This is the music from the third level (lawn) in Plants vs. Zombies, titled "Watery Graves".

Ever since I played Plants vs. Zombies when I was a kid, I always thought that the music sounded like tracker music. I have no idea whether the game engine itself had a tracker engine in it playing the tracks, or it was rendered to a WAV (or Ogg) file before being packed into the game, but I really felt like it was tracker music.

More than 10 years later, I tried to actually unpack the game data from the files and to my surprise, I found MO3 files. I opened them using OpenMPT and it was an XM file inside the MO3. I guess I was right to say that the music was indeed, tracked, although the ending theme "There Are Zombies on Your Lawn" was stored as a rendered Ogg Vorbis file, probably because putting lyrics on an XM file is not easy to do.

There were two MO3 files in the game data, one that contains the full music that plays during zombie waves, and another that only contains the tambourines (hi-hats?) for the entire music. I am guessing that the game plays two audio files at the same time (at the same timing, of course). The game initially mutes the hi-hat channel of the first file, while the second file has no muted channels but has its volume set to zero, but when the wave comes, it gradually fades in the volume of the second file, to bring in the hi-hats, and when it reaches the proper volume, it is then reset back to zero again and the main music in the first file gets the hi-hat channels unmuted. This lets the game transition to the non-wave and the wave version of the soundtrack seamlessly.

Still a very fun game even today.

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