The team working on ScummVM has provided a great historical resource to all of us. I have no exposure at all to interactions with ScummVM you mention, so won't speculate on that.
Hopefully the patent served more in creating a safe space for musical proceduralism in games rather than being chilling. As mentioned in this thread there has been brilliant proceduralism in so many games since Monkey 2.
I figured it was high time to highlight the innovations in iMuse because I realized in discussions that the core principles weren't well known, and difficult to extract from public sources like the patent unless you are really fluent with that language.
X-Wing vs Tie Fighter: available memory and CD seek performance really restricted what you could do then.
The Force Unleashed: this is one of those "succeeds if it's invisible" things. The music is procedural based on mixing rhythmic and arrhythmic stems. That allowed continuous cross fades without needing to precisely match beats. That was a limitation again of not being able to precisely line up stems. The other fun thing that was introduced was physics driven synthesis. The DMM system fed information about strain, impacts, and other events into a granular synthesizer. The bussing and ducking architecture was derived from this paper by Walter Murch: https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/04/200504.review... Fun anecdote: I was at a party with some audio nerds, and raving about the paper to a new acquaintance, who interrupted me and said, "Oh, I wrote that!"