Heroes of Might & Magic III — Full Official Soundtrack

Paul Romero, Rob King and Steve Baca wrote this in 1999, and the approach was unusual for a strategy game: instead of generic fantasy atmosphere, each town got a fully realised piece in a distinct idiom — Rampart as pastoral woodwind, Necropolis as a requiem with organ and choir, Tower as glassy chamber music, Castle as brass fanfare. Romero was a trained pianist working from Baroque and Romantic models rather than film-score convention, and the amount of actual counterpoint in there shows it.

The reason it belongs in a focus catalog and not only a nostalgia one is structural: the terrain themes had to loop for as long as a player takes their turn, which in HoMM3 could be a very long time indeed. That is the same constraint good study music works under, solved twenty-five years ago by people who did not think of it that way. If you played this in a computer club around 2001, you already know every bar.