Hi folks! To mark the release of the official digital soundtrack for Astro’s Playroom later this week, I thought it’d be fun to take a wee “behind the scenes” look at the creative process for the track that players have responded to the most enthusiastically – the GPU song.
Most of the music featured in this post doesn’t actually appear in the game or on the soundtrack – it consists of excerpts from top secret, slightly embarrassing sketch material that was never intended to be heard by anyone’s ears other than those of my Team Asobi collaborators. But hopefully that’s also what makes them interesting!
The GPU Jungle was the first area of the game that I tackled – whilst it was still a work-in-progress at that point, the gameplay felt the furthest along so it seemed like a sensible place to start. My first attempt was quite a traditional approach to scoring a jungle stage, complete with the requisite panpipes:
The feedback from the team was that this was a little too predictable. However, it did have a catchy melody, which is something we strive for in the Astro Bot games because they are, at their heart, ‘old-skool’ platforming experiences. So, before moving on, I had a go at making it a little more “digital” or synthetic sounding:
That certainly felt more appropriate for Astro, but we were still concerned that folks unfamiliar with video game music culture might not “get it.” So, I started exploring something a little more contemporary sounding and began playing around with the idea of writing a song.
Before I’d even started working on the game I had been thinking about personifying the PlayStation 5 console by giving it a voice. This tapped into the idea that perhaps you’ve always known PS5 or somehow encountered it before, as if it were your true love. But I had been saving this idea for the CPU Plaza area as it felt like the most appropriate spot. But now that I was starting again on the music for the GPU Jungle, I saw an opportunity to introduce this concept to the team. Here’s my first sketch:
Worlds of Sound
The first version of the theme was a simple collection of melodies, inspired by previous Sackboy adventures, which we shared with the team of composers. We really wanted the theme to represent the cornucopia of musical sounds that were explored in the game, so we took elements from each of the worlds to help create a musical jamboree. We came up with a general music palette for each of the worlds, which also helped inspire our choice of composer that would look after that world . These included:
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