Downloadables: Highway Hunter Soundtrack

A strangely fond memory from back in my younger days was purchasing shareware computer games at our local grocery store. I say "strangely" because all of the games were clones of other, more famous games, and also because you were only ever able to play through half the game before a screen would come up and tell you that you were done, at that if you wanted to play through the entire game, you would have to pay. Since I had no credit card at age 12, and since my parents were wary of buying online (a restriction they've since gotten over with a vengeance), I never completed a single one of them - I simply beat the playable portion dozens and dozens of times. Of all the shareware games I purchased, the two that stick out the most in my memory were Wacky Wheels (a cutesy Mario Kart clone that actually holds up pretty well), and Highway Hunter.

Highway Hunter was, for all intents and purposes, a Spy Hunter clone with way more weapons. The story made zero sense (you were supposedly "saving the world", but in the end, a short cutscene shows you driving toward the open road - seemingly leaving humanity to be destroyed... good times), and the enemies fit about three basic templates (run into you, shoot lasers at you, or shoot what looked to be rocks at you), but the game itself was kind of fun. It's a nostalgic game, of course, meaning that if you haven't already played it, there's next to no point in hunting it down now, but the music was classic old school MIDI game music. As far as I know, Serge Shishkin hasn't done any other game soundtracks - which isn't surprising, the company that developed the game (Omega Integral Systems) only made Highway Hunter.

I've downloaded Highway Hunter and ripped all the music from it into MP3 form. The bitrate is intentionally low (it's MIDI, after all - nothing is lost at 128KBPS). As far as I know, this is the only copy of the actual soundtrack online, so have at it. It's your soundtrack to killing strange alien bosses while they chuck little red blobs at you, all the while wondering why exactly the ridiculously inferior M-Laser is the final weapon upgrade, and why the almighty P-Laser ends up with no ammo as a result.

Download the full soundtrack here.

Please note: it may look like some of the tracks are missing (i.e. The Lost Roads 2), but for some reason a couple of the levels borrow tracks from previous levels. It's all here.