Happy Halloween, everyone! It seems like I had one more thing in me to assemble up, and it's something I've personally wanted to do for a very, very long time. And before you ask, no, there's not a single trick up my sleeve in this post.
But first, a small introduction. Back in the day, I was undoubtedly a Nintendo person, and the one to introduce me to Nintendo's lineage of consoles was my PopPop. He used to own a Nintendo 64 along with a few games, mainly Super Mario 64 and a small set of the system's few mature-themed games (such as Nuclear Strike 64). But one title that was in his possession caught my eye, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen up to that point.
Enter Charlie Blast's Territory, a 1999 block-sliding puzzle game from Kemco and Realtime Associates. The game stars demolition expert Charlie Blast and his task to travel across different themed islands and use a colorful roster of bombs at his disposal to chain together increasingly lengthy chains of explosions. Only by catching every single explosive in the level in one big combo is enough to destroy an island- leaving one bomb unscathed or getting Charlie caught in one of the explosions forces a restart of the level. I would never be able to get any further than Level 9 as a young kid, and with N64 games no longer being sold complete in boxes in my later years in elementary school thanks to the sixth generation having taken off, I never really had a chance to play the game on my own N64 and was only able to touch it when I visited my PopPop. Thankfully, used games would start being sold at various video game retailers of the era and one day after fourth grade, my mother would surprise me with a used copy of Charlie Blast's Territory. And then years later I found out the game was a partial conversion of Kemco's earlier PS1 title The Bombing Islands, starring their mascot character Kid Klown... And then I discovered years later that The Bombing Islands was loosely based on an old computer game from Europe known as Bombuzal.
That was quite the deep rabbit hole, huh? Anyways, in the early 2010's Charlie Blast's Territory was one of those games that didn't seem to catch on with retro game music rippers of the era due to its relative obscurity outside of N64 fan groups. And thus in around 2012 or 2013, I decided to take matters into my own hands and record the game music myself off of an emulator until I had all the level themes plus the title screen. Unfortunately, as with many of my unpublished pre-2020 music rips on this blog, the entire rip would become lost after the demise of my Macintosh's hard drive. And after re-recording a number of soundtracks I lost in the crash, I figured it was time to do the same to Charlie Blast's Territory. In this new and enhanced rip, you will find the title screen song, the five main level themes, one multiplayer-exclusive level theme, and the level win and level lose jingles.
And at long last, here is the link to download the album.
