willing to know about it. It should be long enough and "repetitive" enough to be looped over and over without beeing annoying (Looks like we love to ask your help).