Mata Nui Online Game Soundtrack: Predators ("Suspense")
53THIS MUSIC IS NOT CREATED OR IN ANY WAY OWNED BY ME. It is property of Dick de Benedictis. No copyright infringements intended.
Not all of the MNOLG soundtrack was composed by Justin Lutcher. Some of these tracks are borrowed from other sources (typically stock songs, from what I gather). The "Suspense" music, best remembered for being heard in the cutscene where Tahu meets the Ta-Koro Guard, is one such example. It can be heard in many other works, including MediEvil, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, and even Bad Milk. And yet, while everyone seems to know it as "that stock suspense music", almost nobody seems to know its source. Any attempt by me to use audio-identification software only led me to other works that sampled the cue, rather than the original cue itself.
That is, until I noticed a conversation on the comments section of the Trespasser soundtrack, where people were arguing over whether the track originated from Trespasser or MediEvil. To my surprise, someone joined the conversation who actually named the original composer and album of this song. I decided to upload this because, as I said, almost nobody seems to know where the original high-quality sample comes from (BioMediaProject, for example, uses the low-quality compressed in-game versions), and knowledge is power in this day and age.
The original song is "Predators" by Dick de Benedictis, as part of SCD 709 Dramatic Workshop 26 - Moodsetters, Links & Stings. You can find the whole album using the link below:
https://search.upright-music.pl/album/ffd02335-27e7-4c68-9982-2c2750239c8a/nojs?orderby=title&order=desc
Actually, "Predators" isn't a single song, but 8 versions of a single cue. Only "Predators A" is heard in MNOLG, and only "Predators B" and "Predators E" are noteworthy variations, but I've included all 8 in this video for posterity's sake.
That being said, "Predators D" has an extended version which is not included on the album. According to Dick de Benedictis's page on the Sound Effects Wiki, this version does not seem to be released, so I was not able to include it in this video. But, it can be heard in some works; for example, at 2:12 of this Bad Milk playthrough (unfortunately, partially obscured by the sound of blowing bubbles): https://youtu.be/cM58ipl6TJE?t=2m12s
What other stock songs are used in MNOLG? The unnamed scary music heard with the "Beware the swarms" vision and the awakening Bohrok seems to be a combination of "Cluster 1" (also heard in Half-Life) and "Doom Threat", both from the same album and composer as "Predators". The "Ga-Koro Sting" heard when seeing the wrecked Ga-Koro for the first time is a currently-unidentified piece of stock music, which has also notably been sampled as "Spookhouse" in Nocturne and "A Red Letter Day" in Half-Life 2... perhaps, one day, we'll identify this one too.