Wasteland 2 Interview

The folks at Bloody Disgusting managed to track down famed composer Mark Morgan for a quick interview about his involvement with Wasteland 2, his approach to video game audio in general, other titles he is involved with, and more. An excerpt:

Was there something you saw in the gameplay for Wasteland 2 that inspired the tonal palette for this score, or did you already have some pretty strong ideas in mind?

Before there was any gameplay Brian and I discussed the sound palette. I did a couple of demos using the concept art, so we had a good idea sonically of what was working straight away. Then it was a matter of fitting the music into the different sections of the game.

There are two distinct areas in the game, Arizona and Los Angeles, so both had to be addressed with their own distinct sound but still feel as if they are part of the same world.

Arizona needed to be open-sounding and have a strong feel of cold desolation. Because of the desert landscape and the fact that we were dealing with the Rangers, a little twang was needed, so we went with a very dark and minimal use of slide guitar. On some of the tracks, to get that dark vibe, we used a dobro slide and purposely brought to the forefront certain artifacts by recording the noisiest parts of the neck and body of the guitar. After which we blended that with the close mic natural sound. Hearing all the artifacts made it feel really dry and dusty which in turn gave it a more aggressive sound befitting the post-apocalyptic world of the wasteland.

LA has more of a glitchy electronic sound, but still has an organic quality because of the use of certain textures in the underlying ambience that pervades most of the game. The sound of LA is more apparent in the battle moments because of the overall nervous and glitchy, rhythmic components along with more pronounced ethnic elements.

The idea in the game was to tell the story by use of texture as opposed to playing melodies in the traditional sense. In some cases we concentrated on the sound of certain cults to give them an identity of their own. For instance, for the Mannerites, the underlying ambience is aggressive and relentless, and with an added subtle pulse that hopefully gives you a sense of unease that you can’t seem to escape from. Other cults were approached in a similar fashion.