What Goes Into Making Video Game Music

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hey there, everyone! I’m John Robert Matz, a professional musician and I mostly do video game music projects. You may have heard the scores I’ve made for games like the For The King series, Tchia, Gunpoint and many more, with one of my projects netting me the Rookie of the Year in the Game Audio Network Guild awards.

What’s your favorite game to play right now?

That is an incredibly tough question.

My favorite game to play right now… I’d love to pull out something super esoteric, but I've been, for the last 12 months or so, having way too much fun in Helldivers 2 with my friends and my cousins, and it's eminently replayable.

The shooting is great. The worldbuilding is fun and absurd. The music by Wilbert Roget II is really fantastic, and is probably one of the best 40-minute soundtracks I've ever heard. And a testament to how good it is is that 400 hours later, it still feels tremendous every time you hit that button and drop to the surface of a planet.

Outside of that, I've really been having a lot of fun playing through Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is a very nifty Atlus JRPG, and the setting is really quite interesting. I'm a fantasy and sci-fi nerd, so seeing them do a different fantasy game is great. I've never played any of the Persona, so or any of the Shin Megami Tensei games, so it is a new thing for me.

But I've always wanted to get deep into a JRPG and I've never really clicked with the combat in most RPGs like I have with the combat in Metaphor: ReFantazio. It's really neat and really compelling and just fun to actually engage with in a way that is not usually found in most JRPGs.

When I played these types of games, I was just going through the combat to get to the next cool story beat or the next moment where the plot advances or the next neat piece of music. And here, this is actually just a pretty fun game, even with the combat side.

How often do you pay attention to the sounds and music in the games you play?

I am always listening to the score. I know I have some friends who will just, after a while, turn the music off or just background it. I tend to play games with decent headphones or even pull out my good monitors so I can really hear everything, and so I really want to hear what the score is doing.

I've definitely encountered things where something doesn't fit and I wonder why it doesn't fit. It could be a budget consideration, or they could only write so much music, so they had to choose the thing that fit it best, or maybe the composer wrote something else and they didn't intend for it to be used here. 

Sometimes, some cues are really nice the first time, but there's some element in it that becomes annoying after a while, which is one of my biggest fears as a composer. I don't ever wanna do anything that's too much.

But on the flip side, there's always this fine line of you don't wanna write something that’s so generic that it doesn't stick with you, that it doesn't have anything to hang your hat on. And as much as you don't wanna drive people crazy by hearing the same thing over and over again, repetition legitimizes musical ideas.

The fine line between pleasant repetition and grating loops

So there's definitely this fine line to walk that I end up thinking about whenever I write music myself. I'm always thinking about how often the player would hear this thing or that thing in particular during their playthrough. In what contexts are we gonna hear this?

Some of the most egregious examples I've heard are like truly lovely music that we only hear the first 30 seconds of because it kicks in at the beginning of a battle and then the battle's over before it gets through the introduction. And then another battle, a minute later, and it's the same 30-second introduction and you're out of it again.

The fine line is always there, and we always have to tread it carefully.

Can you tell us more about your music workstation?

My studio, for those of you who cannot see, is just a visual cacophony of instruments everywhere. And I'm sorry to anybody who plays these instruments and is offended by how they're stacked and strewn about.

Most of the projects I work on are small enough budget indie games that don't have a huge recording budget. So we have to pick and choose what we can do. And as a result, I have this philosophy that if I can do it, I always wanna have at least one instrument that is live at all times to carry a melody.

And the more I can do it live, the better. So For the King II score I released last year, I played every instrument that I possibly could. There were dozens of live instruments at the same time. Only the big string sections and big percussions were sampled; everything else I did myself. 

And to that end, I have five trumpets over here, including a piccolo trumpet. I'm a brass player, normally a trumpet player, but I have two bass trumpets. There are four French horns here. I've got a seven-course lute and an eight-string baritone ukulele, which basically sounds and functions, for all intents and purposes, like a baroque-era guitar.

