[2020] Behind the Soundtrack

Hi Everyone, Mikkel Martin Pedersen here, Game Director of Deep Rock Galactic! The game will launch soon and along with it the second volume of the soundtrack - with more than 50 minutes of new synthy goodness!

To introduce the new soundtrack (and because I really want to!) I'll be telling you the story behind DRG's Soundtrack Vol. I + II, as well as diving into some of the inspiration and thoughts behind it.

I have put two links in the text with samplers of Vol. I + II, so you can listen to bits from the soundtracks while reading. First sampler is right here.

Let's press play and get started!

https://youtu.be/MfjiyvRuVA8

Finding a Musical Direction It was 2016. Ghost Ship Games had just been founded and we were working on DRG and had reached a point where we needed music for the game. But what kind of music? What would be a good backdrop to the gameplay? What kind of music would fit the Darkness, the Danger and the Dwarves?

I began my research simply by playing the prototype of the game while listening to a bunch of different music. This helped me out a lot in getting a feeling for what felt right.

I tried out everything from big epic orchestral fantasy music - like you'd find in Lord of the Rings - to tense action-thriller music, to heavy metal (Doom 2016 -style), and western music - spaghetti or otherwise.

The first thing I realized was that using epic orchestral fantasy music didn't really cut it. It felt too much like a cliché and was counterproductive to our intentions for the game. Even though we have dwarves as our main protagonists, we wanted to have our own take on the dwarves, not just blindly copy paste traditional fantasy dwarves - and epic orchestral music wasn't really helping to set us apart.

Secondly, if the music was too upbeat, it would ruin the tension of exploring dark caves.

The one track that stuck out while testing was the main theme from one of my all-time movie favorites: The Thing by John Carpenter.

The main theme is built around a super simple bassline that just goes BUM BUM - pause - BUM BUM. This generates a very strong feeling of you facing your destiny, that the clock is ticking and that unavoidable doom is coming ever closer. The feeling of all hope being lost in this isolated and godforsaken place. And that was it!

That was exactly what I was looking for. To make the camaraderie between the dwarves stronger, the game needed a backdrop of music that emphasized the feeling of isolation and awaiting doom. Where the best thing you can hope for is to not die alone - or at least die while saving you friends and where the only thing that keeps your spirits high is you and your fellow miners wisecracking and friendship and the code binding you together: Leave No Dwarf Behind.

Though the soundtrack for The Thing is actually composed by Ennio Morricone it has a very straight John Carpenter feel to it. And I really felt that the synth music worked well within our heavy industrial take on sci-fi.

So I started looking into the direction of 80s synth soundtracks aka what John Carpenter had been composing. We actually briefly toyed with the idea of asking the Maestro himself if he would make the soundtrack for us, but chose against it in the end. We had no money to spend and highly doubted he would do it for free, and we simply didn't want the game to become "John Carpenter's Deep Rock Galactic".

At this point in time, Stranger Things had just hit Netflix with a soundtrack that was very inspired by John Carpenter’s work as well, and I feared that we would be compared too much to that. So the goal became to head in that direction, while still finding our own voice and niche within the genre of 80s synth music.



Gathering of the Team When we founded Ghost Ship Games in April 2016, we were six people on the team: a CEO, three programmers, an artist, and me as Game director, game and level designer, and finally sound designer (since nobody else was around to lift the task). So we had a lot of great intentions, but we didn't possess the skills to make the soundtrack ourselves.


Our first office in 2016 was just a modest room with no composer or sound designer in sight.

A couple of months after we started working on DRG, it was time to add some music to the game, but how were we going to do this with no funding in place and no money to spend?

Well, music finds a way, and as we were spreading the word about us founding a company and working on DRG, my nephew Sophus Alf Agerbæk-Larsen heard about what we were doing, and he contacted me and asked if he should try to make some music for us. At first, I was like "Nah, that's never gonna work!" - don't mix work and family, but after debating it with the other founders, we agreed that it couldn't hurt to try to let him make some music for the game. He was trying to start his own rock band (and unemployed) and had the time and passion for giving it a shot. I would actually say he was unstoppable.


The many faces of composer, Sophus Alf Agerbæk-Larsen. Leadsinger and guitarist in his old band Polio, that later developed into Sunraker. Rock'n Roll!

I told him that we wanted a synth soundtrack and pointed him in the direction of John Carpenter and the theme from The Thing. He came back with his first composition ("Into the Abyss"), which made it clear to us that the direction for the soundtrack would work, and that Sophus was the right composer for us. We quickly saw that we needed some more up-tempo music for fighting waves of enemies, and Sophus came back with "Attack of the Glyphids" which we also ended up using for our E3 Xbox Reveal/ and most recently our 1.0 Launch Trailers.

