Astro Bot - Kenneth CM Young 인터뷰

Audio transcriptions

"Kenneth, you handsome devil you! How are you?
I'm good, thank you. Yeah, I was...
Yeah, having finished up on the project, I'm now sort of in a slightly more chilled place and yes, been enjoying the reaction to the game and seeing everybody finally get their hands on it and yeah, it's good. Life is good. It's always good when your project finds an audience and happy people."

"How does that feel? Because it's been interesting this time around because I've obviously loved your work since LittleBigPlanet and all that stuff but with AstroBot it seems like even more people got to know your stuff and really enjoy it but at least for me it seems like even now with AstroBot, let's call it the full game even more people have started to appreciate your work because I'm listening to podcasts all the day and it's just so fun to finally hear people talking about oh, this Kenneth CM young guy, he seems good and I'm just, thank you! Come on, where have you been? Yeah, that's very kind of you, thank you."

"I mean, the funny one is that with Astro's playroom, because it was pre-installed in the PlayStation 5 in a weird sort of way, we probably spoke about this last time but because that game had such a buzz around it, even before it shipped but then when it shipped and it did finally sell a decent number I remember thinking I'm probably never going to work on another game that is ever as successful as this or has as good a reception and it really was just like, I felt like at the age of 28 I'd peaked and I was like, it's going to be downhill from here and then with Astro's playroom, it was very strange because almost irrespective of what we did you knew that the game was going to be played by at the very least tens of millions of people you know, it's like, that's a very strange situation to know that that is the bare minimum irrespective of whether what... because people would check it out, right?
even if what we made was rubbish, people would check it out and that's just a very unusual situation so we were in a weird sort of way, we were under loads of pressure there it felt like, but actually when we were making that game about halfway through, we were like, I think we were overthinking this it just needs to be fun and that's all we can really focus on and that is the mantra of that team, is to make fun player experiences and so in this project, in a weird sort of way it was a lot more pressure because this is the team's big swing standing up to that, I don't know why I'm using American analogies but it's like, the dominant culture is in there and yeah, and they did, they've done a great job and when you're working on a game, you don't..."

