Guitarist, songwriter and 2010 Rock Band 2 national champion (seriously, Google it), Darren Korb has been Supergiant Games’ sound designer and soundtrack composer since their inception. Having bagged awards from the Spike Video Game Awards for his “acoustic frontier trip-hop” scoring of Supergiant’s debut release Bastion, he stripped his sound back for its follow-up Transistor, the revenge-driven tale of a mute songstress brought to life by Korb’s vivid fusion of blues, jazz motifs and dense electronica. Following that soundtrack’s long-awaited vinyl release, we cornered him to find out the ins and outs of his unique take on video game composition.
Congratulations on the re-release of Transistor, it looks simply stunning. Was there much surprise at the fact that it was popular enough for you to consider a vinyl release?
I was surprised but it was pretty awesome. Bastion had a pretty good response for the soundtrack as well. For years we’d been having some requests for vinyl and it was hard to tell how much of a niche that was, but the vinyl trend has certainly picked up a lot more recently, especially for video game soundtracks, so we definitely thought that there was a market for it and we wouldn’t just be sitting on thousands of records in our office forever. I’ve been excited about it for several years and wanting to do Transistor and Bastion soundtracks on vinyl. I’ve gotten a setup at home recently, and started collecting – I have a two-year-old and he loves playing records. You get to watch it spin around, it’s a big physical thing, there’re giant pictures you get to look at on the jacket… it’s pretty cool, so we’ve been getting into that a lot lately. It’s been very exciting to dig into that and do a lot of research and I’m super-pleased with how it turned out. The packaging is beautiful, the record itself is super-cool and Jen (Zee, Supergiant visual artist)’s artwork looks amazing on the gloss.
The demand for video game soundtracks has really stepped up lately, it seems. Have you seen that industry change much? With guys like Cliff Martinez and Clint Mansell doing video game work now, does it seem like the posts have shifted?
It’s cool, and people like Hans Zimmer have been doing some game work for a while now so I think the ‘movie composers doing games’ is a thing that’s been around now for quite a bit. That’s mostly with AAA stuff, but video games are kind of a different beast from film. Video game scoring, if you want it to feel actually scored, is pretty hard to do. If you want to approach it like a movie score and have emotional beats follow what the player is doing, it’s a pretty significant challenge because you have to do that stuff dynamically as, aside from cut-scenes, you don’t know when any of that stuff is going to happen – it’s all up to the player. The interactive element adds another layer of complexity. Certainly, they’re different beasts entirely but there’s a lot of overlap.
It’s cool to see people like that getting into it, and I certainly think the industry has changed quite a bit since 2009, when I started working with Supergiant. When Bastion came out, I didn’t really know there was a market for people who want to buy game soundtracks. I didn’t know that but I spoke to Danny Baranowsky, as Super Meat Boy came out around the same time, and he was like, “Oh yeah, you’ve got to release the soundtrack on Bandcamp! People really dig it and they’re into it,” and I thought, “Cool. I guess we should probably do that.” It was a bit of an afterthought, after we’d released the game, and the response was so huge, so overwhelming to me, that it’s really been an incredible surprise ever since that people have been so receptive for the music. There is this really close-knit community around video game music, people who are really enthusiastic, and that’s awesome. I went to MAGFest, the music and gaming festival, and it was crazy. I gave a couple of talks and I was only there for 30 hours or something but it was really a crazy experience and such an interesting bunch of people who are really enthusiastic about this thing that I love and that a lot of other people are into too.
You worked with Supergiant through the entire development process of Bastion and Transistor, so how did that affect how you scored them?
