#oneaday Day 473: The worst MIDI file in existence

It may sound peculiar in these days of being able to stream or download pretty much any piece of music you'd care to mention in its original format — be it legally or less-than-legally — but back in the '90s we had a lot of fun downloading MIDI files.

Some of these MIDI files we downloaded with the intention of using them somehow — primarily in Klik and Play and The Games Factory projects — but sometimes it was just for fun. And it was fun! Even with the limited synthesis capabilities of the sound cards most of us had at the time — it was very much the days of OPL FM synthesis being the norm, as wavetable cards were an extremely expensive luxury, if you could even get them at all — we used to enjoy tracking down MIDI files of songs we recognised and playing them back.

One day, my friend Edd found the worst MIDI file in existence. It is called EWOK.MID and I've been attempting to track it down for a good twenty years. Recently, I succeeded in my search and rediscovered EWOK.MID in all its glory — though I did forget to make a note of the website where I found it, so you'll have to settle for a version hosted here. (EDIT: It was here. Which appears to be buried deep in the depths of an SEO-optimised, likely AI-generated site about tech, which I suspect is built atop the remnants of a long-abandoned website that has somehow kept all its old uploads intact since 1999.)

I would like to share EWOK.MID with you now, but given that MIDI file support is no longer a given on modern machines, you'll have to settle for a recording of my computer playing it back in the name of universal compatibility.

Isn't it magnificent? Someone spent time on that. Moreover, someone thought that the time they spent on that was worth sharing with the world. And I am unironically glad that they did, because EWOK.MID has given me many, many laughs over the years.

What I find most amusing about it is that they clearly got the gist of the track from Star Wars that they're trying to ape, but then weren't quite sure how to do all the other bits. I suspect they started with the melody line first, and then attempted to play the drum parts "live" over the top of it. At that point, the sensible thing to do would be to use MIDI sequencer features such as quantizing to get the notes a bit more "in time" with one another, and get the whole thing sounding a bit more "professional". (Of course, quantizing demands that your notes are vaguely in time in the first place, so I do find myself wondering if EWOK.MID is possible to save.)

But no! Our heroic arranger decided that the work they'd done was enough. This was their magnum opus; their note-for-note recreation of a classic theme from a classic movie. So they uploaded it to the Internet one February morning in 1999, and sat back to enjoy the reactions of everyone who stumbled across it, whether deliberately or by accident.

I salute you, heroic arranger, whoever you are. You have brought me many hours of joy over the years, and I'm glad I finally rediscovered your finest work. I hope you're doing well, wherever and whoever you are.

---

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.