Year: 2005
Type: Gamerip
Composer(s): Dan Haigh
Number of tracks: 13

★★★★★

Dauntless defeat

I have already mentioned in my review of Team Fortress: Classic: Classic how Valve has repeatedly shown in the past that they have a knack for commercializing modifications of their games and turning them into entire franchises. Another example of this lucrative strategy was the Day of Defeat games, even if they never achieved the longevity of Team Fortress or even Counter-Strike.

Launched in 2000 as a mod for the first Half-Life , according to Wikipedia the first version of Day of Defeat was offered for free online. Valve later bought the rights to the game, hired the modders and released a boxed version in 2003 with Activision as publisher. Even though it never achieved a huge breakthrough, the game retained a loyal fan base and even received an update from Valve in 2013, enabling the game to run on Linux and Mac.

What I haven't discussed yet, however, is the ingenious marketing strategy of slapping the engine onto the titles of the sequels/remakes. Valve also did this with a few of its games, giving games such as Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source their (last) names. It has to be said that the Source engine was absolutely state of the art in the early 2000s and hasn't aged too badly compared to other frameworks, making a port a blessing for many of the games.

Conversely, some communities were divided and had to play either the old or the new version - spoiled for choice. I shouldn't care, as I didn't start all this online gaming until much later and was able to leave the initial test phase to the internet pioneers. Meanwhile, in the case of Day of Defeat: Source the 2005 release meant that in addition to the previous updates for the original Day of Defeat it was also given a 'soundtrack'.

The quotation marks around the word soundtrack are intended to draw attention to the fact that the 13-track album is of course not an original soundtrack (OST), but a gamerip. It should also be understood as a warning, as we are talking about the music for a multiplayer mod. It may be a remake of a mod, but the foundation remains the same.

Incidentally, the original Day of Defeat also had a soundtrack, but I won't do a separate review for the game anyway. This is because it defies classification as a score, since as far as I know it is a single 26-second track called UK Victory. The nice bagpipe march was composed by Michael Gordon Shapiro (Empire Earth II, Empire Earth III), whose career as a composer began here and is also part of the gamerip.

Dan Haigh, on the other hand, was hired for the sequel and/or remake, presenting us with his first and only work as a video game composer. He was primarily responsible as a level designer for games such as the first Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake or Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and, in addition to his work as a game designer, film director and visual effects artist, has been part of the synthwave band Gunship since 2014. The man seems to be blessed with a lot of creativity and the music for Day of Defeat: Source doesn't sound too bad for a debut work.

Admittedly, there are actually very few tracks that qualify as music. First and foremost is the theme song Day of Defeat: Source, which appears in four versions: The [Short Version] differs from the main theme only in that the 40-second ambient part in the middle has been cut out, while [US Version] and [German Version] have English or German (in good dubbing) babbling in the intro.

Ironically, the track, which is dominated by drums and fits well into the setting of a main menu / pregame lobby, sounds to me very much like the first Empire Earth. However, since Shapiro only scored its successor and his track for the original Day of Defeat goes in a completely different direction, this association is probably pure coincidence.

Other tracks include the bomb blasts and machine gun fire-laced Hymn of Defeat and Victory, which seems a little more varied but doesn't get beyond the 'nice' rating, and the short and euphorically patriotic US Win and German Win. In addition, there are a few short Stinger-tracks, which don't really fulfill their purpose (remember: stingers are usually used to conceal the transition or the end of a piece of music). In my opinion, however, these are just snippets that acoustically accompany a killing spree or something similar.

One last thing to mention is Day of Defeat or Day of Defeat – Classic Main Theme . According to the logic of the gamerip, this is probably the theme from the original Day of Defeat, but it is not listed on Shapiro's homepage . So I don't know whether it was created by him or another, unnamed person, whether it really appeared in Day of Defeat or is a homage by Haigh. But it doesn't really matter, because the track falls more into the Company of Heroes-ambient/tension track category. So musically, the score offers more than that of its cousins Counter-Strike and Team Fortress: Classic, but skipping it won't do you any harm.

No.	Title	Artist(s)	Ratings
01	Day of Defeat: Source	Dan Haigh	3
02	Day of Defeat: Source [Short Version]	Dan Haigh	3
03	Day of Defeat: Source [US Version]	Dan Haigh	3
04	Day of Defeat: Source [German Version]	Dan Haigh	3
05	Hymn of Defeat and Victory	Dan Haigh	3
06	Day of Defeat	Dan Haigh	3
07	US Win	Dan Haigh	3
08	German Win	Dan Haigh	3
09	British Win [Day of Defeat]	Michael Gordon Shapiro	4
10	Achievement Earned Stinger	Dan Haigh	2
11	Domination Stinger	Dan Haigh	2
12	Nemesis Stinger	Dan Haigh	2
13	Revenge Stinger	Dan Haigh	2