Choicest VGM - VGM #389 - Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds - Dead London

Screenshot from Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds


Music composed by Jeff Wayne
Arranged and Programmed by Stephen Murphy
Engineered by Pete Smith
Sound Engineer Paul Chivers
Additional Programming by Gaƫtan Schurrer
Mixed by James Cassidy
Music and Audio Production by Jeff Wayne Music Group Ltd.

We now move onto a very peculiar game with an awesome soundtrack that was released in 1998. While it'd probably not surprise anyone if a game were to be based off the classic sci-fi novel "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, what might raise an eyebrow is if you told them there exists a game that was based off the musical version created by Jeff Wayne in 1978. This is probably a good reason the music in the game is so good because it contains remixes of music that has sold pretty well (in fact, the original album sold more than 15 million copies worldwide).

The game is a Real-Time Strategy game set at the end of the 19th Century where you get to choose whether to defend the Earth and play as the Humans or invade the Earth and play as the Martians. Depending on which side you choose, you'll be treated to different music.

This track, "Dead London", plays in the background while you're viewing the strategic map as the Humans. It doesn't stray much from the source material and in the original album, this plays towards the end of the musical when the Journalist arrives back in London to find just about everything dead, including the Martians. It's a pretty grim, lonely, depressing piece of music though, which is probably why it was excluded from the Playstation version's soundtrack, although I think it's quite fitting, especially at the beginning of the Human campaign where you're watching in terror as the Martians land their pods in Scotland and slowly but surely draw their plans against you...


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