iMUSE (''Interactive Music Streaming Engine'') is an
interactive music system used in a number of
LucasArts
Lucasfilm Games (known as LucasArts between 1990 and 2021) is an American video game brand licensing, licensor, former video game developer and video game publisher, publisher, and a subsidiary of Lucasfilm. It was founded in May 1982 by George ...
video game
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...
s. The idea behind iMUSE is to synchronize music with the visual action in a video game so that the audio continuously matches the on-screen events and transitions from one musical theme to another are done seamlessly.
iMUSE was developed in the early 1990s by composers
Michael Land and
Peter McConnell while working at
LucasArts
Lucasfilm Games (known as LucasArts between 1990 and 2021) is an American video game brand licensing, licensor, former video game developer and video game publisher, publisher, and a subsidiary of Lucasfilm. It was founded in May 1982 by George ...
. The iMUSE system was
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
ed by LucasArts in 1994, after being added to the fifth version of the
SCUMM game engine in 1991.
Development
iMUSE was developed out of
Michael Land's frustration for the audio system used by LucasArts while composing ''
The Secret of Monkey Island''. His goal was to create a system which would enable the composer to set the mood via music according to the events of the game. The project was much more daring than he had imagined. He brought in an old friend,
Peter McConnell, to collaborate on creating the system, which they later patented together.
iMUSE was also found to be useful to account for differences in processing speed between personal computers at the time, as there was no direct means of synchronizing sound with gameplay rendering. To account for this, the iMUSE system acts as a
pit orchestra, according to McConnell, playing back shorter or longer sections of music while waiting for key events to occur within the game's drawing engine.
The first game to use the iMUSE system was ''
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge'', and it has been used in all
LucasArts adventure games
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, LucasArts was well known for their point-and-click graphic adventure games, nearly all of which got high scoring reviews at the time of their release. Their style tended towards the humorous, often irrevere ...
since. It has also been used for some non-adventure LucasArts titles such as the DOS versions of ''
Star Wars: TIE Fighter'' and ''
Dark Forces''.
Usage
One often cited example of the iMUSE system is at the very beginning of ''Monkey Island 2'' where
Guybrush finds himself in Woodtick, the small town on Scabb Island. Whenever Guybrush walks into a building, a variation of the Woodtick theme plays, each with a different instrument.
When Guybrush then walks out again the music has a closing flourish that leads back into the basic Woodtick theme.
See also
*
INSANE (engine)
References
{{LucasArts adventure games
Computer music software
Middleware for video games
Video game music technology