Music recommendation: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy (Star Wars)

Music is crucial to the Star Wars experience. With the most recognizable opening theme of all time, it grabs the audience’s attention from the very first moment—whether that audience is in a movie theater or at a gaming table.

When trying to find music for your Star Wars game, the solution might seem obvious: Use the official movie soundtracks. Many of the tracks, however, are quite long and varied in both tempo and mood, making them less than optimal for gaming unless you are prepared to do some editing.

Luckily, the developers of the Star Wars video games Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy faced the same problem and did all that editing, making things a lot easier for the rest of us. The soundtracks to these games consist entirely of sections from the movie soundtracks joined together into virtually seamless remixes tailored for use during gameplay.

How to access the music

Unlike a lot of video games, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy store their music in a format that is easy to extract and make use of. While this blog normally focuses on how to use music rather than how to obtain it, the sheer value of these two soundtracks is enough to make an exception. In order to access the music, follow these instructions:

1. Insert your Jedi Outcast disc, or Jedi Academy disc one.
2. On the disc, navigate to GameData > GameData > base.
3. Open the file assets0.pk3 in a file archiver, such as 7-Zip.
4. Extract the contents of music to your hard drive.

At this point, you have full access to all of the MP3s used in the games.

Note that Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy do not contain exactly the same tracks, so extract the music from both of them if you want the complete collection.

Suggested scenes

Theme

• cinematic_1.mp3
• endcredits.mp3

Exploration

• Any track ending in _explore

Action

• Any track ending in _action

Chase

• rail_nowhere.mp3, in the t1_rail folder from Jedi Academy