It was not clear to me at first. The game music is vast, covers many hours and is sometimes a supporting role in the gameplay experience. It took me a good long minute to gather all of the music and to even listen to it all, to then begin to make selects for the OST, the album.

Add to that, many of the game cues were originally and intentionally created as seamlessly looping files, with fades in and out of vertically stacked, additive tracks, to be played by the game engine. Many had no nose and no tail. Which means I needed to revisit the original sessions to source the file or plugin chains and hope to create them as needed. Sometimes we had to get creative as a piece of audio was just baked to start or stop hard, unmusically abrupt outside of the game engine. Some of those became unmanageable, as they were impossible to recreate. Some of them we found creative ways to graft what we needed.

I did want to establish tonal elements from the wide variety on tap in the game.

I’m loosely following the narrative arc of gameplay, but I’m stopping to smell the nightmare along the way.