In collaboration with video game publisher Dreamhaven we worked on the trailer music for TWO original game titles! In both cases we were provided the score files from the games to interpolate in the soundscape of the announcements.
We love this trend of incorporating the score themes into the trailers. Often marketing music involves licensed songs, or covers, or is otherwise separate sonically to the palette of the game world. As gamers, fans, and music producers - we love the continuity and respect this shows to the creatives who worked on these franchises for years before we came along and made our small contribution!
Trailers do have a specific purpose and directly lifting score cues doesn’t necessarily work for the medium. At a base level a classic trailer is ~90sec with cutdowns and many score cues are just too long, or narratively winding. For Lynked, the game has an upbeat, quirky, synthy score and we built on that with a remix-style track that incorporates harmonica, woodwinds, and vocals for the organics and new cozy synth work and electronic production for the robots. For Wildgate the team wanted to keep some of the late 70s/early 80s rock and orchestral inspirations while matching the pacing of the story beats. A focus here was touching on the game’s deep lore while swinging it back to the fun of team-based multiplayer PVP gameplay. We were able to incorporate a few stems from the game’s live-record in Nashville, which was sweet (the game studio put up an article about the music of the game which you can read & listen to here to see how it inspired the trailer).
We really loved working on these! Check out the finished products below!
Wildgate Reveal Trailer
Developer: Moonshot Games
Publisher: DreamHaven
Game Composer (themes by): Maclaine Diemer
Musicians: Stevie Blacke (violin, viola, cello), Chris Ott (trombone, bass trombone), Meredith Moore (french horn), Dan Hill (drums) and Ryan Lofty (guitar, bass, synths)
Lynked Announcement Trailer
Developer: FuzzyBot Games
Publisher: DreamHaven
Game Composer (themes by): Zach Abramson
Musicians: Will Wilde (harmonica), Jonathan J. Golko (flute), Keeley Bumford (vocal samples) and Ryan Lofty (guitar, bass, synths)
This was our original demo for the Lynked trailer, still one of our favorite things ever: