Roland MT-32 - Music For PC Games

Music For PC Games

Despite its original purpose as a companion to other professional MIDI equipment, the MT-32 became one of several de facto standards for PC computer game publishers. Sierra On-Line, a leading PC game publisher of the time, took an interest in the sound-design of its PC games. Sierra secured a distribution deal to sell the MT-32 in the US, and invested heavily in giving its game titles (at the time) state-of-the-art sound by hiring professional composers to write in-game music. King's Quest IV, released in 1988, was the first Sierra title with a complete musical soundtrack scored on the MT-32.

The MT-32 with a necessary MPU-401 interface cost $550.00 to purchase from Sierra when it first sold the device. Although the MT-32's high price prevented it from dominating the end-user market of gamers, other PC publishers quickly followed Sierra's lead, expanding the role of music in their own game titles with Roland supporting the industry by releasing CM modules for computer users. The MT-32 remained the gold-standard for musical composition well into the early 1990s, when the game-industry began to shift toward General MIDI and later CD Audio.

The proliferation of the General MIDI standard, along with competition from less expensive wavetable-based soundcards, led to the decline of musical soundtracks using the MT-32's proprietary features. Games that played General-MIDI tracks on the MT-32 initialized the MT-32's sound bank to approximate the General MIDI Level 1 (GM1) specification, but avoided any of the MT-32's hallmark music-synthesis features, adhering to GM1's rather limited set of controllers.

See also: List of MT-32-compatible computer games