I've got a mandolin, more ukulele, a smaller traditional soprano ukulele, and an erhu. I've got bass recorders, tenor, alto, soprano… they're just every instrument that I could possibly think of. A plethora of Celtic whistles in various keys and an ocarina, and I can play them all well enough. This is the wonderful joy of being the composer and the person who is recording this stuff.

I can play them well enough to play the music that I write for them. And because I'm recording it myself, I can make myself suffer and do 30 takes and then make the best version of those 30 takes into the one that you're gonna hear in the game. It's a little slow and painstaking, but it gets the job done.

Then you have something that has human expressivity and emotion in it in a way that you would have to really work to make a sample. For those of you who are not composers, we use things called “samples” a lot.

These are virtual instruments, which are basically recorded and programmed versions of live performances, live instruments, a whole string section or a brass section or a piano, or a keyboard or whatnot, that is then triggered by a system that we call a “MIDI”, which is basically a musical interface you can control with a piano keyboard, so you can play that stuff yourself and make it sound pretty human. But if you can pick it up and play it for real, obviously it's gonna have even more of that human emotive element, and you can put whatever you want to do it.

So long story short, I could reach behind me and pick up a bass clarinet and play that and then put it back. I have a new little line in the music, and then I can pick up another instrument and lay that in very easily, hence them surrounding me and just being everywhere in my work area. 

How did you find your love for music?

I've always been fairly musical. My mother was a classically trained soprano. My dad played trumpet, guitar and basically all sorts of instruments that he could get his hands on. And so I grew up with a lot of music, listening to classical music on records and the radio. And my dad played in local community bands and stuff like that, so I always had music in my ears growing up. 

I learned piano lessons when I was young, taking Suzuki piano stuff. I did church choir and played trumpet in a band, though I started off with a cornet originally. Then decided I wanted to be a music education major when I went to college, and so I studied music education and graduated in 2009.

Along the way, I had written a bunch of different arrangements and compositions that got played by various school bands I was in. And my sister had developed a very deep interest in filmmaking, something I'd always been interested in, but never really delved into. And she made films with her friends and I wound up scoring those while I was in college. I had a shot at a feature film that one of her friends had gotten a job on as an assistant of some sort. And he played some of the music that I'd written for films that he had worked on with my sister and her friends for the director. And they liked it so much that I got a chance to audition for it. And I made it to like the final round. I didn't get it, but it definitely gave me this feeling of, “Oh, I could write music or things. This is really cool!” 

And going to school for music education, you learn to play every instrument, or at least every family of instruments. So I had training, having to take a string tech and woodwind tech classes, and I'm a classically trained tenor. So these are things that will familiarize you with how to teach these instruments and work with kids in these various instrument families.

That also feeds back into writing for those instruments. If you know how to play them even a little bit, you're gonna be much better at writing for them, or at least I think generally that would be able to be a transferable skill. And while I went to school for music ed, I taught high school music as adjunct faculty in places around the Chicago land area for 10 years or so, basically up until the pandemic started and that program got shuttered. That was the thing that I'd studied to do.

But when I got outta school, I couldn't get a full-time job teaching. And so I started to dabble in composition professionally, like I started looking for film scoring and video game work, and I landed something.

My first game job was writing music for Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator, and the soundtrack came out around 2011, so I must've been working on it in 2010 or so. And that was a really fun and weird project, and definitely an interesting thing to be the first project out of the gate.

Bunny Overload and other projects

I have no idea how HGG found out about Bunny Overload, as I don’t think it even shows up on my discography, haha!

That was a tiny, weird little mobile game where someone actually reached out to me. I got actually pinged for once, as opposed to most of the time, as a composer, you're struggling to find work and sending cold emails to various developers that look like they're doing things. They’re one of the first people who reached out to me, and I scored a short little thing with some interactive elements for their little mobile game.

