Valve announced yesterday that a song would be included with the Orange Box - both boxed and Steam versions. Now that the box has launched, it's a little trickier to find than anticipated. If you've completed all the Orange Box games, read on to find out how to extract the song - and a little more about who it's by.
Steam games keep their data in big archives called GCF files. Get GCF Scape for free, open up your Steam\steamapps\portal content.gcf, and find the portal\sound\music folder. It is, of course, the file called 'still alive' - extract it any old where.
Still Alive is by a guy called Jonathan Coulton - one of those people no-one seems to have heard of but everyone would like. As the Hijinks Ensue webcomic puts it, "He's like if Bob Dylan and the internet had a baby." He sings sharply written and often extremely funny songs about zombies, programmers, losers - and in his soulful folk cover of Baby Got Back - ass.
The undead office memo Re: Your Brains is my favourite, and will one day form part of my dream Left 4 Dead playlist. The song and its lyrics are available to stream for free or buy from Coulton's site. It includes the partially-rhyming triplet:
But here's an FYI: You're all gonna die Screaming
Update: I checked with Valve and yes, Steam purchasers will get the song as an MP3 download on Steam. And it's not a separate CD single in the packaged version, it's just an MP3 file included in the game files.
Unable to resist, I also asked if they saw Steam as a platform for music distribution more generally. "Yes," quoth Doug Lombardi. "We see Steam as an extremely viable platform for the distribution of all digital media."
Steam passed thirteen million active users five months ago. A of that size muscling in on iTunes' territory could get very interesting indeed.
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