A month after Sophus started composing the soundtrack, we hired Troels Jørgensen as sound designer. Troels came from the TV and movie industry, with a ton of titles within the LEGO Star Wars and Ninjago universe behind him. At the time, he didn't have any experience with sound design for computer games, but he was exceptionally talented and eager to learn, and he also just happened to have a big taste for synth music.

Our musical dream team was in place!


Troels Jørgensen putting his magic touch to the music and sound of DRG. If you want the grenades to make bigger KABOOM's - he is the one to ask!


Categorizing the Music At the same time as Sophus was composing, I was trying to figure out how we should use the music in-game to generate a dramatic narrative throughout one mission. I ended up dividing the music into different categories based on the situations that they were going to be used in. These are the main music categories:

Level Music
Level Music is continuously playing in the background. This is the steady drumming on a Roman slave ship, where you are rowing to the beat. This is music for exploration and mining! Usually, these tracks are around 5-8 minutes long.

Wave Music
When Mission Control announces a wave, we step up a gear, and the music supports the tension and pressure from the wave hitting you. Wave music is among the most intense music you will find on the soundtrack. Tracks are around 2 minutes long, which supports the length of you fighting a wave.

Boss Wave Music
A variation of music for the Dreadnaught fights that is more epic than normal wave music.

End Wave Music
Endwave music setting the tension for you running to the Drop Pod. These tracks have a feeling that the clock is ticking and they have passages where more Heroic and grand melodies are elevating the drama - Are you going to make it before the timer runs out? Will you turn back and jeopardize the mission to save a fallen comrade?

Misc. Music
"The Deep Dive" is used as Level Music on the Space Rig, "Ode to the Fallen" is used in the Memorial Hall and "Beneath the Crust" is used on the Mission Complete screen. A variation of "The Last Ascent" is used in-between stages on Deep Dives. And finally, before you all start pinging me for why the Jukebox music isn't on the soundtrack, let me tell you that all the Jukebox music is pureply stock music and it would be kind of weird (besides propably illegal!) to but it on the Original Soundtrack.




Making Vol. I: All Tracks Needs a Signature After Sophus had composed the first bunch of tracks, we had established the baseline for the soundtrack. Still, in order for the soundtrack to feel fresh and original, I started dictating new elements I wanted to hear in each of the tracks that he was composing. This could, for instance, be a feeling, an unusual sound, an instrument, or a music or movie reference. I felt this approach was needed, so we didn't have too many repetitions, and it made it easier to distinguish the different tracks.

Take "Fathomless Tomb", for instance. It started out with me asking for music to play at the deepest, darkest and most lonely place on Hoxxes, and Sophus came back with the track and the great use of the single note playing in the beginning that resembles a sonar - making you think of submarines and emphasizing the feeling of being deep beneath the surface.

An example of where we used original instrumentation could be "A Matter of Skill and Ammunition" that has a very moody spaghetti western harmonica (beautifully played by Troels) mixed in with the synths. This track was also partly inspired by the main theme of The Untouchables.

And finally, an example of a music reference could be "The Descent" that is partly inspired by The Cures - A Forest or "They're Here!" where the track surprisingly goes full euro-techno at the end.

Sophus was excellent at taking all the references and ideas we came up with and mixing them with synths and dwarf quirkiness and creating something entirely new and original. While Troels was so skilled at giving the tracks that special 80s synth sound, that we could easily do a lot of far-out things with the music and still have consistency between all the tracks.




Making Vol. II - Let's go Crazy After we finished the soundtrack and launched Deep Rock Galactic into Early Access, we thought we were done with the soundtrack. But after the success of DRG and due to all the praise we got for the soundtrack, we felt that it could be very cool to expand it. Furthermore, we thought that the game could need more musical variation when you are fighting waves - especially since you can easily encounter three waves during a single mission.

So we rehired Sophus to compose more music and this time around we had all the principles in place. The baseline was already established and we were ready to take the soundtrack further than before. We wanted to make it even more playful and fun - with the confidence that no matter how far we pushed the envelope, Troels would keep the soundtrack coherent through his arrangements and mix.

Now it is time to listen to Vol. II of the soundtrack!
https://youtu.be/RpaVY-hQuxQ
Below is a list of all the references and ideas we used to make the new tracks for Vol. II stand out and have their own signature. If you try to keep the pace you can read about each track as they are playing in the sampler.

1. I Welcome the Darkness: This is our take on a spy theme in the vein of Mission Impossible, The Saint or James Bond. Dwarves on a mission ...with a license to drill!
   
