What Does a Video Game Music Designer Do? Interview with Adam Kallibjian, Senior Music Designer at Bungie

So what does a video game music designer do? Find out as Ted Reyes chats with Adam Kallibjian, Senior Music Designer at Bunjie. He has worked in some of greatest video games ever made including The Destiny Series, where he and his team worked with APM Music to make use of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony "Pathetique" in a unique way.

More about Adam Kallibjian

Adam Kallibjian is a Music Designer/Composer and graduate of the Berklee College of Music. His work has been recognized by the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G), British Academy of Film and TV Arts (BAFTA), Motion Picture Sound Editor’s Guild (MPSE) and more. He works as an in-house Senior Music Designer for Bungie serving as music PoC for Destiny 2's seasonal expansions. Previously he served as Music Editor for Sony Interactive Entertainment (PDSG) and contributed to games such as Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. His passion for interactive and linear media drives him to innovate on story-driven musical experiences that captivate millions around the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

You're listening to Soundscreen, APM Music's podcast where we engage in insightful conversations with our top artists, production music industry thought leaders, and more. Discover the magnificent world of production music and hear the stories behind some of the greatest sounds and music ever synced. So today we are chatting with Adam Kalibjian, Senior Music Designer at Bungie. Hi Adam, thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Hey Ted, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 0:43

Cool. Yeah, so can you detail your journey to becoming a Senior Music Designer at Bungie?

SPEAKER_00: 0:52

Yeah, sure. It's kind of an interesting path, so... The role of music designer is something that has cropped up recently in the last few years at game companies as an actual position that I didn't really even know existed. So my background is I went to school at Berklee College of Music for undergrad in film scoring. My plan was Similar to a lot of my friends and colleagues at the time of moving out to Los Angeles, becoming sort of a film composer, maybe assisting somebody and sort of going that route of trying to break more into film TV and do assisting and hope something may trickle down my way after five to ten years of probably very intense, grueling work. But In my last semester at Berkeley, we did this field trip. It was like a week long trip to San Francisco, where we had the opportunity to speak with a lot of sort of tangential industries to just, music. So it was a lot of tech focused stuff. So like we went to go visit like Apple and Apple has a music department. We went to Spotify and Spotify's music department. And it was basically a trip that was like, okay, you're going to graduate with a degree in music, a bachelor of music. How can you utilize this in maybe some ways that you weren't thinking about before? Because I was so hyper-focused on, you know, composer writing music. But then it was sort of being introduced to this whole other world of, oh, there are people that with music degrees that go into more of the business side and may go work for Spotify. There are people that may go lean very heavy on the tech side and become a programmer like at Apple's music department or something for like Logic or GarageBand or something. And one of the companies that they took us to was PlayStation's main campus in San Mateo. And that was kind of my like aha moment because where I got to meet a lot of the team there, and some of them were Berklee grads, and these were folks that were, there was a full music team that worked for PlayStation that does all of their first-party games, you know, MLB, which I know APM is familiar with, having a lot of tracks from past MLB titles, and you know, The Last of Us, and Death Stranding, and Ghost of Tsushima, and all these really big titles, and they, I think at the time, I forget what they were working on at the time, this would have been 2018, so like, yeah, beginning of 2018, and yeah, I was introduced into this environment of a bunch of you know, music engineers, music designers, music editors that were on this team working for video games. And that's sort of, yeah, it was my aha moment. I was like, oh my gosh, a team of people that are all music focused. They all sort of share a common love for the industry and for video games. And they're all very passionate people. And when I graduated, I stayed in touch with some of them, did some rounds of interviews. Some of them went okay, some of them not okay, but I just stayed very persistent in wanting to try to have a chance at working for that team, and I was able to get that opportunity from being sort of slightly persistent, bordering on maybe a little annoying, but that was kind of the sort of, you know, the line that I was towing a little bit on, you know. How can I get my foot in the door and show that I'm really passionate and motivated to sort of have an opportunity at this? And I started on a six-month contract after I graduated, working on some of the smaller projects for that team, and that grew into sort of... I moved out to L.A., I was fresh to L.A., and we were working on a Call of Duty game, and I was living in the Valley, They were like, we need somebody to implement music for Call of Duty. You live in Sherman Oaks. Infinity Ward is over in Woodland Hills. It's like a 20-minute drive. How about that? I was like, that sounds great to me. So that was really my first big opportunity and just sort of thrown into the deep end of figuring this all out. And fast forward, I was there for about three years. uh left and came to bungie and i've been at bungie now for about four years um doing a lot of similar things so like um music designer and you know um i can kind of give you a quick breakdown of what that means if that's if that's uh that's super

SPEAKER_01: 5:47

interesting yes of course like i mean You have a title of senior music designer. What do you design? Is it like, you know, game sounds or like, you know, gunshots, you know, whatever, or actual music?

