God Rest Ye, Deadly Gentlemen

GOD REST YE, DEADLY GENTLEMEN

Original version by Trad I. Tional circa 1650-something.
Arranged and retitled by the legendary Lee Jackson for the soundtrack of Rise Of The Triad in 1994.
Rearranged for the 128K Spectrum's PLAY command by Jim Waterman, 11-12 December 2021.

Just a little extra for WOOT! ZXMAS 2021, in the hope that I actually will have something resembling Christmas this year, because 2020 was a complete wash-out and I'm still annoyed about it.

Start a game of Rise Of The Triad on Christmas Day (and possibly Christmas Eve or Boxing Day) and Taradino Cassatt will be wearing a Santa bobble hat on the screen before entering a new level. The music for E1L1 will be changed from the regular "Suck This" to "God Rest Ye, Deadly Gentlemen" (compactly credited as "Deadly Gentlemen" on the music menu if you use the MAESTRO cheat).

Lee Jackson was responsible for 29 of the 34 official entries on the Rise Of The Triad soundtrack, and it shows - there's a recurrent theme through most of them, off-the-beat perfect fourth chords everywhere being the most obvious marker. No, really, listen to "Suck This", "Goin' Down The Fast Way", "Run Like Smeg", "CCCool" and "I Choose The Stairs" back to back, then look me in the eye and tell me it was accidental. You can't, because it wasn't. And what Lee Jackson managed to do is adjust a 340-year-old Christmas carol to fit the style of his soundtrack. There's a reason why he's as revered as he is.

Incidentally, Bobby Prince made the other five tracks, and though he's just as revered for his work on the Doom soundtrack, "Excalibur" sounds like it belongs in Doom rather than Rise Of The Triad, which should be a surprise to nobody.

What I did is, I found a downloadable MIDI version of the Rise Of The Triad soundtrack, loaded "God Rest Ye, Deadly Gentlemen" into MuseScore 3 and translated it into 128 BASIC statements that the PLAY statement can interpret. Lee Jackson had a lot more channels to play with, so I've taken the three channels that make it obvious it's his version of the tune. One of the short interludes that is obviously his addition to fit the style of the soundtrack had to be mildly altered and it still sounds wrong... but I assure you, those are the notes on the page. If I found any obvious mistakes in MuseScore 3's transcription that didn't sound like the original, I've corrected them. But otherwise, it's as close as possible to what Lee Jackson intended within the limits of 128K Spectrum BASIC. Also, the screen was a product of running the festive intro screen of E1L1 through BMP2SCR with a mild hint of editing - it didn't need much doing to it.

This is what it's supposed to sound like, with a decent MIDI interpreter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HeFP_POeg

God rest ye, Deadly Gentlemen
Leave nothing in your wake
Consider lead your saviour
To see you through this day
To save us from Oscuro's power
A snake who runs away
Oh, drown them in torrents of gore
Torrents of gore
Oh, drown them in a tidal wave of gore!

I really must play Rise Of The Triad again.

• JW 12/12/2021