When I wrote my essay on dungeonsynth for The Believer back in 2023, I made the usual points: it really came together as a genre in the ’90s thanks to the work of Mortiis, though it had clear predecessors in acts like Tangerine Dream and Danzig’s instrumental project Black Aria (1992); explicit connections to D&D and other RPGs came later. And all that’s still true, but I’ve since been introduced (by Jamie Sutcliffe at Strange Attractor) to a double LP that directly ties D&D to electronic music earlier than Corvus Neblus’ Strahd’s Possession (1999): Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Quest: The Music (1985).
To be clear, while it sometimes strays into territory we would now identify as dungeonsynth, this is not really dungeonsynth. It has more in common with the Dream, John Carpenter’s scores and the odd world of psychedelic electronic music that was floating around in the early ’80s — synth-based meditation music that would soon become known by the fairly meaningless umbrella marketing term “New Age.” There are eight different artists here (they sound almost cohesive) providing a score for a (brutal, ridiculous) dungeon crawl plotted out of the record sleeves, punctuated with menacing voice overs by actor Valentine Dyall. There are some corny bits and some, uh, sections that are clearly inspired by other music (“The Living Dead” is basically a cover of the theme from Return of the Living Dead and there are echoes of some incidental music from Ghostbusters and countless videogames, at least to my ear), but overall I think it hangs together remarkably well. I don’t know if it screams “D&D” to me, but I dig early ’80s synth music and this winds up on my turntable pretty regularly.
The fact that this thing is officially licensed is the really bonkers bit. David Miller apparently secured Gary Gygax’s blessing in-person while he was still exiled in Los Angeles, which is sort of wild considering TSR UK still existed as an entity at that point. Aside of providing a mish-mash of art (the border work from Dragonlance, Easley’s cover from the Dungeon Masters Guide and another Easley Dragonlance piece in the gatefold), TSR seems to have not had any further part in the product. What a rare and delightful artifact!
