Ripoff?

So making my rounds listening to random modules on modarchive.org, I found a track called Winter Freeze.

It sounded really familiar, but I couldn’t place it, so I went digging into my local archive… turns out it sounds extremely similar to Autumn Depressions, just shortened and with some minor changes. Looking a bit further, it’s obvious that even the samples are the same, and in the same order. Setting the tempo of both tracks the same and playing them side-by-side (one in each ear) you can hear it’s almost identical, except for the piano. There’s no way one isn’t a ripoff of the other.

I could maybe believe one being a remix of the other, but neither mentions the other in the texts in the file.

According to the text inside Winter Freeze, it was written for a competition in 1999… whereas Autumn Depressions was uploaded to modarchive.org as far back as 1998. So I’m going with Autumn Depressions being the original.

(Incidentally, looking up the page for the competition in question, I found at least one other person that recognized the similarity)