Sonic Alchemy: Crafting the Musical Universe of Remedy Games - An Interview with Composer Petri Alanko

Step into the realm of sound design and composition with Petri Alanko as he discusses his pioneering work on Remedy Entertainment's groundbreaking titles. From the haunting melodies of the Alan Wake series to the surreal atmospheres of Control and Quantum Break, explore the fusion of music and narrative that defines Alanko's immersive soundscapes. Join us for an exclusive glimpse into the artistry behind video game music creation, as Petri spills the beans about upcoming projects that promise to redefine the gaming experience.

How did you initially get into composing music for video games?

I didn't know anybody from the gaming business back then. But then several guys from advertisement agencies that I knew moved to other companies. That's when my phone started ringing, and eventually, I received a call from Remedy, for instance. However, it took quite a few years between the late '90s and when that call finally happened.

Since you've composed music for video games as well as other media forms, what are the main differences between composing music for video games and other media such as films or television?

I would actually print out the stems and slice them into pieces. That's the extra stage compared to, let's say, TV and movies. I would also include, because I have this pop music background, that it's very similar in that regard as well. The funny thing about pop music is that when it needs to be converted to a form that we can perform live, I need to do similar things with it as I do with gaming music. So I cannot escape the idea that everything is a game after all, more or less. But if I need to choose between media and games, it's always the games first because that's much, much, much more rewarding in every way.

Who are your biggest musical influences and how have they impacted your work?

The list is going to be long, but of course, there's Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre, who used to be my icon. Then came the Synthrock bands like Ultravox, for instance, and all kinds of later new wave groups that were sort of forming into Synthrock back in the day. Depeche Mode, Front 242, which is more or less like industrial music, and Nitzer Ebb, which was produced by one of the Depeche Mode guys, Alan Wilder, by the way. Nine Inch Nails made a great impact back in the day with "Head Like a Hole," and I've been a fan ever since. Especially a fan of pretty much everything Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have created for movies and soundtracks and things like that. Right now, I've been listening to quite a lot of more or less modern classical music.

How did these artists influence your work?

There's a certain level of production I've learned from them, and I still admire how Ultravox, for instance, were able to do their early albums with just 8 or 16 tracks. It's astonishing, really. And how they were able to perform all those songs live without sacrificing anything. That's one thing. And then there were the industrial producers throughout the years, Flood being one of them. I mean, how he treats the lower mid-range frequencies, how much information he's able to cram into the lower mid-range frequencies is astonishing. I have to admire that. And then, of course, Mr. Reznor's sound design skills. It's really something.

You already mentioned how the collaboration with Remedy started, but could you expand on that? What kept this partnership strong after all these years?

I think both Remedy and I are striving for a certain quality level. We are aiming for such high standards that it's a mutual benefit—I feed them, and they feed me. But it all started when a close friend of mine used to work with Futuremark, which was partially owned by Remedy back in the day. They had parties together, and at one of these parties, somebody asked my friend if he knew anyone who could compose modern classical music or, to be precise, modern orchestral music. He was like, "Oh, yeah, I do," and gave them my name. So it began there.

It took a while for that to materialize, and I forgot about the whole thing. He mentioned it once when we were clubbing back in the day, and I was like, "Yeah, sure, whatever." Then the next week, they called me and invited me over, asking, "When would be the first possible date you could come here?" And I was like, "How about today? In two hours?" To my surprise, that was OK for them. So I drove there, and they actually showed me the presentation they had been showing to potential publishers for the game. I had no idea what the game was, but I knew them from the Max Payne series. So that immediately lured me in.

They put on a video, and I was astonished at everything I saw. When the video ended, they told me that was what I was supposed to compose music for. I was so sure that this was something I was really good at, and I was confident I'd win this no matter who I was competing against. A few years later, they mentioned to me that there was some German guy and some American guy also composing for that same scene. But for one reason or another—maybe I was the cheapest, who knows—they chose me. I promised back then that whatever they ever required, no matter what I was doing at the moment, I would stop when a call came from Remedy. And it’s been like that. I owe them so much. This August 15th, it will be 20 years with them. It’s been a very special kind of relationship. It’s my longest business relationship, and to be precise, some of the relationships with the people at Remedy are my longest relationships in general.