"with the best will in the world, you just make the best thing that you can and you think about the audience and you think about who's going to play it and yeah, I do my bit there, you know, the way I work with Nico and Junko, the audio director is to think about the player experience and try and focus on how the music can elevate that and support it and yeah, and then so now that it's out and it has had such a great reception, it's fantastic and I'm just so thrilled for the team that, you know, it feels like yeah, they now then get to make more games and can focus on just making the best games that they can but it's a double-edged sword because they've done such a good job that that's now the expectation, that they will keep doing that and I'm sure they've got that in them, but yeah, no, it's just, it's great like, you know, it's what you want when you work on a project to work the land like that and yeah, everyone's really happy Yeah, with you now talking about Asteroids Playroom was the process of making the music different from that to this one, with this being a more diverse game, bigger game and everything like that?
I'd certainly say that, yeah, I mean, the process is fundamentally the same but because of the scale of the project, there were a lot more levels that I think which were maybe a bit more experimental in nature so if I compare the project, I'd say that, you know, something like Astrobot Rescue Mission, in general, the level settings were much more kind of tropey, you know, you've got your fire levels which need heavy metal, you've got an underwater level, beach level these are all things where it's quite clear what the music direction needs to be in terms of, you know, musical genre and then it's my job to just introduce elements of roboticism, digital touches, all the things that are like these little pillars of the visual, like the art direction and the music direction to back up the robotic character and always with a focus on it being fun With Playroom, it was a little bit different because, of course, it had this higher level conceptual idea of it taking place inside of PlayStation 5 so that led the music down a certain route and so that's where we had things like the GPU song because it was about PlayStation hardware and trying to find ways to back up that high level concept whereas in this game, in a way, it was much more like Astrobot Rescue Mission in the sense that it was a bunch of levels loosely tied together with a high level narrative but the high level narrative is really just there to string the experience together it's not central to the player experience, it's really just, again about each level being a fun toy for you to interact with and have fun with and so some of the levels and the stuff that was easiest to write was the stuff that was tropey but then the stuff that needed a lot more time and experimentation was things like bigger levels that had more complex interactivity in the music, like the puppetry level or bubbling under, the underwater level and, of course, the Sony first party remixes which the challenge there being, even though the brief is super clear we want to take what is for example, God of War level, where it's adult IP really, it's not family-friendly entertainment, it's not for kids and the music's very serious in nature and that's not appropriate for the fun environment of Astrobot, how do we take that and make it fun?
and although, like I say, that brief is clear but actually what does that mean in practice? It wasn't clear until I had to start getting my hands dirty in order to work out how are we going to do that With you now talking about these already existing tracks and talking about the experimental how was it making your own versions of these for at least us gamers that have time to play these games and aren't busy making amazing songs what's the process like making these songs? Were there any restrictions?
Did you talk with any of the original composers?
What was their thinking about how to I don't think they even necessarily knew, I mean I didn't know that it's not my job to manage the relationship with the composers but from what I can see, they didn't know that this was happening Sony own that music so they have the right to pass it on as long as, we had to get buy-in from the original teams they had to give us permission to actually do that they were already working on the levels and they trusted them with their characters and they'd gone through that process of discussing how to make that work and agreement on what that would look like and what was allowed and what was not allowed but it came to the music, I was given the stems which is an archival format for the music where you've got each of the different instruments on a different audio track, so I wasn't just working with the finished mix and then cutting that up, I was actually able to just take out individual instruments and get access to those and get creative with it, and that was really the solution I came up with for how to make it playful, was for me to actually just play with the original music the analogy I've been using to describe it to people is that it's a bit like you start with a jigsaw puzzle but it's actually finished it's the finished picture, which is the finished bit of music but then you break it up into these little building blocks and get creative mashing them together, even though they weren't quite designed to do that and sometimes you come up with a little new element that's interesting and then start to build a track out of that, and a lot of that stuff is not super obvious to people, certainly not when they're playing the game because you're busy controlling the character and concentrating the gameplay so the most important thing is that they can hear the main theme and recognise that thing that's backing up the IP be it God of War and Kratos, or Horizon and Alloy for example, so that has to be there but on top of that, or underneath that rather, there's all this stuff going on that's me just having fun with the parts and rearranging it, and bringing a little bit of myself to the table too, I think certainly in the Horizon and God of War, and less so but still to a certain extent in the Uncharted remix there's some new melodic elements where I've put my own little tune in there and the main role of that is to lighten the mood a little bit, my music presentation for this kind of game is relatively simple and naive and it's often that there's either a positive like if you think of it in a pop song format, there's a verse and a chorus one of them is normally a bit more serious than the other, and it juxtaposes against something that's the payoff where you get something that's more positive, that just creates this ebb and flow during the gameplay experience, which adds some positivity and variation, and that's part of what I'm doing there when I'm adding my own melodies to these iconic tracks, is just to create variety and add some more fun and light-hearted family-friendly vibes to something which is pretty serious in nature Yeah, because that's what kind of caught my ear while playing the game, because it's like you said I kind of felt that you might have been working with Bear McRae or something when I heard what seems obviously like something Kenneth, to me, is suddenly inside the Bar of War tune Well what's interesting is, there's two parts there which might sound new to people, there's the Nicol Harpa part at the beginning, I just so happen to have a Nicol Harpa because I bought one a few years ago for another project Meant to be! Yeah, but it's a beautiful instrument, and as a string player and a guitarist, for people who don't know, a Nicol Harpa is a Swedish folk instrument that's a cross between a typewriter and a viola it's this weird wooden mechanical string instrument and it's got a lot of sympathy, like a lot of the Nordic instruments like the Hardanger fiddle, it's got a bunch of sympathetic strings that resonate whilst you're playing the main strings but that's one of the main instruments from the more recent God of War games with their setting in Norse mythology I just so happen to have one, so I wrote my own melody on there and that wasn't inspired by God of War that was me building up a backing track of God of War stuff, and then just playing on top of it and then finding something that sounded good if anything, it's probably got more of a it's slightly bluesy actually, it's not entirely appropriate for God of War, that..."