SPEAKER_00: 6:00

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the term music designer came up a few years ago. Before that, we used to call them like music editor. It used to be more like music editor. But the role is really a very hybrid thing of many distinct roles, right? I like to classify it into three different pillars, very similar to a film production line of pre-production, production, and post-production. There's kind of the pre-production phase of being a music designer, which is a lot of working with either the audio director, who may be the person that's in charge of the full vision of audio for a video game, or a music director if there if the company has a specific person that is basically the same role just focused on music um and working with some high-level leadership folks on figuring out what the game needs are so a lot it comes to a lot of like reading sort of like spec documents, and talking with designers, playing the game, coming up with cue lists, cue sheets of potential places in the game that there might need to be music, and sort of going through this process that we call, or maybe like a light spotting set, like light spotting sessions, where in a more traditional sense, you would think of as the composer is spotting like a film with the director, The game development timeline is, in many cases, much longer than films, where there's a large portion sometimes of the game. They don't have a composer on the project yet, but they may have some audio people. One of those people might be a music designer or someone that's kind of in the realm of dealing with, okay, what's music going to be for this game? And so... Sorry, I lost my train of thought for a second. There's so much that I'm trying to unpack.

SPEAKER_01: 8:04

Yeah, but that is awesome. I mean, you are working on music and playing video games. That sounds like a dream job to me. It

SPEAKER_00: 8:13

really is. And for me, having worked for Sony and for Bungie are both kind of like pinch-me-dream moments because... i'm a huge fan of playstation titles played so many of them as a kid i remember i mean i had a ps2 and you know playing early like you know star wars games and

SPEAKER_01: 8:36

metal gear solid and stuff like

SPEAKER_00: 8:38

that well you know i never i had a friend that was super into the metal gear series and he got me into it later i never played i it's one of my regrets i never played them earlier on. But like a lot of the late a lot of the later, you know, Sony games like The Last of Us and God of War and all those big things I was super into. And same thing with Bungie. Like I was a big Halo nerd back in the day in high school and played a lot of Destiny in college. And so both of these have been really awesome opportunities to to work on these really these really great projects. And it's just kind of happened to be a great fit because it's like Um... When I came to Bungie, I was already a big Destiny nerd. So I think I put in my cover letter, I was like, I've played enough Destiny for like two people. So I kind of consider myself an expert. I'm like a self-proclaimed Destiny music and Destiny overall expert. So I was like, you guys got to just hire me, right?

SPEAKER_01: 9:37

So what does it take to be successful in your position? Do you have to be a passionate gamer as well as being an exceptional musician or composer producer

SPEAKER_00: 9:50

yeah it's been it's i would kind of yeah highlight a few things um to work to do music for games there's a i call it understanding the philosophy the the philosophy of of game music which is um you know when you're watching a film it's linear right there's the film there's the pictures the frames and everything's happening running in time forward in a game there's so many different situations that can occur and it's not always linear and straightforward. And so it's being able to have a combination of a creative and a technical mindset of thinking about Oh, there's this really cool thing we might want to do musically. Say the player approaches this vista shot of something that looks really awesome and you want to have this grand reveal moment. In a film, you could do that no problem and you could make it the biggest thing ever. But in a video game, the player may start running up to it and then... maybe their cat jumped on their lap and the controller fell over and then they got up to go make a sandwich or something and the music triggered while they were like because it wasn't properly tied or the player the player has agency over the whole thing and so it's there's a lot more considerations and then they make him back and they have missed the whole the whole music reveal moment because they were making a sandwich or something so there's a lot more Not to discredit anything with film and TV, but there's additional thought that has to go into working on game music. It's just as much a technical role as it is a creative role. So for me, a lot of... What I'm doing is either working in Pro Tools, so it's having a lot of strong editing chops with audio, because a lot of what we do, a lot of what I do, is I will take stems from the composer, and I will edit them into new assets that will actually go in the game. A lot of times, depending on the game, that happens more often than not. A lot of the titles that I've worked on in the past, we'd have suites of music written by a composer, and then... uh we would get stem deliveries from the composer that was like you know brass strings woodwinds split out into like 10 20 30 40 50 maybe tracks of audio and we would make new assets and the actual stuff that would go in the game from all of that and so our role was to very much be this sort of handshake bridge between composer that was writing the music and developer that was making the game and where that's linked so that everything can sort of seamlessly happen without the composer needing to get as involved in the weeds of the technicalities of like how is this going to play back in the game that's sort of the job of like music designers to sort of be able to speak both the lingo of the creative to the composer and musical and is a musician themselves and a very musical person and also be able to speak the technical lingo to a designer of like how are we going to actually make this function so that both parties are happy with the result because the composer doesn't want their music to be sort of butchered and like end up in the game in some you know hacksaw like you know just uh, you know, smash together, whatever mess. And the designer wants a reflective, you know, interactive thing that changes with the movements of the player and is responsive and feels good for their, whatever mission or activity, whatever it is they're doing. So it's heavy. It's a lot of good pro tool skills. Um, for me, I learned wise, which is a very popular, what they call middleware, um, software. Um, Middleware is... There's basically two big ones, Ys and Fmod. Most AAA games use Ys just because it has more expandability and scalability and customizable options and supports larger projects. But a lot of indie games use Fmod.