Remedy's games often have a strong narrative focus. How do you ensure that the music supports and enhances the storytelling?

I try to avoid embellishing the present moment. Decorating action as it unfolds feels somewhat like a Jim Carrey movie or an over-exaggerated Asian kung fu film. Instead, I prefer to emphasize the mental or psychological aspects of action. I enjoy building on what's off-screen, what has occurred before, and where the main character is heading. It's crucial for me to maintain this coherence throughout—to tie everything together. This process initiates a dialogue between myself, the developers, the story writers, and the director. I always stress that my primary tool at this stage is communication—75% communication and 25% me tinkling the ivories, so to speak, laying down my compositions. As we progress towards the end, the percentage shifts, but in the early stages, maintaining clear communication is paramount. It's very, very important.

What is the collaboration process like between you and the game's writers and directors?

They usually are very precise and thorough about their initial presentations. They reveal what they have been thinking about and what they might require. That's when I start writing a few tracks—could be 10, could be less. These are what I call concept tracks for the game. Some deal with how it could sound in the beginning, midway through, and probably in the end. After laying down those concept tracks, we discuss them with the director, story writer, or art director. Very rarely do I have to do iterations or changes to the concept tracks. For some reason, I manage to reach something very topical about the concept itself.

This is good because I mentioned before that if I feel trapped or like I'm entering a dead end or writer's block, I can use those tracks as a time machine to return to the days when I felt the exact essence of the main concept. I mean the story and the characters and things like that. I'm able to give rebirth to those ideas with the tracks I've written back then. So I suggest everybody do this, especially if the project is going to take longer than just two months or so.

How do you ensure that the music enhances the game's suspenseful and eerie atmosphere?

Mostly, I need to feel the chills myself. I need to have my neck and hairs raising. That's one thing. We are dealing with quite delicate things there. Trying to keep people on their toes is very important. It requires gameplay action-wise, some special spooky things. When you've done that enough times, the gamer enters a certain kind of state of emergency, so to speak. That can be maintained by just adding something almost subliminal to the overall sound.

For some reason, I've noticed that if I try to create ambient parts from whispering, for instance, they work really well in creating a certain kind of scariness or spookiness. And then metallic tones, inharmonic tones. For me, it sounds like if I get scared or let's say I almost drop a cup on the floor and it's about to break down but I manage to catch it. The feeling that I get afterward, if it could be put into a sound, would probably be something like I was trying to bow a broken drum cymbal, I mean ride or crash cymbal, with a double bass bow, with lots of resin so that it sort of yells and resonates. The same feeling can be reached with that sound. Also, grabbing the cup right before it breaks down. So, there is this analogy between your nervous reaction or nerve reaction and turning it into a sound.

And I happen to suffer from synesthesia, so it's quite easy for me to turn music into colors and shapes in my mind. But also vice versa. And as I've grown older, let's put it this way, I've been in this business long enough to be able to achieve the same thing with on-screen events or reactions. And also, again, vice versa. So it's a set of mind tools that have been honed with the projects throughout the last 20 years or so.

And did your process of work change in any way between the first and the second game?

No, actually not. The only change has been the set of tools or, actually, the speed and processing power of the tools. That's something that has changed. But for instance, with Alan Wake 2, I'm still using the same Kyma algorithms I created with Alan Wake 1. Kyma is actually the sound design system that's been used by Mr. Ben Burtt in Hollywood. For instance, in the Wall-E animation movie. It's a number-crunching, audio-altering workstation that has roots, I would say, in the early '80s. Because its user interface is more or less like a troglodyte.

Alan Wake games feature soundtracks that blend license tracks, songs from Poets of the Fall, with your own music. How does this combination work? Is there any collaboration involved?