"but then, in what I think of as the chorus, which is the...
that's actually one of Bear's motifs which is buried in the God of War main theme track that's played on the harp and I've changed it because he's written it in a mode which again makes it sound a bit more serious, so I've taken it and turned it into the major key to make it a little bit more light-hearted, but that's sort of, if you like yeah, like a modification of something that was already actually there and is present in the God of War music, but sort of reimagined and made more fun, if you like and then of course there's just the main iconic God of War theme, which is actually quite easy to work with, there's an interesting lesson there in terms of how, I think probably how Bear works as a media composer who has to write huge amounts of music for TV programmes, you know, you think about him working on the Lord of the Rings series at the moment, and just huge amounts of music you know, just like, and obviously he's got a music team he works with, it's not just him but an aspect of that process is quite clearly coming up with a theme that is very flexible and allows for a lot of adaptation and modification and modulation, so you can take that and use it in different ways, and that core like three note there's just a lot you can do with that and immediately, you know, you can hear that in the beginning of the God of War remix I've done, it's like that, you can just get that theme in there and start playing with it, and then yeah that was real fun and real pleasure just to be trusted with that material and yeah, get creative with it."

"Do you remember which of the tunes you started with, because as you said, the God of War theme might be more difficult for you because it's quite different from anything else in Astrobots.
That was the one I did first actually, and yeah, that was I can't remember why we started with that I think I had a hunch actually that one would be more doable just listening to the material and digging through the stems and listening to it, I was like I think there's quite a lot I can do with that, so I'll start with that one. The challenge with Horizon and Uncharted is their melodies are long and sprawling, and there's a lot less you can do with that. If you start changing that, it stops being the original recognisable theme so I've had to retain them much more I wasn't able to play with those as much as I was able to play with the God of War theme because the God of War theme is so simple and modular and allows for tweaking and change but I just wanted to start with that one, so actually it took a while because it was the first one and I was trying to work out this process of getting creative with the stems and playing with it and reorganising it and all the kind of stuff I did When I came to the other two, those took about the same amount of time I can't remember exactly what it was, but it wasn't quick, it was probably four or six weeks it took me for each of those and then there's also of course the process of you do it and it sounds finished but you put it in the game and then the team's got feedback about what actually this bit here comes down intensely too much and it stops supporting the gameplay so you can rework that bit and there's like an iteration pass that goes on to make it properly fit the gameplay It's funny that you said it's easier to make the God of War theme or Astro Body because one of the ones that impressed me but I really enjoyed God of War and but that's because I already loved the original songs and the Horizon theme I have never been much of a fan of but your version really took me by surprise and I found myself really immersed in the game and following the beat and stuff like that so it's kind of surprising to hear that you didn't feel like it was as easy to work with that as the other stuff Yeah, I mean that was the last one I did so I was it's not that it was impossible, it's just it's a different kind of music to the God of War music it was tricky but I suppose I wasn't as worried about that one because I had already done God of War Uncharted and I think Uncharted was the hardest one because of its melodic structure it's like in three sections and actually if you listen to the way that I've structured that track, the first time through I drop the B section it goes A, C and it only goes A, B, C the second time or third time through and that's because that B section really drops in intensity in the original Uncharted theme, it comes down, it goes all slow and quiet and that was one of those things where putting it in the game, it was like this is great but when this bit happens all the energy drops out and of course that theme wasn't used in that capacity during gameplay in Uncharted because it's not for gameplay it's actually title screen big thematic stuff and of course it would be referenced during the game but never in that format where it's just that three section sweet Uncharted title theme so yeah, trying to make something that wasn't designed to even take place during gameplay is difficult and of course I've got the benefit because the music in Astro Bot is more electronic in nature where you've got that cheap trick of just adding more overt percussion and adding a kick drum to add more drive and the obvious thing about all of the music is it's all been sped up a lot if you compare it to the original, some of it's twice as fast as the original and that's just what was necessary to get that intensity and get that drive that a platforming game needs to just keep the player motivated to just keep going While I remember this, you always keep talking about the three, but when I was lucky enough to get a version of the game with the digital soundtrack with the music being out on digital platforms today because we have to peek behind a curtain here we have to hold this interview for a few days, but one of the things that wasn't or isn't on the digital soundtrack is what I'm guessing you would like to call Loco Boto Yeah, so it's not on the soundtrack because that music for whatever reason is not fully owned by Sony, so they had to license it to put it in the game and they didn't license it for soundtrack use, that would have been an additional fee I guess so it's just a legal technicality. Obviously it would be nice to be in the soundtrack, but it wasn't felt like it was worth it to do that. I wasn't involved in that remix, although I think it was my idea to make the kids singing have a vocoder on it so it was a bit more robotic. Yeah, I love that part Yeah, I think it's been nice to see people be reminded of some of these games they've not played for a while and that they're still awesome and worth checking out But before we go into more original work, because you deserve a lot of praise for that as well, well, the God of War itself is original as well, but not entirely yours But now, you having God of War and all that stuff, were there any franchises that you would love to see in the future?