SPEAKER_01: 14:14

So Fmod, like those tools, are separate from Pro Tools. Correct. What do they do exactly?

SPEAKER_00: 14:19

They are the... Yeah, Middleware is basically between... the game engine itself and the content of what you want to do. It's a separate software that plugs into the actual game engine, so like Unity or Unreal or something. It just has a lot more functionality than Unreal or Unity's built-in game engines. So it's just another piece of software, and it's not like you have to learn code or anything to use them, but that is another aspect of it that I would say is important for someone in my position is having a little bit of knowledge of visual scripting or some scripting, like Lua scripting knowledge, things like that. But yeah, I mean a lot of these things can be learned online really what it comes down to is just a like you said earlier Just a passion and and being really passionate about games and you know being motivated and sort of being able to tackle problems sort of head-on and find sort of come up with solutions to problems or come up with solutions before the problem has sort of presented itself as like a big problem. Working in games is a very iterative and collaborative environment, especially in video games you're working with large teams a lot of the times. So it's being able to be very collaborative and open and hearing other people's ideas and being able to very it's very diplomatic like diplomatically um convey when things are broken or things aren't working the way that you want there's a lot of soft communication skills that are also really important um and

SPEAKER_01: 16:24

i would assume that like in your in your work like you come in in the post production phase like the game is done essentially like the scenes the cinematics

SPEAKER_00: 16:34

Sometimes,

SPEAKER_01: 16:35

yeah. There have been instances where you've been involved in the middle of it while games are being developed? Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_00: 16:45

So that's kind of the whole pre-production thing that I was talking about earlier. The advantage that a team can have with hiring like a music designer or someone that's like specialized in this kind of role is that they don't need to necessarily be far along in the game yet to hire the composer that's going to write all the music because the game's not going to be done for another year. Right. And usually composers are the ones that come on like last to the project. The benefit of someone like a music editor, music designer is they can start working sooner because they can start getting what we call like hooks into the game. Like even with temp, like we would do this a lot on... on Sony titles is temp the game. Same way that you would temp a film or a TV show, before they would hire a composer, a lot of music editors will do what's called a temp pass, where they'll take music from other sources or from their own music library of soundtracks that they've collected over decades, maybe grab a John Williams track or an Alan Silvestri track or who knows, whatever, right? And they'll temp with that music knowing that it's going to be changed the same thing can be done in games where we can grab like temp music and it can sort of help set the tone and vibe and sort of guide direction for maybe where the composer will end up going or not some composers hate temp music some are okay with it so is that

SPEAKER_01: 18:24

where you come in if they don't like you know placeholder music you kind of like compose a little bit of stuff just for him to or her to listen to and the end do you you get involved in that at least

SPEAKER_00: 18:36

it depends i mean my job my job is to sort of empower the composer to write the best music that he or she can or and and is able to my job is not to like stomp on the composer's creative process it's really to enable them right um and so Um, there's been instances where I'll do like some, yeah, some like additional arranging, like cinematics are a great example where like there's a lot of times I'll get like very early picture cuts of stuff that are, you know, a lot of gray blocks moving around and, um, you know, uh, The composer might write a piece of music and score it, but then after the fact, they might change some stuff in the scene very late past when the composer would be able to write new music. And especially if it's recorded music, a lot of times it might be past the point that we can record more music. So those are instances where maybe I might add some MIDI production on top of whatever was done. But it's always in the effort of... empowering whatever the composer wrote because you know there's not a lot of room for big egos on these games and so it's always it's very like you want to be very amicable and collaborative and like we're all just trying to like make the you know most badass thing possible to release And it's not about, it's not much about it's like, I'm trying to like one up each other.