Unfortunately, collaborations are quite rare. However, for instance, the licensed tracks that are now in the game, how they originally made their way to the production company—there were two choices, both suggested by yours truly. So, yay! I managed to influence that. I'd like to get more involved, but I'm quite sure that what I do is what I'm best at. For instance, I've never approached a developer of a game with a composer and said, "Hey, I would be the better composer for this one." I have never done that. And I make sure that nobody else does that to me either.

The same applies to the licensed tracks and Poets of the Fall. They are really good at what they do, so I let them do their thing without my interference. So, yeah, I would like to have more idea exchange, but let's see what the future will bring.

Were there any situations where you heard a song made for the game and thought that maybe you could create a theme that fits the situation in the game?

On several occasions, reverb endings of my compositions morphed into the intro of a licensed track. I did those, but that's all. In some scenes and cinematics, I had already composed the music, and we knew what key it ended in. So I was able to tell the producers and the composers/songwriters to try something in E minor, for instance, or something like that. But that is all. We planned it very thoroughly, which means that there was practically no need for iterating the in-game music, cinematic music, or the licensed track. It's really nice when people play according to the rules, let's put it this way.

Quantum Break combines live-action elements with gameplay, so how did you approach composing music for such a hybrid experience?

Unfortunately, that's where Microsoft stepped in. I composed music for the in-game segments and some of the live-action tracks. However, a micromanaging individual from Microsoft decided it was his time to step in and have his name in the end credits. He wanted his pal to compose some of the tracks for the live-action segments. Unfortunately, this person didn't exactly follow our concept and instrumentation wishes. Instead of using our custom-built libraries and original compositions, he opted for something he had purchased online. It felt somewhat awkward that way, but he did a commendable job with the live-action music. Despite this, I had hoped that the production values would have matched the level we had achieved with the game itself.

Control has a unique and surreal atmosphere, based on surrealism and brutalism. How did you approach composing music for such a distinctive and complex game world?

I think that was the first time when I collaborated with another composer, Martin Stig Andersen from Denmark. I loved the guy's output. The way he treated material and turned it into sound was astonishing. He's truly a one-of-a-kind fellow, both as a person and as a musician and composer. His way of composing is more like musique concrète rather than regular music, but he's exceptional, and his sense of aesthetics fits perfectly with Remedy's reputation.

At some point, we decided, "Okay, you've done this library, and I've done this library, so let's exchange the hard disks." And that was like having Christmas 24/7, 365 days a year. Incredibly rewarding. I mean, we divided the workload so that I was dealing with the themes and the cinematics. We used Wwise as middleware for playing back the sounds and music, and there was quite an elaborate ruleset created for Wwise. So he did some music and turned the music into individual sounds, which were then played back by the ruleset set in Wwise. I mean, the ruleset—it's a monster. I have a copy of the project at home, and I sometimes try to understand how it's doing what it's doing, and I have no bloody idea what was achieved and how. But it works.

The team at Remedy is working on a few projects, some of which we know about, and maybe some that we don't. Are you working on any of them? What can we expect from them, from the musical point of view?

Actually, I'm very eager to spill some beans about the DLC for Alan Wake. There's something really tasteful happening. We're experimenting with different music styles, entering a zone we've never visited before. We decided to go with rockabilly tracks, like proper rockabilly. Not rockabilly as such, but in Great Britain, there were two bands that specialized in combining punk and rockabilly, which made it into a psychobilly genre: Cramps and Meteors. A schoolmate of mine back in the day listened to both bands quite a lot, so I know them through and through, every single album. It was kind of funny to revisit that memory lane after like 35 years or so. I was more than nervous when I sent the tracks to the integrators, and then came Sam Lake's message to me, and it was literally: "Oh, holy shit, now it's working perfectly." Almost word for word like this. And that was sort of... I got my blessing right there.

Of course, other things are going to happen as well, and then there's a project about which I cannot speak, but everybody probably guesses that they are doing a sequel for Control. So, although I'm not mentioning or admitting anything, one could put one and one together and get something like two as a result. Control 2, maybe. Well, that's going to be something very different compared to the first one. Again, I'm not willing to do something twice.