I felt a really cool connection with the music culture and video games in the late ‘90s, particularly in extreme sports games like Tony Hawk and ATV Offroad Fury. I grew up playing a lot of games, and it was something that influenced my childhood in a lot of ways. What originally inspired you to start making soundtracks for video games? That provides opportunities to come up with some really minimal ideas that can be incredibly effective when you pair it with the game. Everyone is going to hear it in the same order unless they turn on shuffle or something. It’s a lot of thinking about how things can loop or how things blend into the next track or fades out or fades in. A lot of the time, you’re trying to think about how long a player might take in a certain area and how to make it feel cinematic and seamless when the timeline for each player is going to be different. Game music is not linear in most ways - unless you’re scripting a cutscene or trying to piece together a bunch of different cues to help out a sequence. It’s sort of an intimacy mixed with the scope of the solar system within the game.Īs someone who’s worked on everything from films to studio albums, how is developing the soundtrack of a video game unique? It gave it a very emotive score that feels very intimate but also grandiose in a way because I’m able to take these post-rock guitars and put them in the background so they can all just sit there blending together in the mix. It was a dream come true in a lot of ways because I was able to use a lot of my post-rock and indie-rock references from the late ‘90s and early 2000s to pull it all together. What was it like to move away from the stereotypical “sci-fi” soundtrack of electronic and orchestral music for this score? I think it helped to make the score more unique for the alien civilizations because it’s like two or three different genres of music all interwoven together. It’s been interesting to see how the game evolved over those years and to be able to use the tools that I learned from other projects to apply to the Outer Wilds soundtrack. I’ve known Alex for probably 10 years at this point, so I was on at the very early stages when it was just a prototype and he was still coming up with the ideas in his head. In that time, I’ve really grown as a musician and as a composer. This has been an interesting one because it was on and off in production for close to seven years. Outer Wilds is a very unique game with a fittingly interesting soundtrack, so how did working on it compare to your experience with previous projects? SPIN caught up with Prahlow to find out where his inspiration came from and how he utilized the handful of musicians encountered throughout the game (known as Travelers) to create one of the most memorable musical experiences in video game history.Īlso Read Rollerdrome Is the Futuristic Sci-Fi Video Game Rooted in the ’70s With a background that includes gigs ranging from Westworld to The Martian to Madden NFL 15 as well as composing a wide range of other shorts, shows, series, and feature films, Prahlow wasn’t about to shy away from taking the Outer Wilds‘ soundtrack to unexplored terrain. The adventure - which all takes place in a 22-minute time loop before the foreign solar system’s sun explodes - is unforgettable in numerous ways, and composer Andrew Prahlow made sure that the soundtrack would certainly be one of them. With more than a handful of major award wins in categories like Best Game, Best International Indie Game, and Best World, the 2019 release from Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive provides a combination of narrative development and exploratory gameplay unlike any other game available on the market. If you think you know what to expect from the soundtrack of a science fiction game, you probably haven’t tried Outer Wilds.
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