SPEAKER_01: 20:15

Right. And the final green, the green light would come from the composer at the end of the process. Like the composer would be like, Oh, this is good. I'm happy. Or is it like the video producer or the, the game producer,

SPEAKER_00: 20:27

like the studio question. And a lot of times it's like, that is a, that is something that is being figured out as it's going is who are the people that are signing off on this thing? Yeah. Sometimes it's some like, high-level producer, sometimes it's the game director. It usually goes through a chain of like composer and audio director sort of settle on the vision and then the audio director will sort of take it to the next up the chain like through the actual internal team because compo a lot of i would say like 95 of game music that is written is by an external composer they don't work they they are hired by the game company but they're not an employee of the game company and so there's a bit of that kind of outside versus inside dynamic that's happening so the audio a lot of times whoever is in charge of either the music team or the audio team it's their job to try to make sure that the outside people are feeling included and roped into the conversation so that it doesn't feel like um they're just kind of like taking it and running with it and then like the composer no longer has like any say or decision in the matter um But yeah, great question. It's kind of like when you're in recording sessions and sort of figuring out who's the one that's supposed to say if this was the best take or not. I've been in some film or TV recording sessions where you've got the TV producer and the showrunner. You've got a bunch of people in the room and you're like, so we're trying to figure out while this is going, who's the one that says when... They like it, and it's approved.

SPEAKER_01: 22:12

Well, I mean, eventually it might be the studio at the end of the day. They'll be like, all right, you are all paid by the studio, so this is what we want. This is what's going to happen.

SPEAKER_00: 22:22

Yeah, sometimes. It's very specific. Studio, company to company, and person to person.

SPEAKER_01: 22:28

So your position is really interesting. So it seems like, to me, you have to have at least an interest in Not expertise because you can learn this. In the actual tech part of music production, Pro Tools, the software that you mentioned. But also, it would help if you are a gamer. I know composers and musicians that have zero interest in gaming. To them, it's like... And then, obviously, there is that skill set where you have to be... I wouldn't say... political or like you know how to like talk to people negotiate because most of the time when you're in production that is kind of required right like oh the composer is throwing a fit because like there's this sound that got in and he doesn't want it or she doesn't want it yeah but then you have to kind of finesse that a little bit it's because oh we have budgets to work with you know whatever so so oh yeah yeah so aside from like the the the technical skills in producing music the interest in video games and being a negotiator or like you know a producer in itself So those three, you think, are required. If you're talking to a newly grad who wants to be in this industry, do you feel like there's more or that's enough?

SPEAKER_00: 23:54

I would say a lot of the stuff I learned as I was going. I never specialized in going for this out of school. But a lot of the stuff that I... uh, learned in school is kind of tangential or can be, it has transferable knowledge into this kind of role. And yeah, I was like, for me, like looking back, if I was to tell like, you know, seven years, seven years ago, Adam, like, okay, what you should like be focusing on to get, you know, to where I am now, it would be like, yeah, strong music, Production chops like yeah editing and write like composing arranging and understanding your doll like in and out and Strong Organizational skills like like music like like production not production in terms of like music production But like music producer right kind of like being yeah being able to have conversations with people about what it is clearly that is working, isn't working, how to say that in a way that is not offensive and is collaborative and gets closer to the final goal. And being able to identify, yeah, being able to identify problems before they really show themselves, being sort of a, I like to call it, have a productive mindset, not a reactive mindset. Right. Because in a lot of... Game audio is usually... A lot of the game audio work happens at the tail end of the game. Say you have a game that is on a five-year timeline. The majority of the game audio final work is probably going to happen in the last year and a half, year. And so you're coming in at the end, so there's going to be a lot of... reaction there's the game is going to be changing so much that you're already inherently going to be reacting to so much of it right so being able to identify where are the spots that we can get ahead of the problem is like golden right um and that and that's part of that kind of like music music producery being able to read the room read between the lines of things um And then, yeah, kind of that final piece is having a... I wouldn't say you need to be a technical expert, like a coder or anything, but having an interest in it and not just wanting to... Being able to ask the question why or how a lot I feel like music designer is really like a music designer is someone that really enjoys Not just the what like the music itself like either creating the music or listening to the music and working with the music But but but the how and the why of like how is it like like how how do we make this work? And why is why do we want it to be like this? like And that goes back to what you were saying about being a gamer.