We know there's DLC coming, hopefully Astro Bot 2 Yeah, I mean, in terms of my own personal bucket list of stuff, I'm actually the games that I'm most passionate about, because I didn't have a console when I was growing up, so in terms of nostalgia, the stuff that I really get misguided about is PC gaming from the 90s So if I had a magic wand, I would and obviously within the confines of Astro Bot and the PlayStation nostalgia, there's no room for this, so this isn't a sneak peek, it's just my if I had the magic wand bucket list, I'd love to get my hands on music for the original Doom and have fun with that, or some of the other like Deus Ex, or just so many melodies that are still stuck in my head from when I had the free time to just spend a lot of my spare time gaming but yeah, I'd love to get in there. In terms of Sony stuff, oh gosh, I don't know yeah, Prappa the Rapper seems like an obvious thing that I'd love to play with, because it's already in the right wheelhouse of being fun and yeah, something like that maybe But now talking about more the original songs because one of the things that kind of surprised me was that you said it seemed like you were more open or got more room to experiment this time around, especially with songs like Luna, Quelle Fromage, stuff like that I started to think, is this really Kenny or is this Iga-san, Rihanna-san, Sasaki? Those tracks aren't me, those ones are by another composer I think those tracks are actually from a previous game from the Playroom or from Playroom VR, so they're reused and obviously in this game there's some of my work from Rescue Missions reused as well but yeah, I think that's one of the challenges of this project is that it's not a criticism, it's a compliment, but there's entire levels where there's game mechanics that you only see once in that one level and then the next level it's something new and so the team have really given players this amazing toy box experience where you just get all these different cool things to play with but of course all those different game mechanics and level settings require different music to support that different context and so yeah, as much as I really like that in the sense that it keeps things fresh, it gives me a different challenge so I'm not always having to write the same bit of music over and over and over again, I've got to think about doing different things for different levels, but of course every composer's got their limitations so it's important to have other people involved to make sure that we've got that variety but also keep the quality up, because I wouldn't be capable of writing a jazz track like that, certainly not quickly, so there's like an efficiency aspect to things too. What was your philosophy or was this your decision about which levels and songs to delegate to others, because it seems like at least they have been listening to your work because it really feels like Astro Bot even though they aren't yours. Yeah, I think that's probably just down to good direction and the fact that Nicholas really knows what's important about the player experience that they're trying to manifest and there's always this focus on fun I know for me, Nicholas is now scared of using the fun word because I think his observation is that because I've got quite a playful personality, if I end up trying to push that, the music ends up being too saccharine and too kiddy and too cute, so you kind of get that for free with me, so you don't need to ask for that, if anything sometimes it needs reined in so yeah, I assume that with the other composers I guess they got the benefit of hearing what I've done on previous games, as a point of reference With all these different kinds of songs what's your favourite songs? What's your own song that really, you felt like, oh, I nailed this Yeah, so I really like the Casino track that's one of my favourites, just because and again, this isn't really to do with AstroBot it's more just my own personal taste, but there's aspects of the production of that track that are the closest I've got to a 1960s, 1970s library music kind of vibe thinking about the way the strings sound and the horn sound so yeah, that's a guilty pleasure, that one I like that, I got in my moral messaging in the vocal hook there, that casinos again, that's a trope in family-friendly games, there's often a casino level in racing games, in platforming games, it's a thing and so that's why that's in there, it's an homage to that whole sub-genre of family-friendly gaming but at the same time, as a parent, I'm aware this is a casino, that's for adults, so me putting in a vocal hook in there, which is like, casino, casino, no guarantino, and then the bit at the end which is, you know, why don't you come on in and take a seat, we're watching you don't try to cheat, under-think and over-spend, the odds are stacked against you friend, table games and slot machines and everything that's in between, which one will you choose, snake eyes, you lose, so that's just me being like, hey, casinos are fun, but you go there to lose, okay, some people win, but statistically you're going to lose all your money and so that's just me having fun with that, recognising that actually we should probably point that out about casinos in our game, but using that as a source of creative inspiration to then have fun with that, and that's generally my approach is, whatever the concept I'm working with is, try and be playful with it and be fun with it, because that's what works in a game which is trying to be fun and playful."

