Teamtris Music: Download it for free

The Teamtris soundtrack was composed by Brian Orr in 1991 and contains 28 pieces of original music. There are 26 unique levels in Teamtris, plus an introduction song and a main menu song.

In addition to learning assembler and coding, Brian was studying music theory and composition and these pieces were some of his first compositions created on the computer. (Later Brian went on to create the Windows 95 Easter Egg song for Microsoft Windows 95, and other compositions.) The pieces were composed in AdLib Visual Composer, written note by note in a piano-roll interface, and not performed on a keyboard.

Not a sample in sight

The Teamtris music is of course very retro, designed for the Adlib soundcard (which didn't use any samples - it used FM synthesis) and worked on the most popular Sound Blaster card of the day. The realism of the music by today's standards is humorous, but some great melodies and songs were created (in many DOS games) in this style.

A few years later, MODs became much more prevalent (which used digital samples, and thus sounded much more realistic). In 1994, Brian was inspired to compose an S3M file (like a MOD file, but with 8 channels) that re-created some of the music from Teamtris in one giant remix.

Download or listen to the soundtrack

For retro video game music fans, the soundtrack is now free to download for your own personal enjoyment. (Please contact Brian for any commercial use or licensing.)

The music has not been mastered, and this is exactly how it would be heard in the game. Most compositions are intended to loop and thus are faded out shortly after one loop through the song.

The whole soundtrack (including the 1994 Teamtris S3M remix) is available here as a zip file. You can also listen to the music online below. (Note: some browsers will require you to download the MP3 file)

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Notes on the music

Writing the music engine for the game wasn't easy, and there were a couple minor bugs in the final product. Most notably, the engine isn't initialized properly on some computers, so the first piece of music doesn't have the proper instrumentation.

Another couple of minor bugs include:

• Music doesn't loop properly on Level 12.
• Triplet values aren't played back with the proper timing and are quantized improperly.
• The sound effect when a new bomb is granted sometimes changes the percussion sounds of the playing song.