The Sound of Hades

I had a lot of fun voicing Zagreus and Skelly!
They are each fun for different reasons […]

We ended up using a combination of dynamic stem variations and section markers to achieve a level of variety and responsiveness that we were happy with.

So here it is – our newest exclusive interview with Darren, so if you want to find out more about the sound of Hades, Darren’s past and how it leads into his work at the studio, then look no further.

As a little kid, probably about five years old, I started singing and performing in musical theatre. I took some keyboard classes around this time, but it didn’t stick. I picked up guitar at around eleven years old and started writing songs and playing in bands. In high school, I became obsessed with multi-track recording and dove really deeply into experimenting with that. I ended up studying a combination of music production and music business in college, and I interned in a recording studio for a couple of years.

After school, I was trying to do any music job I could find. I produced some local artists, played some hired musician gigs, wrote a musical with my brother, and did a couple of little TV/Film spots. At that point (September 2009), my childhood friend and longtime bandmate had just quit his job at EA and was co-founding an independent game studio, and he asked me to do all the audio for their first game. I said “YES!” and I’m still working there now!

I grew up playing mostly rock music. I took some guitar lessons and singing lessons over the years, and I learned piano basics in college. My main experience before games was in songwriting, and I still consider that to be my particular speciality. As far as musical influences go, I grew up listening to everything from showtunes to Led Zeppelin. Some of my current and past favourites are: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, They Might Be Giants, Ozma, Bjork, Imogen Heap, Jeff Buckley, Louis Cole, KNOWER, Vulfpeck, Pixies, Radiohead, David Bowie, the first couple Weezer albums, and on and on!

A lot of what I do is based on trying to lean into my strengths. I had a background in music production and songwriting, so I lean heavily on that knowledge for my composing. Almost all of my pieces are structured like songs, and a big part of my creative process is the actual production itself. The way something sounds is as critical to me as the actual notes it plays. When I started working on Bastion, I had an initial goal of making a kind of music I’d never heard in a game before, so I set out to make something that felt specific to that game. I’ve tried to make music that is specific to the world of each game that I’ve worked on.

Another aspect of my approach to creating the sound of a game is focusing as much as possible on having that sound feel like it comes from the world of the game. At the start of a project, I ask myself: What sort of instruments would exist in this game world? What sort of music would people listen to? What kinds of songs would people write? What styles of music might fit here? Once I have the answers to those questions, I’ll see if there are some other sonic elements or styles I can juxtapose to that, and help enhance the tone of the game world.

It was an incredible honour to have a collection like this made, and then to have people actually buy it! It was a lot of fun to look back at the music for all of the games and to have an opportunity to release additional material on vinyl that wasn’t part of the initial physical releases for the soundtracks. I think the packaging turned out beautifully, and it’s really interesting to see this physical representation of a lot of the work I’ve done for the past ten years. It’s a big honkin’ box of vinyl!

Originally, we had a different conceit for Hades when we first started development. We knew it would be Greek mythology focused, but it wasn’t about trying to escape the underworld, and Zagreus wasn’t a part of the equation. We knew it would be in some sort of a rogue-like format, and we wanted to incorporate an overarching narrative into it. That much stayed the same! From a musical standpoint, I knew I wanted some instruments that evoked a Mediterranean vibe, so I did some research and ordered a baglama, bouzouki, and lavta. Those ended up dictating a lot of the vibe of the game’s music.

In a game designed for replayability, how do you make music that people won’t get sick of? There’s about two and a half hours of music in Hades, that has to last over potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay.

For me, finding a way to implement the music that would extend the life of it, and make it feel different from run to run, as well as feeling somewhat scored to your particular run, was really important. We ended up using a combination of dynamic stem variations and section markers to achieve a level of variety and responsiveness that we were happy with.

I had a lot of fun voicing Zagreus and Skelly! They are each fun for different reasons. Skelly was a blast because he allowed me to go for maximum ridiculousness. Subtlety is not really his thing. Zag was really different. My approach with him was to try and make everything feel as natural and believable as possible. He gets to be witty, and he has more emotional range than Skelly, but I think deep down he’s just a pretty caring guy. He cares deeply for all of the other characters in the game, and is concerned for their well-being, often going out of his way to help them resolve their troubles. He seems like a kind of brooding, arrogant person when you meet him, but he really opens up as the game goes on, and I think it’s really refreshing!

Pyre was an interesting one from a development standpoint. We were interested in trying something really different. One of the main ideas early on was to have a game that dealt with failure in a non-traditional way. You could fail, and the game would keep on going. It would just change the outcome of the story. From a music standpoint, I went a little crazy with the multi-channel implementation.

For most of the pieces in the game, they are implemented as eight different stems playing simultaneously in any number of different combinations. This allowed us really granular control over what stems the player was hearing at any given time, and we developed a really elaborate reactive music system. My main takeaway from this approach is that this sort of reactivity has a sort of effectiveness bell curve, meaning after a certain point, there are diminishing returns. I found that only the more noticeable music changes contributed to the feeling of reactivity, and I refined this process a lot for Hades.

I’m looking forward to whatever we do next at Supergiant! I have no idea what that will be at the moment. I’m working on an album with my band, Control Group, which we’ve had sitting around for years. I hope to finish that up sometime in the next few months. “The Songs of Supergiant Games: 10th Anniversary Orchestral Collection” album comes out pretty soon, and I’m really excited for people to hear it! It was an incredible project to work on and I’m thrilled with how it turned out! Aside from that, hopefully, the world will recover from this pandemic and Ashley and I can play some more concerts someday…