Why does Unreal Tournament use tracker music?
Because its composers came from the demoscene, and trackers were their instrument.
While its rival Quake II shipped CD audio, Unreal Tournament (1999) carried its soundtrack as tracker music: patterns of tiny sampled notes stored as data, played back live by the engine. The files were small, the sound was not, and custom map makers could ship their own scores the same way.
The credited composers are Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, both veterans of the tracker and demoscene world, Brandon working as Siren, van den Bos as M.C.A. Van den Bos composed from text descriptions of maps he could not yet play, on tools like Impulse Tracker, with complete creative freedom on Unreal and direction from Cliff Bleszinski on Tournament. His Foregone Destruction became the sound of Facing Worlds, the game's most famous map.
THE HIDDEN CREDITS
Two names the box left off
The Game · 1999
The soundtrack shipped inside UMX packages in Impulse Tracker format. Anyone with a tracker program could open a song and read what the box never printed.
Where It Started · 1998
Unreal's score, by Brandon, van den Bos, Andrew Sega, and Dan Gardopee, set the method. Tournament kept the method and narrowed the credited team to two.
Razorback
Peter Hajba, as Skaven, contributed Razorback, and Tero Kostermaa and Kai-Eerik Komppa contributed Firebr. Neither was credited for Tournament, though Hajba's credit survives inside the instrument data of the file itself.
No Official Album
There was never an official Tournament soundtrack release. The music fans own is the music fans extracted, pulled straight from the game files in its original tracker form.