I had a pretty unique relationship with Supergiant. I started freelancing around the beginning of Bastion but I became a full-time member of the team partway through that project and have been ever since, so actually being part of the team gives me a lot more access to what’s happening, development-wise. It makes me part of the decision-making and discussion about what’s happening creatively, what the various disciplines are doing – the art, the story – and how we want all that to feel. The way I approach it initially is I start going from what we want it to feel like, tonally. What are some of our high-level ideas about tone and gameworld setting? I’ll just run with that and start making music that feels like that somehow and that’s sort of my guideline. I know another thing that was important that guided me creatively on both projects was I wanted to try and do something that wasn’t one particular genre of music. I wanted to make a new genre that was a hybrid of a bunch of other things and use that to guide and group all of the pieces together so that, even though they were different, they were related by the style of music and the musical palette, the types of instruments I was using and things like that.
Another factor for me, given that we’re an independent studio and on Bastion especially, was that we basically had no music budget, it was, like, just me. All the music I wrote had to be able to be performed convincingly by me and put together in a way that sounded… I didn’t want it to sound lo-fi or anything necessarily; that if there was anything that did sound lo-fi it was an aesthetic choice, that I did it on purpose, and I didn’t want to have any bad string samples or anything like that. I didn’t want to do any of that stuff because it’s just distracting and if I leaned into the things that I was able to execute well myself, that way the overall result would probably turn out better. I leaned into things like acoustic guitars, electric guitars and basses, stuff that I could really play and record in my apartment, and then a lot of samples and synths that I could combine in a way that was convincing.
With both scores, there’s a sense of old and new world meeting. Is that as much logistical as tying into the games’ design aesthetics, then?
Yeah, it’s a bit of both. The electronic drums stuff, the sampled drums, are both a creative choice and a practical choice because the hardest thing for me to do was record live drums. I just didn’t have the space or the budget to go do that. It really became, at first, a practical choice and then an aesthetic choice. “I can’t do that, so let’s lean into trip-hop sampled drums and more electronic percussion.”
Your two main partnerships with this work have been with Supergiant and with Ashley Barrett. How did you come to end up working with both?
It’s funny because my good buddy Amir Rao is one of the cofounders of Supergiant Games and we grew up together. We started playing Dungeons & Dragons together when we were about eight years old; we were in bands together all through middle school and high school and did all this other stuff, were good buddies all the way through college. We both went to college in New York, though we went to different schools, and he was getting into game development. I was really excited for him and was happy that he was doing that. It was something that I never had an ambition to do, necessarily, and I didn’t even know how one would really even do that, but it was something I was always excited by because I had been a gamer forever and loved video games, grew up playing them all the time with Amir and on my own. When he was leaving EA and founding Supergiant he just asked me if I was up for doing all the music and sound design for this game that he was going to try and make, and I said, “Of course, that sounds amazing. I’ll totally do that.”
Ashley was someone who I had a lot of mutual friends with. We both grew up in the Bay Area with a lot of mutual friends but I didn’t really know her until I moved to New York. I’d worked on another music project – I’d recorded a musical, written with my brother – was recording the demo for it and people knew her and recommended her as a great singer, so I had her over to record a few parts. I thought she was great and when I was working on Bastion, I thought, “You know whose voice would be really good for this? That girl I worked with, Ashley.” We started working together on Bastion, it was a blast and turned out great and we were really happy with the results and we wanted to work together even more on Transistor.
- Transistor
The work on Transistor ties in so well with the game and with the story, and a lot of that stems from having a main character who is a singer. Did you feel that your compositions, and Ashley’s contributions, were a way for you to give Red a voice
Definitely. It was all part of the same conception in that, after we had had such a great experience with the vocal stuff in Bastion, we wanted to start to lean into it even more on Transistor and see what we could do that would afford that and make it make sense. Having a character be a singer is something that totally makes sense and makes vocals be a part of the world that you accept. It makes perfect sense to you as a player. That seemed like a really good opportunity to have more vocals and have the vocals be more integrated into the music of the game. One thing I felt after Bastion was I had the instrumental pieces but then the vocal pieces were more a different style of music, a bit. They were more of a stripped-down, folkier, bluesier thing which, while I was happy with how it turned out, wasn’t fully integrated in my mind into the rest of the music. So one objective I had on Transistor was to try and make the vocal pieces be more of a piece with the rest of the music of the rest of the game, tonally.