The first game I worked on was Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator, and then, a couple of years later, it was Gunpoint, which was the first game from Tom Francis of Suspicious Developments. They've gone on to make games like the most recent Tactical Breach Wizards, which is a tremendous game that has won an award in the IGF, believe this year at GDC, so really, they've gone on to do wonderful things. I was really glad to be a part of that one for their first game, along with Ryan Ike doing the lion’s share of the music and Francisco Cerda, who did some more of the menu music. Those were like the first two big games that I worked on.

And then I had a few smaller things. People reached out to me, like with Bunny Overload. Wow, I haven't even thought about that in eons. I don't even think it shows up in most of my discography, but like that. And then a little game called Almightree: The Last Dream, which is a little block puzzle platform kind of game, solving little logic puzzles on the run.

Along with those things, I did some more work for film stuff. I got gigs from the same friend who got me the first job, the first audition for a feature film, and my sister went to LA for film school. And between the two of them, I wound up scoring some very shorts for, like RocketJump, who was a very popular YouTube channel and then went on to make stuff. They did a Hulu show, which I contributed to, and some other things from there as well.

But, yeah, I feel like 90% of the work I do is video games. And the last bit is all films and strange video projects. So it's been an interesting journey.

At what point in a project do you usually come in?

In an ideal world, I come in at the point where they know basically what the game is going to be. It could be a third-person, real-time action game with some platform elements, or it could be a turn-based, puzzle combat game, or it could be a space sim where you are the guy inside the ship and you can walk around inside the ship and land on every planet… The basic idea of the game is there and then usually, a lot of the lore and the world building is done. Maybe there are some concept art for what we're targeting, for what the visuals are gonna look like… that's usually the point that I really like to get in.

The first thing I wanna see when I come onto a project is what the world is about. What does it feel like? Because my job is to take whatever the writers and the creative people have built for the world and figure out how to support and enhance that. So if you give me a script with all the info like, these are the major characters… these are their basic plot arcs… this is what they look like… that is immensely helpful. Here's what the world looks like. It's a world where we have stumbled into this magic bubble no one's been able to get into in a million years. And what are we gonna find there?

And that's super compelling and interesting. Show me what the interior of that looks like. Show me where we're coming from before that, so I know what the world is like outside and what the world is like inside. And then I'll start to put all those pieces together in my head and start to come up with the sound of whatever your world is, what your characters and themes might be, how these things all interact with each other and hopefully build something that will support the world and the characters, et cetera.

When you get down to the granular stuff, like designing an interactive combat system where the music has branching paths that'll shift depending on how much damage we've taken or how many enemies are on screen, or here's this bespoke sequence… like those things, they'll happen when they happen. But getting the groundwork for what the world feels like to be in? What’s the orchestral or instrumental palette? That's like painting a picture, like I'll choose the colors that we wanna paint this. Knowing all that is there, but then there's a twist halfway through, so how are we gonna change that?

So knowing those sorts of things early on and being able to be there join in those conversations as those things come together is super useful because like I said, my goal is to take what all of the people that are creating this world give me and turn that into music that will support and enhance the emotional experience we want the players to go on.

What’s the difference in working with an indie team and a group with a big budget?

It depends on the project. With the various things I've worked on, they've generally been small-ish teams, probably less than 20 people or so, and most of the time, there is a project lead of some sort, maybe a director or a creative director or whatnot, who I can directly interface with and talk to.

But frequently, especially on the smaller indie teams, you'll have situations where you’d present your stuff and everybody on the team will be able to listen to it and talk about it, et cetera. Maybe on the bigger projects, there'll be less direct feedback with things and more feedback only comes from one source. But for the most part, that's been the way it has been with most of the things that I've worked on personally.

The budget hasn't affected, in my experience, hasn’t really affected the working dynamics much, at least on the projects I’ve worked on. The biggest difference, I think, is that when we have more to work with, we can start to do more elaborate things. For example, there was a game that was released a few years ago, I think in 2021, it was Ambition: A Minuet in Power. It was kind of a rogue-lite, visual novel adventure game set in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. And it went through a few shifts in gameplay early on, but the setting and the characters were there. The story arc that we wanted to have in the possibility space was all there from the beginning and the score is effectively as close as I can come to a period score.