SPEAKER_01: 27:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 27:01

Like, you're passionate about the game, like, so you're asking yourself these questions. Well, why should the music change to the character? Like, oh, because I know that the character has, like, this whole backstory and, like, this is their narrative arc and really, yeah, just having a love for the story of the game or the mechanics of the game that you're working on. Yeah. Then that just naturally comes out. It doesn't really feel like you're banging your head at a desk, trying to enjoy what you're doing. It's just naturally flowing. Obviously, there are really shitty hard days where I may be doing that, but there's still that kind of high-level thing that's like, I'm getting to work on something like, yeah, I'm passionate about this. I'm enjoying this even if in the moment I'm at a low point where it's like shitty or something yeah

SPEAKER_01: 27:57

yeah totally I mean I'm a big gamer myself like I remember prior to like before twitch like we would record cinematics just like for the music and like that kind of stuff like you know we would take grabs and like because we couldn't share it like on twix but back in like ps2 ps3 you know music is so sound is so important you can't you can't mess that up so I'm sure it's it's challenging but this is a perfect segue to my next question which is I really think this is a dream job but even dream jobs have major challenges I'm pretty sure so can you name a few that is constantly kind of like a thing that's like this is where it's going to be challenging

SPEAKER_00: 28:41

yeah so I will say that yeah I mean there's always hurdles working on games nothing ever goes perfectly the way that you would want it to. If it did, that would be great. But that's unfortunately not reality of working in, I would say, any entertainment industry related thing. For us, I mean, a constant hurdle that I think we've gotten pretty good at dealing with now is how to score a live service game. just all up. And that was something new for me, moving from Sony to Bungie, because a lot of Sony games are these sort of boxed product, you know, you work on them for a few years, they come out, they're done. They're out in the wild and people enjoy them. The game that I work on, Destiny 2, has been out for about just over 10 years now. I think the first iteration came out, Destiny 1 came out in 2014. which is crazy to think. It's amazing that the game has been going strong for 11 years now. You're basically doing a mini box product release like multiple times and when it comes out it's never really done because it's it's a live service game it's constantly being updated there are new you know worlds and characters and things that have been added to the game um and how do you do that in a sustainable way and i actually and i gave a whole game sound con talk on this i think maybe like two years ago that i that i called the economy of music and destiny um basically talking about this sort of quote quote problem space of like how do you um score something that is constantly changing and do it in an economical way in a fiscally responsible way that is like um and so for us it was um it's been a combination of identifying where the key areas are that we actually want to have new music versus we have 10 years of Destiny music that's already been written. We have a vast library of Destiny music, hundreds of hours of written music. How do we maybe take some of that stuff and refresh it, remix it? What I call hybridize music. And so we'll take... Actually, a great example of this was from season 19 of Destiny, which came out a few years ago, which I want to talk more about, too, because that's the one that we worked with you guys on. Because that season had a lot of really fun stuff in it. But that season, when it first started getting pitched... around and I was learning more about it one of the first things that came to my head was okay the hurdle there's always okay so there's always the hurdle of they want new music for everything right like and by they I mean the game developers right they always want new music for everything okay we can't always do new music for everything because it's not financially responsible it's not time economically responsible uh how are we going to do that right and so season 19 when I started hearing about um Just for a quick, I'll give a quick sort of like, what the fuck is season 19? Also, I'll refrain from swearing. That's okay. That comes

SPEAKER_01: 32:23

out sometimes.