Did that include the inclusion of Ashley’s ‘hummed’ versions of the songs? You basically ended up with three versions of that one soundtrack.
The humming was something we thought would be really cool to pull you inside of the character’s head in Turn Mode – that was the original concept. We have this new software we were using that allowed us to do pretty cool multi-channel audio stuff and I thought that a cool use of that would be to have this track that’s just playing all the time and is silent that we can turn on whenever we want. Then all of a sudden we have this humming track that we were able to do some interesting multi-track stuff with where we put a low-pass filter on all the other tracks of music and then brought up this previously silent vocal track. I thought it really helped to pull you inside this character’s head while you’re planning – and you are meant to be in her headspace while you’re planning out her moves. So that was a real opportunity and then once we had it all integrated we thought, “Let’s find another use for it.” I think Amir came up with the idea to have a humming button where, whenever you want, you just press this button and she’ll start humming.
- Bastion
You also have a band going as well, Control Group. What’s currently happening with that?
Pretty good. We’re not playing much as I moved back to San Francisco, the Bay Area, and the rest of the band are still in Brooklyn. I moved at the end of 2014 so we haven’t really gotten the chance to do much since. We recorded a bunch of drum tracks for a new album before I left and I edited them all, good to go but we haven’t been able to work on them much since I had a baby, Evan had a baby, Jeremy started a company, the manager had a baby, so everybody’s pretty busy. Still around but we haven’t had much of an opportunity to do much work.
Do you find that you have more freedom writing for a band as compared to the soundtracking or the musical?
I see it as a whole different beast because there are things about it that are totally freeing, playing with a band, compared to what I’m doing when I’m writing (for videogames) because I am sort of the whole band and I have to make every piece of it. It’s pretty deliberate and I’ve got to plan it all out and experiment as I go whereas in the band context, the way we do it is everyone’s writing. You are just responsible for your one particular thing on that song and it’s a really freeing thing. The objective is just to have fun. So in some ways there is more freedom with the band in that you can just cut loose and that’s the objective whereas with the game, there’s almost no limitation on what can be done. There’s a lot of freedom in both, I would say. For the band, we’re trying to play rock music; it’s a type of music, but in the game whatever it needs to be is what it should be.
At least with writing for the games, you don’t need to worry about the logistics of taking it out live but there must be a demand for that anyway. Have you tried any of the songs live or considered it?
Ashley and I have done little acoustic performances of some of the vocal pieces. We got the chance to play at PAX Prime a couple of years back and we did a little medley from Bastion and then We All Become from Transistor and that was cool. I haven’t done any full band arrangements of any of the music but I’ve heard some pretty cool covers people have done, particularly In Circles. I’ve heard some pretty cool covers of that in terms of full band arrangements. Actually, at the Boston Festival of Indie Games a few years back I got the chance to play a few of the songs with the VGO (Video Games Orchestra), which was awesome. I played Build That Wall and Coming Home and that was a blast to play with those guys. They’re so good.
The fan community for Bastion and Transistor have to rank among some of the nicest around. How have your interactions with them been?
It’s been amazing. I’m so impressed by and shocked by how into it some of the fans are. It’s really amazing to see the level of appreciation for something that you work on. It’s one of those things where it’s like you work on a thing for two and a half years and toil away in the dark, no-one knows about it, and you get really close to it. It’s hard to have any perspective so you don’t know if it’s any good by the time you’re done and it’s very nice to have people tell you they like it. It’s certainly something that we really appreciate and don’t take for granted at all as a team. I know that everyone is continually grateful for the response that people have had to our two games. The fans are amazing and just seeing stuff like that cool Tumblr called ‘Fuck Yeah Supergiant’ is awesome, and stuff like fan-art and seeing so much amazing cosplay. We’ve seen so much incredible cosplay – we saw cosplay for Red before Transistor came out! People were that excited about it and it’s crazy.
