Background music

Autoplaying music was a personal-site love language, and before the radio’s Windows Media streams there were MIDIs — tiny sequenced files, a few kilobytes each, that every browser of the era could honk out through your sound card. A folder of them survived from the 2005 site. None are my own work: they’re the game and TV themes I collected off MIDI sites and set loose as page music, exactly the way half the web did it.

Browsers stopped playing MIDI natively years ago, so each one below is rendered live in your browser with a General-MIDI soundfont. Hit play.

The game music

This is the heart of it — chiptune themes someone lovingly sequenced from the original NES and N64 soundtracks, attributions baked right into the files.

A little TV

Demos and mysteries

The rest are a grab bag: a couple of demo songs that shipped with the WinJammer MIDI editor, something built in NoteWorthy Composer, and a few I can no longer identify — labeled only “Bass Strings,” “Eerie sound,” or the ever-helpful “New Track.”

These files are tiny — kilobytes of note data, not recordings — which is exactly why they survived twenty years in a backup when the MP3s of the same era did not.