Creating different flavors of music within a project

So I'm writing for every faction that you might have there; the crown, the revolutionaries, the military, the church, the bourgeoisie, all these factions have different orchestras, different ensembles associated with them.

So the crown is gonna be slightly out of touch, the very ornate baroque orchestra. The military is a wind ensemble based on some of the stuff that young Beethoven was writing for military wind ensembles at the time. When you go to a military party, it's always outside and intense. It's like always on the grounds of something, so I wanna make the music feel like it was outside. The bourgeoisie was being very cutting edge and upwardly rising. They are like a very Haydn-esque string quartet, so they're forward-looking in this way, but they're also a little more intimate in these very fancy salons and so on and so forth.

So all of these sounds are things that don't lend themselves well to the thing I mentioned way earlier, which are samples. They don't work well with samples because these are very specific and small ensembles. Most samples work better at scale, and a lot of sample library builders are recording samples to give you a big Hans Zimmer sound, a big Hollywood sound. And in Ambition: A Minuet in Power, we're trying to make stuff sound like it came from the late 18th century, so it's a very different vibe.

So for that project, we actually, because it was produced during the pandemic, had to do this all in isolation with every single instrument recorded in someone's bedroom and glue it all together in post-production. But the upside was, while that was a massive amount of work for me to take, to put like 32 different string stems together, make a whole orchestra out of it, it did mean that it was actually cheaper than if we had gone to Nashville or gone to Europe or LA or something like that to record.

But that game had enough money in the budget to do that stuff well, and I'm super grateful that we did. Whenever there's more money and there's more budget to do that sort of stuff, there's more back and forth between you and the developers as a result, because we're spending their money to do the recording stuff.

We wanna make sure that the mockups do what we want them to do, and everything comes out nice. When you don't have that budget and I'm just doing it all myself, there's a more direct process of I'll just put it together then you can hear exactly what it's gonna sound like now, and we'll go from there. That works pretty well, too!

Are there times when music for a game isn’t needed?

Like for Wordle and those kinds of games? I don't think it's a question of what's too small for music. I think it's a question of, “Is the idea of music appropriate for the game?”

Now, I obviously love music in games, but I can think of games where there is no music for vast swaths of the gameplay, and that is a creative choice unto itself. It's like having a stage play with no dialogue, but the characters moving and the blocking is suddenly very important. That's a creative choice. And there's nothing wrong with that. If it's the correct creative choice for the project, that's perfectly fine.

Wordle is such a very upfront game and experience, you just get to think about it. It's a turn-based thing and the way that people engage with it is the same way that you engage with a crossword puzzle or something like that, right? It is a puzzle to solve.

But what I would probably do if I wanted to do something that was musical with Wordle is I would have had little stingers. I might have a little Wordle fanfare at the top. If we wanted to put sound in this way, a stinger at the top, maybe a fanfare when you win, maybe every time you put a letter in, there would be a note in the Wordle motif that gets played so that it would be more like musical sound design. Like something chilling in the background that wouldn't be irritating, but hopefully soothing and pleasing.

And then when you succeed, you have a “Hooray! You did it!” kind of thing, and if you fail, there’d be like “Too bad. Better luck next time!” and that's the thing. Most of the time, especially with a puzzle game like that, where someone is, say, playing it on their phone, you are very likely to not have a situation where the user is going to want to have it blasting music at them. They're gonna be in a coffee shop, they're gonna be on the train, they're gonna be in the passenger seat of a car. They're gonna do their Wordle for the day.

You don't want it to be super big and jarring, so you put the stuff that's gonna enhance it. If they have the sound on and maybe it won't be as crazy as something that'd be more elaborate. On the other hand, if we are sweeping you away fully into a world, then that's where you want to think about immersing the player.