SPEAKER_00: 32:24

That's fine, man. You can see how my brain just kind of goes to these places where I'm sitting here going crazy. So Destiny, it's a sci-fi space shooter. Season 19 was about this AI robot called Rasputin. This sort of Russian, you know, had this kind of like Russian voice. It was kind of this like omniscient robot that like existed. And they were bringing together a bunch of sort of narrative beats that had existed previously with this sort of... this Rasputin sort of robot AI narrative. Right. And one of the places that they were doing a lot of the activities for that season was on Earth. So Earth is one of the locations. It's a sci-fi space shooter game. There's Earth and there's other planets you go to. And we had music that was written for these different areas but had never existed together. And so when I was hearing about how they were trying to weave this story together in season 19 with the narrative, I was like, oh, this is like a perfect example of, or a perfect opportunity for us to do the same thing with the music. We can take these older cues that we had written and weave them together to create something new, which is this process that I was calling hybridization, where I would take three or four cues that were written maybe years apart Time stretch them, pitch shift them, cut them up. If one was in 3-4 and one was in 7-8, I would figure out a way to make it asynchronously work and time modulate in a way that felt like it was originally written that way. And that was a great solution. to this, okay, we're creating all these new missions, and we have to be very specific about where we're going to have new music written, because at the same time that we're doing Season 19, we're also working on other Destiny releases at the same time. Because we're sort of in this live-serving cadence model of, we're working on, we're planning one release, we're working on the next, this is how it was for Season 19. We were planning... season 20 while working on season 19 while in mix and closing the previous season and so there's kind of there's like three things happening at once and at the same time as those three things were happening we were also working on the annual beat that was going to be light destiny to light fall so there's like there's like four technically four things happening at once And so we had to be very conscious of our own time, our money, our resources. How do we do this? And so that was a really great solution to that challenge and that hurdle of getting new music for things. And it landed pretty well, I think. The fans really liked this... the mission that we did that a lot of that in in season 19 there was a really cool like sort of pinnacle we call them exotic missions that had a lot of really cool hybridized combination music that never existed before that um it was nice too because as a gamer and a fan of destiny myself i wasn't just like making this for others i was making it for myself like i was making it for myself too like as a player i was like put my head in the player space If I was playing through this and I had played through all these years of Destiny, I'd be like, oh, that's pretty cool, like, what they did there. Like, the nostalgia's hitting me pretty hard there, but in a way that doesn't feel like it's just kind of corny reuse. It's like they actually did something new with it, but they're also kind of pulling my heartstrings a little bit. And so that's always kind of the goal. So

SPEAKER_01: 36:32

how did, like... APM's music come into play in that project

SPEAKER_00: 36:38

yes perfect segue because I definitely want to talk about this because this was one of the most this is one of the most fun things I've gotten to do here while I was at while I've been at Bungie is this so this AI robot character Rasputin narratively Right, he's this AI that has existed for, like, millennia from, like, the golden age of humanity. So the game takes place, like, hundreds of years in the future, right? And he's kind of, like, the last relic of, like, modern... Like, our modern society. And so he was a fan of Russian ballets and of, like, Russian music. And so we... We licensed... some music previously, way back in Destiny 1, one of Tchaikovsky's Symphony 6 pieces, or, yeah, Symphony 6, I think it's called, like, Pathetique or something, or Destiny 1, that kind of became, like, his defunct theme. Like, whenever, you would basically, you would be walking around in these corridors and these, like, underground bunkers, and you would hear this, like, reverberating... classical Tchaikovsky music reverberating and that kind of became his sort of voice because Rasputin didn't have a voice so his voice was speaking through playing music to the player and so this was this cool thing that was established way back from even before I was at Bungie and season 19 bringing this piece they're bringing Rasputin back and putting him full sort of center stage in the narrative story and expanding on his story more than they ever did before and so this was a really, this was like, oh, we got to like use this music again, but we got to do something new with it. Um, and not just kind of what we did before. Um, cause we want to, we want it to be a novel experience and delight players in a way that hasn't, we haven't done before. And so there are these throughout the game, there were these little, um, floating like robot nodes. They almost looked like little like floating lamps that you could, you had to go find, there was like 20 of them. And they were scattered all throughout the world in Destiny. And you had to go find them. And the only way to find them was by exploring and listening for the music. So you would hear off in the distance some ambient classical music playing. And that was kind of supposed to attract the player to one of these nodes. And every single time you'd collect one, you'd get a gun or some loot or something. That's awesome. There was always an incentive to... There's always, Destiny's a looter shooter, so there's always some sort of like, what am I getting out of this? There's always some looters, there's something to get. But we took that classical piece from APM, the Tchaikovsky piece, and we cut it up into a bunch of different parts. Because there was this sort of story that we came up with for these nodes, that as you were collecting them, you're sort of restoring... like the date like he's like Rasputin started off as this very corrupted data and you're sort of restoring his as you collect more of these you're kind of like refining the data severance pun you're sort of like you're sort of refining the data and it's becoming less and less corrupted so we took the APM license track cut it up into a bunch of different bits and made different versions of them we made a version that was like super distorted like we would we'd throw um one of my favorite weird plugins is uh free uh freak show is called mishby i think it's this awful plugin if the ui is terrible it's like it's like brain rot to look at but it makes but it's really good at just like hey i want to like really destroy the audio like does it like compress

