ReMix:Sonic CD "The Future Is Bright" 3:54

We're celebrating the 10th anniversary of our 45th community arrangement album, Sonic CD: Temporal Duality! Like your boy Sanic, time also has the tendency to "GOTTA GO FAST!", so we've got a special retro submission from Temporal Duality, the only track put together by the album's director and assistant director. SuperiorX joined forces with Pete Lepley for an optimistic opus covering one of Sonic CD's more uplifting JP stage themes, "Metallic Madness (Good Future)"! In the decade since this album dropped, assistant director Pete Lepley has leveled up and scored a few games including -- no biggie -- Chucklefish's smash hit Advance Wars spiritual successor Wargroove. For this one, Pete ran through and sprinkled some flavorful 8-bit chiptune seasoning into the mix:

"Matt came to me in the late stages of the project with something he'd slapped together in a few hours, which is the main base of what's there now, and it was damn cool. He'd tossed around the idea of another big mega-collab, but it ended up just being him and me. He did the bulk of the work (all the arranging, percussion, etc.), I just added in some chippy solos, the chip break (and the transition to it), and the duet harmonies at the end. I also did the final master, and I think the track as a whole ended up pretty darn good! It's a fun one for sure. Enjoy!"

Pete's chippy chips beautifully blended together with SuperiorX's nicely personalized palette, as the duo didn't stray far from the source's melodic structure, electing to edify the smile-inducing energy of Naofumi Hataya's composition through a softer touch. Originally an omitted source tune for the album, SuperiorX filled the gap by making it Temporal Duality's pentultimate piece:

"So the idea for this track actually came off a YouTube comment I read after we released our first album preview. Someone said something along the lines of "I sure hope they do a Metallic Madness JP Good Future mix!" At that point, we didn't have a track claim specifically for the "Good Future" variant. After reading that, I checked out the source and remembered how different the "Good Future mix" was from the other "Metallic Madness" JP sources. After listening to the source again, I was struck with inspiration, and it was one of those remixes where you catch lightning in a bottle. I had an idea then to just make this an over-the-top triumphant "We just saved the world" kind of track. From there, the vast majority of this song basically wrote itself in 2 days time. I had loads of fun writing the main synth lead part and then went to town with those background orch hits. I wanted it to be a collab track, so I asked Pete to join in too and he added some truly awesome chip lead parts, some solo work in the mid-section, and made the really cool 8-bit breakdown section towards the end. And the rest, as they say, is history. :)

For me personally, the track always held a special place in my heart. With its placement as the second-to-last song in the tracklist, it was meant to serve as a joyous celebration to close out the album, sandwiched between Brandon's somber final boss theme and J's poignant and introspective album closer. To me, it symbolized the close-knit community everyone on the project fostered while working on the album and the joy we felt when it was released. The fact the album went from inception to release in less than a year, with the quality it had at the time, still astounds me and remains something I'm incredibly proud of to this day. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with a lot of the people I worked with on the album, but I'd like to think their futures were bright. And, as the opening song of Sonic CD reminds us, "if you try, you can do anything". :)

With the recent "changing of the guard" at OCR, I'm excited to see where you guys & gals take the site. So I'd also like to think that the message still resonates today; and that the the future is bright for OCR too!"

OC ReMix's future's so bright, we've gotta wear shades; at least, that's our goal! Quickly formulating strong collaborative albums has been part of the community's DNA since the start, so we're eager to get back to those roots as we on staff take our next steps. Meanwhile, this piece retains everything happy and hopeful that we love from "Metallic Madness "G"mix", yet features more relaxed instrumentation alongside sophisticated chippy vamping that grabs one's attention without losing sight of the optimistic big picture.

Thanks once again to SuperiorX and Pete Lepley for formulating an album with a high benchmark of quality and high standard of success. At 38 tracks, nearly 40 artists, and nearly 2 1/2 hours, Temporal Duality stands the test of time as we look back to the Past, yet its speedy spin-up also illustrates the way forward to OCR's Good Future!