[seba_dos1]

> and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible. The best example is the usage of orchestral music, according to the post.

Usage of real recorded instruments can still be technically challenging today if you want to do what Monkey Island 2 did with its audio via iMuse - synchronization between music and in-game events (easier) and smooth background music transitions between rooms (harder). MI2 Special Edition recorded its soundtrack with real instruments and while it did a pretty good job at it, it still noticeably simplified some transitions the original version had, because they were much easier to achieve back when it was using MIDI.

[Tyr42]

One interesting innovation is in Octopath traveller. It has set up the music before the boss fights where it is ready to jump into the boss theme at any point you finish the dialog boxes.

https://youtu.be/b7Zc3f8cPnU?t=215

[seba_dos1]

That's one of the things Monkey Island 2 did. It also had the track seamlessly changing cues and adding/removing layers as you entered various sections of a location, had multiple transitions between the same tracks that were chosen depending on when did you trigger them and in-game events were often timed to wait for the beat to synchronize them with music. Later games with similarly dynamic sampled music that I'm aware about (The Curse of Monkey Island, MI2:SE, Portal 2 and now Octopath Traveler) did some of these things, but none of them came close to the level of complexity in the original Monkey Island 2.

Although one reason for that (other than the obvious MIDI vs. sampled one) could be that in MI2, a lot of effort went into this music system which ended up working great, but... not many people actually noticed ;)