From Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki

Quest for Butter Composer Stephen Rippy Released 1999-09-30 Title Origin Official Loops Yes

Quest for Butter is the tune that you are greeted with when starting the game. The song plays in the background while you navigate the main menu of the game.

The track was composed by Stephen Rippy using a Boss DSS-330 synthesizer and an E-mu ESI-32 sampler. Finally, the mixing and editing was done using SoundForge. A MIDI version of the song was also composed in Cakewalk.

The song title has been confirmed by Stephen Rippy.

Games

Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (W32)

Quest for Butter was specifically composed to be used as the new main menu tune for the game. There was an alternate menu tune that was composed earlier called Joey JoJo, but when the menu was redesigned during development Stephen Rippy felt that it no longer fit the new menu screen.

In the game, it is one of the few tunes (together with Uluzah, Carne y Helado, Rich Corinthian Leather and ...Where Credit is Due) that is stored as an MP3 file and not played directly off the CD. The reason for this was to save disc space since they were not played during actual game action and were therefore less prominent.

A MIDI version of the track was also composed. While it was originally planned that the MIDI files were to be included in the game just like in the previous entry, the MIDI composition was eventually only used in the demo version of the game.



Age of Empires II: The Conquerors (W32)

Quest for Butter is used as the main menu theme in the demo version of the game. Since the MIDI files were only included with the demo version of the game, it was not seen as being worth the time to create new MIDI files for the expansion.

In the retail release, a remixed version of the track was used called Quest for Jam.