"Was it an intentional choice to have even more tunes with lyrics in them this time around after the success of the GPU song, because we obviously have the casino level, we have now what seems to be the famous tree and everything. Yeah, I mean, that's like a trend I suppose because that goes back to the first game, the closest we got to a song in Asphalt Rescue Mission was the Fire In Your Mind track, which reappears in this project and works really well in the fire levels that it's in, and that wasn't something I was asked to do then, that was just something I thought, let's try this. I was always looking for excuses to use robotic vocalisations in the tracks because it's one of the few ways you can actually back up the robotic nature of everything in the world, the robots, the bosses are robots, the minis are robots, Astros are robots, so it's all robotic, so having stuff that sounds robotic was one of the things I was trying to do there, and then it was Nicol who said that actually that is great, like who doesn't like singing robots, let's have more of that, and that's where the GPU song came from, was Nicol saying let's have more of that kind of thing."

"In that instance, that was me being inspired by that direction, like let's look for opportunities to get more of that in your music please, combined with the fact that there's that high-level concept of the game taking place inside of the PlayStation 5, so I saw that opportunity and Nicol was crazy enough to agree to do that, whereas on this game, it was very much a case of with the puppetry level, they literally came to me and said, okay we'd like to have a song in this game, this is the level that's going to have a song in it, have fun and initially I refused because I couldn't see what to write about, because all you do is jump around the tree and it's one of my favourite levels in the game and it's quite tricky, it's about the right balance for me in terms of my gaming skill, it's like I die enough to be challenged but not enough to get frustrated by it oh I've gone blurry, it's done it again so yeah, the thing for me was like, well, it needs to be a fun track but I refused to write a song for it, because there's not anything to write about it needs to be about something so initially it just had the backing singers that you can hear in the track when you're outside the ideas that the plants are singing, or you can hear the bees when you go into the little honeycomb, beehive section that goes a bit more singing, and so that was there from the beginning and I thought they'd be happy with that, but Nicola was like, I want a song so I was like, right well, so we did a bit of brainstorming I'm trying to think about what can we write about, and yeah the only thing that happens other than the platforming is you, at the end you have the mini boss fight with the three chicks you've got to defeat which is really, I found that bit really hard but that for me, I was like, well we can construct a narrative around that I suppose, you could be like, there's these bird chicks in the tree's hair and he wants you to get rid of them, so we'll write about that which is kind of weird, it's kind of it's not exactly fourth wall breaking, but it's like, yeah, it's just a bit odd and it's really, it's the only thing I think, there's other things we could have written about it, it just would have been way too random, like we could write a song about trees, but I mean it's not what the experience is about, whereas at least the boss fight is something you've got to do and level, so it makes more sense for the player to talk about that and of course, whilst the player's playing this, they've got no idea what the tree's talking about, even if you can actually stop and listen to the lyrics, you're like, okay the tree's saying, you know what you've got to do, and it's like, I don't know what I've got to do actually no, so the whole thing is just a little bit crazy, but then the fact that it doesn't make sense is fine, because once people have played the level, they'll be like, ah, that's what the tree was talking about, got it, okay, it's all good and then the fact that they had this idea that you would get into the tree by going through its mouth, and I was like, well I suppose we could have the tree tell you to get into its mouth and make that part of the song, and then again, yeah, that's weird, let's do that, and so yeah it's just, you know, it's a who knew that that was going to be in the game? They knew they wanted a song but I don't think they quite knew what that would entail and yeah, that's what we ended up with, so yeah, I'd love to do more of that, but that takes a while, the songwriting is not the slow part there, that probably just took me two or three days coming up with the lyrics and trying it out it was trying to actually solve the problem of what's the song going to be about and having discussions about that and me refusing and saying, there's nothing right about it, I'm not doing it, and then coming back to it and saying, come on, come on Kenny, you're creative, you can do this, solve it so