SPEAKER_01: 40:41

it like to bits or what does it do is like

SPEAKER_00: 40:44

oh it does everything it does bit crushing it does like phase distortion it just like um yeah it does it just does a bunch of wacky stuff and the buttons don't even clearly say what they're doing it's like you move a unicorn slider and it's applying And it, you know, in backend, it might be like doing some bit crush distortion or something, but it's literally all you see is like a unicorn.

SPEAKER_01: 41:06

It's like a plugin where they give you, you're brought into a room or apartment and you get, they give you a sledgehammer and you pretty much like destroy everything that you see in that.

SPEAKER_00: 41:16

Yeah. It's like, it's like they're giving you a sledgehammer in one hand and a bucket of paint in the other. And like, you know, a vacuum for a foot and like, you're just like, yeah, go to, go to town. And so that's awesome. Yeah, so we took the licensed track and we cut it up onto these different bits, and as players are going through, we had different processing on these different versions of the Tchaikovsky piece. So as players are going through and discovering these nodes, as they're getting more of these nodes, they're hearing the music sort of attract them to it, but the first time, it's like really distorted, so it's going to be like... barely audible but as they're collecting more the music track sort of kind of is slowly revealing itself as to like what it actually is and there's less distortion there's less chops and edits in it

SPEAKER_01: 42:06

it's it's also like they're kind of like building a puzzle or repairing a track with every pickup

SPEAKER_00: 42:11

it's basically they're repairing the track yeah amazing and so it was a lot of fun to work with that piece because um uh Yeah, that was just, like, such a unique thing that, like, we haven't really done before in Destiny. That is, yeah. I've never played anything like that,

SPEAKER_01: 42:27

like, ever, you know. But that is an interesting concept where you're kind of, like, repairing something through your pickups.

SPEAKER_00: 42:33

Yeah, and then finally, when you collect them all, you can go back to this, like, social space in the game and hear the piece kind of in its pristine form, fully, like, repaired. Yeah. So did

SPEAKER_01: 42:50

you have to search for that specific track in the APM system? Or did you ask for it specifically?

SPEAKER_00: 42:58

I think we asked for it specifically. I think because we'd already used it before. And so we're like, hey, we already have this relationship with APM. And we used this track before. Let's go back to them again. And let's get a

SPEAKER_01: 43:15

little bit more out of it. So it was a different track that you pulled. Or it was the

SPEAKER_00: 43:19

same track but a different version? It was the same track but a different version. And then we took it and we did, if I remember correctly, we updated the agreement so that we could do more sort of destructive editing to it than just reusing it as was. I would want to

SPEAKER_01: 43:40

see that agreement. It would have been kind of like, we're going to destroy this track.

SPEAKER_00: 43:46

I don't remember what we say specifically in it, but I remember it was all above board. It was all good.

SPEAKER_01: 43:52

That's super cool. I have a question about the creative process, but you already spilled it out. That's super creative. You're destroying a track and then Repairing it through gameplay. I mean that is yes unique to me. And

SPEAKER_00: 44:09

yeah, I think that was something Yeah, I'm excited to hear that. I mean, yeah, it was it was really fun to do and I think players enjoyed it It's not something I had really seen before in destiny 2. So like again, it goes it goes back to like I'm a big fan of destiny you know as a gamer and as a fan and not just as a developer and someone that works on the game and so I It just goes back to that passion. As I'm doing this, it's very exciting for me as well. So if I'm excited by it, then that's kind of like step one. It's like, how can I make sure other people are excited by it? If I'm excited by it, then whatever. Nobody could enjoy it. Everybody could enjoy it. I don't care. It's servicing the game. If I'm doing something and I'm excited by it and it's servicing the game well, that's like a win. Totally,

SPEAKER_01: 45:10

man. This is awesome, man. Thank you so much for your time. This has been super informative. Thank you so much, Adam. Have a great day.