Soundtrack
The in-game music was composed by Mike Clarke, who worked in-house at Psygnosis at the time, and Stuart Ellis, a session-guitarist from Liverpool and owner of Curly Music, an independent music retailer.
Stuart was initially brought in for one week to record some guitar ideas and riffs with Mike at the Liverpool studio. The end result was two DAT tapes full of guitar sections, riffs, motifs, bits of solos and so on.
Mike then spent three months composing the tracks. Sections of the DAT material was sampled (into an Akai S3200) and pieced together into skeleton riffs with parts of solos chopped up and added on top. This was added to the rest of the new instrumentation (bass, drums, keyboards) to form complete demo tracks with rough, sampled guitar. Everything except the guitar was programmed by hand (using Bars & Pipes Pro 2.5b on an expanded Amiga A1200 computer), with great pains taken to make sure that it was almost impossible to tell. Special care was taken on the drums, where everything was designed so that it could be played identically on a real drum kit.
Once the 12 tracks were ready, Stuart was brought back in and spent a week with Mike recording the final riffs over the arrangements and improvising new solos based on the demo tracks with direction from Mike. As a testament to Stuart's skill, some of the solos were completed in just one take after Stuart only hearing the demo track once or twice. Recording was done using a Tascam DA-88.
A final week was spent on final mixing and mastering at Pearl Music Studios in Liverpool, with Steve Cowell as engineer.
On insistence from the marketing department, who wanted to convey the idea that the music was licensed (and thus seen as being more professional), the name "Overdrive" was chosen by Mike as the name of the "band".
The soundtrack also features the songs "Juice" by Steve Vai (from his Alien Love Secrets album), as well as "Summer Song" and "Back to Shalla-Bal" by Joe Satriani (from The Extremist and Flying in a Blue Dream, respectively).
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