yeah, anyway, it's good they pushed me, because if I'd had my way, they wouldn't have had a song in it, so you know, that's how these things go sometimes. Because that's why I started to think about that level specifically, because we've been talking before about you getting often to see the levels beforehand and being able to write the music for that specific thing so I started to think, oh, have Kenneth been playing this level now and didn't understand that he was supposed to squirt into the mouth of the tree or something and now wanted to help people with that kind of way Yeah, I mean, it was trying to solve that problem in a way, because asking the player to go into the tree's mouth, it's like, that's not something people are necessarily going to be into. They're like, should I?
Is he going to eat me? If I do that, do I get killed?
And yet, you can overthink these things It's very easy to sort of try and second guess what people are going to feel. And earlier versions of the level, I think that was didn't work as well, but once we got it feeling, like, once the tree starts singing, we get all the little flowers pop out of the ground and it feels much more happy fun. It was less dark and weird once we made it more overtly, like, this is okay, we're having a party here, it's all good But yeah, telling people to do it and the tree inviting you to do it helps, I think, because without that the tree would just stand in there with their mouth open and it's not necessarily clear, like, why are they doing that?
So yeah, the song helps with the gameplay there and helps tell you what to do. It's a cheap trick, but it works It works excellently. But unfortunately, I only have 30 minutes with you today, Kenneth, so I've been told that I kind of have to wrap it up. So I just want to give you the opportunity because I hope that you will be able to talk about your amazing work many times in the future now. So what's one thing that you're really burning to talk about that you fear us dumb journalists won't ask you that you really want to talk about? Please share now I'd say you've got me there, because I think all the key talking points have been covered, like, the highlight of the project for me was the first party remixes I really just, yeah, that was just a privilege and I enjoyed it I don't know, I think yeah, just thrilled by the reaction and glad people are enjoying it. I think the fact that, what is interesting as well is that so many people have reached out on social media or sent me an email to say that they've really enjoyed the game and they're really enjoying the music and when is the soundtrack coming out? And the fact that it's out now, or should be by the time this video goes out, is great, because A, they'll stop bugging me, and B, that's one of the nice things about no, no, no, it's good, people want it, that's a good problem to have right? It's a compliment. One of the nice things about game music, particularly in quite a music-centric experience like Astrobot, where the music is permitted to be really front and centre in the player experience, which isn't all games, and that's completely fine, but it's quite old school in its presentation there and that lends itself to people really paying attention to the music listening to the music, enjoying the music, and wanting to experience it outside of the game, and that's lovely, because it's one of the ways that people continue to remember the games they play. They don't always have the time to go back to revisit and play a game but just putting on a track and being like, oh yeah, that game was great, I loved that, this track's great that's something that people do, and they'll do for the rest of their lives, and it's really nice to have that connection and be part of people's lives in that way. I do get messages from people saying how the music has been part of their life, and either helped them through a difficult period or, like I remember, because Astral Plane came out during the pandemic, there was all kinds of, like, the world was such a weird place, and to have this game that was fun, and then this music that was fun was important for people, it kind of gave them a little bit of an escape, and so I got messages from people talking about how they were listening to the music, and that was the moment they felt like they sort of woke up and came out of the COVID bubble and all this, and those are little moments that people will remember for the rest of their lives, and My Silly Music's sort of somehow wrapped up in that, and that's not something you can really anticipate, but it's always nice when people tell you about that stuff and, yeah, it's cool."

"Yeah, and you now being able to brag about having the best-selling PlayStation 5 game, the highest-rated PlayStation 5 game, that's something to put on your portfolio.
Yeah, it's all good."

"Can't complain.
Thank you so much, Ginnett. I promise I won't bug you too much in your DMs on X and everything like that, now that I'm able to talk to you face-to-face again. It's been a real pleasure, Ginnett."

"Yeah, thank you.
Thank you so much."