Music is a great way to immerse a player, and you'd probably go more all in there in that case.

How do you discern between composing and UI sound design for a game?

It's usually separate work, but they are very related. Because a lot of times, UI sound design is tonal. It has pitch to it. It has notes associated with it. Even if you hear things where you put points into a skill on the skill tree and it goes “Zzzzzt, ping!” Even that has a note.

So is it gonna be consonant with whatever the music is underneath it? Or is it gonna be really somehow like a half-step high and it sounds jarring and weird? I'm pretty sure anybody who's played games for a while will hear examples of UI sound design that clash with some element of the music.

And obviously, you are always bound by this aspect of how creative you want to get. The more creative music that you get, the more tonally flexible you get, the more chances there's gonna be a clash somewhere. So maybe there's only one second in a three-minute cue where it could be bad. Eventually, a player's gonna land on that and they’re gonna be like, “Oh, that didn't sound as good as it should have.” But most of the time it'll be okay.

And so you wanna think about that as you're doing that. And usually, that's where close collaboration between a composer and sound designer comes into play. It's also where a person, like an audio director, if your project's big enough to support a third person, though frequently I've had things where the sound designer is also the audio director and I will be able to pass things over to them to make sure that stuff connects properly and nothing is going to really clash.

So yeah, UI sound design, I've also definitely worked in situations where I'm effectively doing UI sound design using instruments, because we wanted a fully musical sound for this or that. Frequently, it's percussive in some way because that has a nice snap to it that makes it feel very tactile and dynamic.

I've done things like in Tchia, for example, there were whole bits where we had musical sound design for these various… I don't wanna spoil too much, but there were creatures. There are creatures, for example, that speak in a kind of strange language, and the language is made out of percussion instruments and blown bottle sounds that I recorded and pitched up and down.

There are all kinds of stuff that's like tonal and percussive sound design UI cues. They’re like, “Oh, you've done the thing!” and there's a little music sting, but it's just like a percussive build in like a flute kind of note that’s like “Lulululu…” going down, trails off.

And that should not clash with the music going outta the background. Instead, it should just be a layer on top, a building element, and it must feel like it comes from the same musical world as the music, and in my case, it is the same, since I made it all with the same instruments.

Do you have a composer who serves as your inspiration?

Who am I inspired by? Man, that's a tough question. I'm super inspired by a lot of my colleagues. I always enjoy their work. Some people appeal so strongly to the sorts of writing ideals that I try to put into my own work.

I had mentioned him already, but Will Roget II is wonderful. The stuff he did this year and last year has been just huge for him. So the stuff he did for Helldivers II and Star Wars Outlaws is melodically super, super cool and very compelling. And it fits very much in the vibe that I try to espouse when I'm writing my own melodies.

Another friend of mine, Austin Wintory, has always been really good at creating very different sounds for these spaces that his games take place in. He also tends to end up with a lot of games that feel somewhat abstract and a little pulled back, while still sweeping you up into the space.

So some of his scores, obviously, everyone always thinks of Journey, but I think Abzu is an even better soundtrack. It is really tremendously beautiful, as it is an underwater game and it truly feels like you are underwater in that score, but I'm always interested to see what new sounds he puts into his stuff.

He's probably one of the more… I almost wanna use the classical music term of avant-garde, which is maybe a little too elaborate to use here, or stretching it a bit, but I always appreciate the kind of sounds he's been game to go for and use in his work, while still very much sounding like himself. He always has some bold choices, and that's really neat.

Outside of that, I've had a time of misspent youth sitting in the trumpet section of many orchestras. I don't think it was misspent at all, really. It was lovely getting to play and listen as a trumpet player, as you don't play in an orchestra all the time.

In fact, sometimes you sit there with a book, because in rehearsals, you've got nothing to do for two hours while everyone else works on stuff. But that experience of getting to hear in rehearsal, how everything gets broken down, how all of these different sections work together, listening to composers like Leonard Bernstein and Mahler and many others... That sort of stuff is the stuff that my brain grew up on, along with film composers like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner, of course, John Williams.

