Making a Space Opera

We sat down with our Creative Director, Karl D’Costa, and discussed his work on the new soundtrack for the 35th Anniversary collection he composed, performed, and produced. You can buy the full Alien Breed 35th Anniversary OST, Hyper-Breed Dreams, on Steam. The complete original soundtracks for Alien Breed 1, SE, 2, TA, 3D, and Killing Grounds are included in the virtual museum of Alien Breed 35th Anniversary.

Tell us a bit about your role in the project and how your scope changed through the development cycle?

I do love working in small teams when we don’t have enough resources and the odds are stacked against us! Sounds crazy, ha, but the chaos and firefighting every morning, full-on engagement and problem-solving is what I so love about making games. I’m the creative director, and this basically means I help steer our ship in the best creative direction, with Team17’s, Commodores’, Antstream’s and the gamers' needs at hand.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but we only started this project 9 months earlier this year. I started off jamming with the team (ideation), bouncing ideas around and growing something from nothing is what I do. Then really explored the Alien Breed games, universe, law and what the games meant and will mean to a new generation of gamers. I collate and pick out pieces to form the concepts and mood board. And this cycle keeps repeating until we have grown something special and worthy. You see, I was making games when Alien Breed came out and already understood its significance to the Amiga and gaming back then, and this IP really needed celebrating. My primary goal was to immerse you and make you feel you were actually there in the universe - so the very top design pillar was based around this and how to present a collection of games with you there within the Alien Breed universe.

To immerse and place you there, we needed a cinematic trailer showing the long deep space journey to the science space station, mentioned in the games. And then, within the space station, with an approach to the collection of games (computer console), which was based on the Intex computer system used in the games too. We wanted to keep as much authenticity as possible. With this in mind, we decided on basing the product on the same retro pixel art style and even extracted graphics from within the games to create our museum and easter egg horde mode. Team 17 were great and supported us by reaching out to the original team for interviews and wonderful things never seen before to fill the museum. And subsequently put a lot of love into creating a fun environment to explore and not just a list to draw from.

We had so much fun working on and playing our own horde mode, our respected nod to the top down games, and who knows if there’s enough interest we could explore developing an entire game. Just like with movies, I’m a strong believer that sound and music are very powerful tools to immerse. Ambient sound effects and subtle animations were placed around accessing the main computer console and within the museum, and a fully sung soundtrack was what I decided was needed for the job. And not even that, so I took it upon myself that we needed mood-setting songs for the main interface, the museum and horde mode.

You created a whole new Original Soundtrack for Alien Breed 35th Anniversary. What was your inspiration for the signature sound you chose?

After a lot of thought, I found it era-fitting to go with a 90s rock theme. The likes of Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Linkin Park, etc. Again, just like the movies, a song can elevate and set an underlying mood.

The album contains six songs, and it all started from needs within the product for background instrumental soundtracks. Xenomorph started life as a slow-paced ambient rock track to fit the entire product. Job done right! Hell no, Alien Breed needed much more!

Once we pieced together the main home screen and universe, that then split in two, and I started work on an even more laid-back ambient version for the universe/archive museum. After horde mode came, this really wanted something more energetic and upbeat, so another was needed. Then, when it was time to add our intro mini-movie depicting the long journey to the science space station, it was then that I made the decision to take everything further with more eerie sci-fi notions. So I reworked all the soundtracks again. I do like a challenge, and the only way I could portray real emotion was to add vocals and sing it myself. Let the songs begin!

The first track, Xenomorph (describing the alien form), starts describing someone in their final hours via alien impregnation. Then I had to add a little fear of the queen boss and also wanted to mention something about the powerful corporations experimenting without morals. I got there in the end.

The second track, The Horde Surrounds You, came from our horde mode’s soundtrack, and I wanted to get you moving on this one, so I added keyboards and dance production. I even dusted off my talkbox (Electrospit) for some extra grooving vibe. Basically, a couple of small speakers blasting a sawtooth synth that vibrates the throat, and with only vowel mouth movements, a faint sound comes out to record. You can just about make out the rhythmic “Closer and closer!” in there. Funny enough, this one took inspiration from Ghostbusters and Living On A Prayer songs. Here, I wanted lyrics about actually coming down the lift, doors opening with the excitement of running around playing our horde mode. As the song progressed, it also called for a little gospel backing in there, so I convinced my wife to join me layer it up. A crazy mishmash, but it works for me!

Boomer Shooter came about from a need for us to create a trailer highlighting our three retro 3D boomer-shooter games in the collection, so I quickly composed a repeating guitar riff with a single phrase “Boom!” in there. After a couple of weeks of living with it, that evolved into a song about someone fed up with the daily job grind, looking forward getting home and letting it all go in a their genre game of choice. I think “Respawn, reload, let the adrenaline flow!” says it all, and this one took inspiration from all the skater rock songs I used to enjoy.

The fourth song was a request to make a song with the title breed. I was like, OK then! This one had no background product needs, so I was able to let go and work on an emotional ballad of sorts. I wanted to go deep with this one and wrote about a lone survivor’s long mental torture, dreaming in cryo-sleep about losing the love of your life. It’s about their inner demons amplifying the pain of the memory, as they pushed you into the only single-space escape pod, left behind to be devoured by the breed.

I kept ‘Into The Universe’ real ambient and managed to persuade my wife again to join me with ambient ghostly vocals in the background. A nice one to chill to.

I know you had some interesting moments during the composition of the soundtrack from your home studio. Can you share one of the amusing anecdotes during the production?

So after the design work was done, it was time to dust off the music gear, update over 2000 audio plugins and practice my guitar and vocal scales again.

I’ve actually had vocal training in the past, being part of a few gospel choirs and had the pleasure of performing at the Royal Albert Hall. Music-wise, I grew up around it with my father having been trained in literally every instrument and even touring within his family band since the age of 11. He majored on guitar but used to repair pianos on the side, and I remember many part-built pianos all over the house with no room to move. I ended up building and repairing guitars so it was an obvious choice to jump at the opportunity and the 90s rock challenge.

Learning how to ‘fry scream’ to add some grit to my voice without hurting myself was a great feeling to finally wield. I’ve always wondered how they managed this without losing their voice. I remember fully in-the-zone practising this till the late hours in our music studio room, and my wife announcing over Alexa to shut the hell up as it was past 2 am. lol

What are you most proud of from the project? Anything special you managed to get in either from an audio or an art perspective?

Well, I guess firstly, pulling it all off against the odds and seeing the reactions when people first experienced Alien Breed 35th Anniversary. I do love the immersion we achieved most of all I do love how the songs turned out, and they make me smile every time listening to them.

You are stuck on the Intex space station; the hordes are closing in. You get one track to play on the speaker system at full blast while you take on the breed. What song are you playing?

That’s an easy one. “The Horde Surrounds You”, but the vocal version. I made this for this very reason. ;)