   
2. A Distant Terror: For this track, we were playing around with the idea of making a unique piece of music for the different types of waves you can encounter. This one was made for the pure Mactera waves. In the end, we decide not to split up the music for the specific waves simply to have as much variation as possible in the wave music category. When you listen, think of a swarm of Macteras attacking you!
   
   
3. Follow Molly: The inspiration for this track is Fascination Street - again by The Cure (Both Sopus and I are big Cure fans if you haven't guessed it by now!). Troels applied the very techno-like WAOP WAOP melody towards the end of the track. At first, I hated this and thought it was too intruding when playing the game. But sometimes musical elements that at first sound off to you can grow on you and become the element you genuinely love about a song. And this is one of those cases.
   
   
4. Let's Go Deeper: This one was inspired by Blade Runner and was an attempt to make a more atmospheric and moody piece of music - it's probably one of the most relaxed tracks of Level Music we have in the game.
   
   
5. Absolute Zero: Here we toyed the idea of making unique Level Music to the different biomes. This one is made with the cold icy caves of Glacial Strata in mind. Again we went away from the idea of unique biome music simply to prioritize variation.
   
   
6. Echoes From The Past: We need humming Monks! This is our take on a choir bourne track. The first sketch Sophus composed was too much fantasy and too little synth, so to tame this track, Troels had to apply a lot of work. This is probably the closest we will ever come to music in the style of Diggy Diggy Hole. But I really love that the rules we established for the soundtrack allow us to do tracks like this.
   
   
7. Dance of The Dreadnought: Let's use some distorted guitars! This track is a full-blown rock song with inspiration drawn from Queens of the Stone Age and other artists in the stoner rock genre (how appropriate when you think about it!). The harmonica also made a return here, and towards the end of the track, you will find a drum break that sounds familiar to fans of Killing in The Name by Rage Against the Machine. Good stuff!
   
   
8. Interstellar Nightmares: The dramatic and grand-sounding organ used in this track is inspired by classical music by Bach, and the organ works very well in a sci-fi setting, I think. The organ sound is also found in "Fighting the Shadows" on Vol. I and it works very well at emphasizing the opposing threat you are facing when fighting a Dreadnought. This is pure Boss Music.
   
   
9. The Core Infuser: When we designed the Machine Events, we needed a unique piece of music to stress you out as the clock is ticking. Troels composed this one.
   
   
10. Deceived by Light: This one has a good deal of the fatalistic mood you would find in a Terminator movie, but it also has a great melodic section. The massive double drum-slams you hear in this track are also used in other tracks. A storm is coming!
    
    
11. In the Belly of the Beast: This track is a piece of Wave music and has an intense groove and a spacy midsection that is inspired by Pink Floyd's On the Run.
    
    
12. The Last Ascent: This one is one of my favorites! We were looking at the main theme from Where Eagles Dare and the way that track is building up with a single military march drum rising in intensity and then going big and epic. This is the team embarking on an impossible mission. At first this track was building up slowly, but it became to boring in-game, and we rearrarranged it, so there is more bang for the buck in the beginning. For the melodic hero theme towards the end, we drew some inspiration from Bon Iver's Perth.
    
    
13. RUN!: Here we tried to infuse some of the energy from Prodigy and make the drums very tense and in your face. This is another track where we really push the limits of the style of the soundtrack.
    
    
14. Axes Out: For this track, we were looking at colorful horror music like what you would find in the themes from Addams Family or American Horror Story. At first, this was too silly, but we played around with it and made it darker, and it worked out great in the end.

...And that is the end of my small walkthrough of Vol. II. After playing and developing DRG for 4 years, I can wholeheartedly say that all the new tracks from Vol. II are breathing a lot of fresh air into the whole game experience, and I'm very excited to hear all your reaction to the new soundtrack, when we go 1.0 on the 13th of May



Closing Comment A lot of the fun we’ve had when developing DRG is due to one thing: The Dwarves!

The Dwarves add a colorful twist to the deep space isolation sci-fi theme in the game and it allows us to do a lot of funny stuff without breaking the suspension of disbelief - simply because all the dwarf tropes are already established.

When it comes to the soundtrack, the dwarves also helped us be creative and push the boundaries of what you usually would expect to hear in 80s synth soundtracks.

I am super proud of the soundtrack. Just like we set out to create a mix of L4D and Minecraft and create something new and original through the game itself, we used much the same approach for the soundtrack. We tried to find our own space within the 80s synth music genre, by combining and introducing original and unexpected elements into the music from movie references to rock music and out of left field instrumentations - and so we found our own sound - the sound of Deep Rock Galactic.

I’ll let you be the judge as to whether we succeed or not, but either way I am extremely proud and happy about the end result.

Thank you, Sophus and Troels, for the Music! Rock and Stone, Miners!

With Love,
Mikkel Martin Pedersen