Hardwar

Hardwar
Also known as: Hardwar: The Future Is Greedy Developer: The Software Refinery Publishers: Gremlin Interactive (EU), Interplay (US) Platform: Windows Released in US: 1998 Released in EU: 1998 This game has unused music. This game has regional differences. This game has hidden bonus content.

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Hardwar is a very obscure game from 1998 that was sort of a spiritual successor of Elite. It had an impressively complex economy which remains pretty surprising to this day, but the game was so poorly marketed (if at all), that barely anyone remembers its existence nowadays.

Hidden Audio Track

The last audio track of the second CD contains some Gremlin employees' commentary over the game's ending cutscene.

According to "Sol", one of the men heard on the recording,

Depending on which version you had, this was reversed on some versions (the European Localised versions) and was also messed up slightly on some English versions with the same sample being played twice.. Doh. Though to be fair we had worked through 2 days to get the final English Master done...

(Source: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.space-sim)

Transcript

Person A: All right, so, it's like three in the morning. And we like finally finished the final version. Uhh... Oh, hang on. Here's that singing there.

[incompetent singing, laughter]

Person B: Like I said before.

[more singing and laughter]

Person B: I said that it was fine. It's better when we record it in the studio.

[inaudible]

Person B: Vocal is different though. Uh, do you think anyone'd notice?

Person A: No, I don't think so. Missed a bit again! Look, it's still singing [inaudible].

Person C: What's someone there doing in the background? That's dodgy, that is.

Person B: Hey, you can't mention that. Shh!

[inaudible exchange]

Person A: I like it. I mean it's good.

Person B: Should be, we've testing it for bloody years.

Person C: You want to go home now, then?

Person A: I think it's about time we should go home, actually. I think the sun's coming up, actually.

Person B: It probably is, actually.

Person A: All right then, let's call it a day.

Unused Audio Tracks

Both game CDs have five audio tracks per disc that are actually played in-game. However, tracks 7-17 on each disc have another ten songs that aren't played at all. While considered bonus tracks by many, in fact the reason for their inclusion was the deal Gremlin made with Warp records to use their music in-game was based on the total number of audio tracks on the disc, with the overall cost decreasing the more tracks there were, regardless of who wrote them. Therefore, Gremlin padded out the disc with short songs from the game Loaded to reduce the fees they would have to pay to Warp. Note that the 2023 Steam re-release of the game extends the original CD playback functionality and actually does now play these tracks in-game.

Regional Differences

The European releases have 'Chin Hippy' by Squarepusher as the fourth audio track on the second game CD. On the American release this was replaced with the song 'The FUN Equations' by Speedy J instead.