Like these things, these are some of my comfort places. I don't get to listen to that many soundtracks because I am working with music. I don't get to do that while I'm working very much. The real time I get to actually do some listening is it's usually when I'm winding down for bed, doing a little bit of reading or something like that. And I'll usually go back to Baroque or even earlier, Renaissance and early music because I find that stuff so fascinating.

And also, I admit to having worked on some fantasy scores. It's always more interesting to go and look at actual medieval music and Renaissance music and say, “What did this stuff really sound like?” Listen to these very early pieces, recreated as close to accurately as we can, and then take that knowledge and carry it forward into the stuff that I write.

How do you find music for obscure themes or projects?

With these kinds of things, you're dealing with a movement for a historically informed performance, where they will do their best to either use actual period instruments. Although for things like string instruments, for example, that were around during Vivaldi's era, that were around during the Renaissance and earlier, they have been modified over the years from being able to support only gut strings to metal strings that we use nowadays.

So they've been reinforced and changed so frequently that now they'll use reproductions from historical instruments based on writings and models that have survived, and they will play in what they believe to be the correct style. And we have decent records through some of that stuff from the Baroque, Renaissance and other eras and into the classical era.

But as you go further back before that, things get even more hazy. We're not quite sure about how a lot of the sounds back then were truly like. What were the target sounds for a certain instrument? A lot of them, we do know they are written for voices. We have notation at this point. People have figured out how to write stuff like Gregorian chant. We figured out things like the Guidonian hand.

So we have a method of notating, and we can read that stuff now and translate it to modern notation if we want. So we know what these things are. But what was the vocal timbre that we were targeting? How were people singing? Were they singing vibrato? Were they singing very straight? We're not really sure. And so people do their best guesses on this stuff based on the existing writing of the time and try to figure out what that sounds like. You go back to even older stuff, like really fascinating music from ancient Greece, and it gets even more interesting. They have methods of notation, but we're not really sure how everything works, and I'm not an expert on any of this stuff.

Interest in old era music

So this is more of just a passion, but it is also fascinating to look at ancient Greek music and look at people who speak modern Greek. It hasn't changed that much. You can sing the ancient Greek lyrics, and the words are still there. The poetry still works. And that's fascinating to me. It's just really neat to see!

It has been a thing that has come up several times in my life, where there's been an anecdote, if you had a time machine, what would you do? Or if you could look back on time and I'd be like, “I always wanna see various periods of music!” I want to experience their performance to see what things actually sounded like when there were writings about celebrated sopranos, or in 1812, or something like that in Paris, and get the answer to my mind’s question, like, “What did she really sound like?” This notable person that is written about in the papers of the time, what were they really like? How do they stack up to the people we have today?

Today, we have early recordings from the very beginning of the 20th century, and some of those orchestras sound dreadful and I'm never quite sure if that was just the sound of the time or the people that they could cram into whatever recording studio they had in 1908 or something. And I was like, “Is this an accurate representation of these things? Were people's standards different back then? Or is this a bad reproduction? Is it actually what things were like at the time and we have just gotten way better now?”

Obviously, there's a whole school of thought about this, but like with the advent of decent audio recording technology in the thirties and forties and moving forward, the proliferation of radio first, and then of course, records and other methods of sharing recorded audio. Everybody knows what everything sounds like, and we have a target to aim for how good our performances should be. What is the standard for tuning, for example? What does a good, balanced ensemble sound like? We can go back and listen to orchestral recordings from 70 years ago and say that it was still excellent, but 50 years before that, did they sound as good? Who knows?

What video game genres do you enjoy composing for the most?

