![]() Tom restricted himself to using sounds only found from 1968 to 1971 in an effort to stay authentic to the era of Deathloop. Now, the music is in lockstep with the personality of Deathloop.” Deathloop. “The old theme was cool, but it did not have that same personality. Otherwise, Egor is gonna blow your fucking head off”), the musician knew he had more tinkering to do. After hearing the savage, dark humour coming from the Visionaries, and Colt and Julianna antagonising each other through a walkie-talkie (“And now you better learn to duck, you sanctimonious prick. But the more I spend time with this game and the personality of the game, I feel this theme will work better as the main theme.” ![]() And I said, ‘Look, I know you already approved the theme. I took about a week on the side without telling them and I came up with Welcome to Blackreef. It also, quite frankly, didn’t have this ‘looping’ element in it.” It didn’t set the stage for what you were going to experience. And I felt that the main theme just didn’t really tell the story. I started seeing some of the snarky comments, the tongue-in-cheek humour and the vibrant personality of the game. “I started hearing some of the NPC’s dialogue. “A lot of people don’t know this, but the main theme that you hear – Welcome to Blackreef – was not the main theme that I first came up with.”Īfter his original main theme was approved by the studio, Tom started working on background music for Blackreef’s area of Updaam, where the story begins to truly unfold. Deathloop’s dialogue changed everything for Tom. It wasn’t just reference music that informed his process. “Never have I done as comprehensive of a job at researching the late 60s musical scene that I have for my R&D stage of scoring Deathloop.” he says. Tom tells us he was given 30 or 40 pieces of reference music and ended up creating a playlist with another 50 tracks to share with the studio. He spent hours researching, experimenting and creating, trying to nail the brief he was given by Arkane – “mysterious from beginning to end and felt like Mystery Island,” he says. Tom’s main theme for Deathloop wasn’t a spontaneous spark of genius. ![]() Implementation is taking the music files into the middleware and deciding what rules follows when it’s triggered by the needs of the game.” “It’s often an overlooked element in the process. “You can destroy a great score with bad implementation, and you can get a lot of mileage out of a mediocre score with fantastic implementation,” Tom says. Tom credits Deathloop’s sound designers for their clever work on integrating the score. It can be infuriating to hear the same obnoxious tune every time you lose a life and restart a level. Tom builds on the theme throughout, adding variations and experimenting with arrangements to bring players back to familiar places without risk of them getting bored.Ĭreating a piece of video game music that is repeatable is tough. Mysterious and eerie, it perfectly embodies the 60s spy movie tone that Arkane set out to achieve. That four-chord motif can be heard in Deathloop’s main theme Welcome to Blackreef, which plays in the main menu screen and is repeated throughout the game. ![]() And the first step towards that success was coming up with a very repeatable motif.” “I was a little fearful that if wasn’t implemented right, it could get monotonous,” he says. Tom’s challenge was to ensure that players wouldn’t grow tired of revisiting these same four areas and hearing their accompanying scores again and again. Video game music is inherently loop-based due to file size restrictions. And when I see people saying how much they liked it… you can’t ask for better than that. “I do what I do in general, whether it’s in video games, or records, to move people. “It’s really gratifying,” Tom says of the overwhelming response to the game’s score. Tom’s work earned the game a nomination for Best Score and Music at the prestigious Game Awards 2021, where it also won for Best Art Direction and Best Game Direction. Deathloop players adore its soundtrack and are sharing links to their various tracks on forums and reliving their favourite parts of the game through the music. You’ll visit these locations at different times in the day to hunt Julianna, the antagonist, and the seven Visionaries holding the loop together. The 20-hour story and endlessly playable multiplayer mode revolve around just four areas of Blackreef, the wretched island Colt has found himself on. Arkane’s first-person shooter has the player venturing through a time loop, repeating the same day of bloodshed and tracking down leads that will help them break the loop. ![]()
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