- Pyre
You mentioned the criteria that a good videogame soundtrack should achieve in order to work. Do you have any benchmark soundtracks that managed to best attain those qualities?
There’re a lot of soundtracks that I really enjoy. Diablo II stands out in my mind as a really fantastic soundtrack. I just started playing it again, I don’t know why… well, they patched it to work on new operating systems so I just thought that I may as well go start it again. Man, that game’s fantastic. Tone is so good in it and music is a huge contributor to the tone being so immersive and so spectacular. A lot of the choices in the art and design obviously contribute to that as well but the music… you hear that Tristram theme – which I guess is also from Diablo I – and you immediately know where you are. I think that’s a really great example of music that creates and enforces a place, puts you in a specific spot, is really identifiable and yet stays out of the way. It’s not distracting but if you stop and listen to it, it’s cool.
There’s a whole gamut of other games but one is Marble Madness, the old-school NES game. The composer for that, Brad Fuller, just passed away which really bummed me out but he was awesome. That game had an incredible soundtrack and it was one of the things I heard when I was a little kid where I was, like, “I have never heard anything like this music. It’s so weird.” I was super into it and it went so well with the really strange game that Marble Madness was too, it was super-weird. Leading up to Bastion, I was checking out Plants Vs Zombies, the original one. It was a very simple soundtrack for that but it was really well-implemented and the tone was just perfect for the music. It was light-hearted but also, zombies. It had a bit of an ominous quality to it but the instruments and the music itself was pretty light-hearted. Laura Shigihara did that one and she did a really good job. The music for Journey is very emotional and it’s very cinematic in many ways so it does a good job of carrying you through the arc of that game really well. Austin Wintory is awesome, and Banner Saga is another one of his soundtracks that I really like. That’s probably my favourite of his. Fallout 2 – Mark Morgan, that’s great and it’s probably one of my favourite games of all time and that’s just spectacular. Also, Dungeon Keeper had a really incredible soundtrack as well. That was super-weird as it was half sound design – there would be this weird ambiance, sound effects, and then the soundtrack would kick in, but it was like part of the ambience. Weird industrial music, almost, but really cool and kind of sparse. It really helped set off the tone of that game which I think is one of my favourite tones of any game. It’s so unique and so much fun. Again, it’s creepy, mostly, but fun at its core. It’s light-hearted but super-dark and weird also.
One of the additions with this edition of the Transistor soundtrack was the addition of She Shines, and that’s on the limited edition of the digital version too. Was it always intended to keep one more song behind for special occasions?
I wrote it specifically for the Apple TV version of Transistor as there was basically a loading screen that you’re required to have with Apple TV as you don’t store anything on your Apple TV, you just download it and play it so there’s a chance that someone might be sitting there for a few minutes which had never happened in the game before. So we created a screen and an experience to cover that, and the song was part of that experience. I thought it would be a cool little extra thing for this version of the game and I was excited that, if we did do another release of the soundtrack, we could add it in. I wrote it in January 2015, well after the game had come out, and it was really fun to jump back into Transistor’s world as in my mind I had moved on to other stuff. It was good to go back in with a different perspective and write another song from Red’s point of view.
What else are you working on at the moment?
I’m working with Supergiant. I’m full-time there and I moved to the Bay Area, partially because that’s where the Supergiant office is. I used to work from home, in my apartment in Brooklyn, but now I go into the office four days a week and work from home one day. It’s a big change of pace from me and it’s nice to be able to interact with people that I’d been working with for years in person. Mostly, I’m just working on Supergiant stuff. We’re getting ready for PAX, which is always a big ordeal as we ship loads of stuff over there, and we have new pieces of merch this time too. We have three new pieces of merch since the last PAX which are the Red tour poster, the Red figurine and the vinyl. I’m looking forward to it.