Video game music is in a strange place. Hideo Kojima hires pop stars for Death in Stranding 2. Sandfall Interactive provided Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33 sweeping orchestral arrangements with endless variations themselves – thematically appropriate, but not very playful. Ghost of YoeiThe soundtrack is essentially the kind of music you would expect from a film. Of course, these are all quality items, but they seem to be afraid to face the fact that they are intended to accompany a video game. At the other end of the spectrum are a huge number of games that revel in their gameplay and rely on retro-style chip tunes that will make you feel like a kid again, and in between are soundtracks that are just good and good and don't try to be anything else.
Christopher Larkin, classically trained composer who wrote the film's soundtracks Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight: Silk Songand lately Moonlight 2: Infinite Vaultbelieves that all these styles can exist in harmony with each other. Moonlight 2 itself is something of a hybrid: part store management game, part roguelike in which you venture into the wilds in search of goods to sell. Although the city you work in is very inspired by medieval fantasy, Moonlight 2 takes you into the desert, through the clouds, and through sci-fi inspired robot lairs. There's a lot going on. In November, Larkin spoke with Polygon during a video call about how he put his ideals into practice while working on sleepwalker continued what makes good video game music and why film scoring techniques work best when combined with the elements that make video games unique.
When you ask someone offline what they think of video game music, there's a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is a snippet of chip-tune from a 30-year-old game. There just isn't a broad understanding of how video game output can work in tandem with the interactive elements of a game – at least not yet.
“Games, unlike movies, are still not as evenly distributed across different generations, so people who don’t try them don’t hear [how music has changed] unless they hear some of it on the radio or hear their kids playing something,” Larkin says.
He points to synthetic sounds and electronic sequencing (where you input notes into a device that creates combinations of different patterns) as the two most common features that people, including gamers, find characteristic of video game music. So, to counter this expectation with Moonlight 2he made a point of doing what he calls the equivalent of “hand drawing” for much of his music, which included, among other things:
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Making percussion instruments from things he found in the kitchen.
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Recording of a live performance by a guitarist and violinist
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I played a few tracks myself
Larkin wants to promote video game music rather than completely change its identity. Throughout the project, he mixed hand-drawn elements with synthetic sounds and electronic sequencing to “pay homage to the idea that this is still a video game.”
Other composers I've talked to in the past have often said that one of the biggest challenges when writing game music is predicting how long the player will stay in a certain area and writing the looping point of the track (where it cuts off and starts over) based on that. Larkin solved this problem by trying to do Moonlight 2The music is more lively and reactive, with a multi-layered effect in each biome.
“In video games, we don't build up to a moment in the script as easily or often as we do in a movie, for example. But we have ways of making music ebb and flow in video games,” Larkin says. “This usually happens by changing the mix, where we can use several layers of music at the same time, and we can remove or add some, depending on certain parameters.”
Here's how it happens. The music starts out as you'd expect from any soundtrack, with a melody that matches the location, but you'll notice that it lingers and changes more than most location themes. It takes on new forms as you move through the region and changes dramatically when combat begins, such as swapping cold classical guitar chords for percussive heavy metal, or taking “trippy, dreamy” melodies for the celestial biome and unexpected pitch changes. (Larkin did not use Surprise Symphony by Joseph Haydn as a guide, but it definitely has the same shaking effect in the game.) Different types of action have different themes – for example, the standard desert combat has a different track than the segment where you're being chased over a dangerous cliff top – and they all borrow riffs from each other and play with them using different instruments.
Larkin went even further and Lunnik 2, which features snippets of battle music as well as sounds from other, less brutal battles that will persist as you continue, woven into the main theme of the area. The idea is for everything to flow together and become something more natural, more like an experience than a soundtrack.
It uses a variation of the same effect in Moonlight 2central areas. The main village theme is about twice as long as, say, Peach's Castle theme in Super Mario 64as Larkin's goal was to make tracks approximately four minutes long or longer. (This, he says, gives them plenty of room to grow and keeps them from repeating themselves.) Just when you think the song is about to return to the beginning, it continues with a new instrument and a different variation of the few chords that originally inspired it. The intended effect is for the musical atmosphere to evolve and deepen along with your relationship with the city and the people who live there, anchoring you more firmly than if it were the same basic melody repeated every 90 seconds.
“There is a little Breath of the Wild there’s style here,” says Larkin, comparing his approach to composition more broadly to the lack of restrictions and sense of open possibility in an open-world Zelda game. “I need space to move, experiment and change to take the music into a less defined stylistic zone.” Lunnik 2, it's something that carries a stronger sense of place and helps the world feel more alive. But more importantly, it's a different take on video game performance, one that's ambitious and eager to move forward without being ashamed of the past.