Honestly, I have enjoyed everything that I've gotten to do. I know that's such a wishy-washy answer when I say that out loud, but I've been very lucky to get to write in a variety of styles with things like the For the King series. There, I am very much trying to write medieval renaissance early music with those sounds out front, and then in the back, it is more of your Howard Shore or Basil Poledouris Conan the Barbarian-esque orchestral backdrop for these other things. And sometimes I let myself have a little bit more fun and incorporate a pipe organ and other bigger instruments that also existed historically, that are maybe a little bit more video game-y.

Other things like, for Ambition: A Minuet in Power, getting to write period music… When does one get to write period music, classical era music for a video game? That usually never happens! And that was such a fun challenge.

Fusing different eras of music

I look at things like Mythgard, which was like cyberpunk meets fantasy, where the ancient mythology world combines with a technologically dystopian future, which kind of left me very unfettered to do all sorts of big orchestral stuff, fused with electronics and all kinds of other instruments.

A lot of it was ancient Greek mythology, fused with sounds that were like ancient Greek aulos and other instruments from that era of history. But what if we took those sounds and ran them through a bunch of guitar pedals? Or what if we made it more electronic? And blending these things together was a real thrill.

Then you get to stuff like swashbuckling space scores. We're doing stuff in the vein of Jerry Goldsmith and stuff. It's been fun to do, honestly, all of these things have been so different that I've had the utmost pleasure of working on them, so I don't really know if I have a specific favorite.

Working on Tchia

The most interesting one was probably the one for Tchia because that had the most specific, grounded approach of anything I've worked on. It's set in a fantastical version of New Caledonia, which is a real place with real people with real history. The studio heads at Awaceb are from there. I worked with them on their previous game, Fossil Echo, and they really wanted me back and I'm like, “Are you sure you want me?!” I think I used the phrase like, “I'm the least qualified person to do this!” but they wanted me anyway.

And so I spent nine months researching and deep diving into New Caledonia music and refining that, reading French musicological journals and watching documentaries to understand how best to take the very distinct sound of their traditional and modern music.  I would then infuse that with orchestral sounds and more stuff that would work well in a video game to create something that felt very specific.

And then we were able to collaborate with absolutely lovely, vocalists in New Caledonia to sing in French and Drehu—which is one of the major dialects spoken by the Kanak people over there to create this thing. It feels like it is a very much a one-off thing, my lightning in a bottle, a once-in-a-career kind of thing to do this as authentically as possible for this culture and bring that to life. 

Yeah, I really don't think I have a favorite of any of these projects I’ve had. They've all been unique and exciting challenges and I always look forward to what the next thing is gonna be and hope it's gonna be different.

Honestly, it's much more exciting when they're different because then you don't feel like, “Oh, I'm gonna re-tread what I did before.” You never have that temptation to lean too heavily on things you did before. Instead, you can take the bigger picture things, bring lessons with you then step those forward.

You can be like, “Oh, I learned how to do this in a more efficient way!” when designing an interactive music system. Let's make this more sophisticated, but more streamlined at the same time or whatnot. It's always fun to work on totally new things!

It sounds so stupid, as I’ve never been to space, but I'd love to go back to space, like when I did Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator. That would be fun, but really, I am always open to anything and I'd be just as eager to go and write like a period noir score or something like that.

What are the common misconceptions in hiring a freelance composer like you?

Some things I think I've touched on a little bit already. Sometimes they have this idea that the game needs to be basically done, and then we talk about music at the end, and it's so much harder to create proper music at that point. It's not impossible, but it does make things a lot more difficult. You're coming in late, coming in on the back foot, you can do that. You can swoop in and say, “Alright, we're gonna add the music now.”

But the number of times that being involved early on and being able to write stuff alongside the bulk of the development just makes it a lot easier and makes the result better. I've been able to directly and indirectly affect the course of the game, and that's so cool.

For example, I have a cool idea because of something they did, and because I'm there, I can be part of the team and weigh in, give it a thought or a suggestion, and that has caused the project to add an extra element or tweak something in some way because I was involved with the development team. I am always grateful to be included as part of the team on these things.

What’s next for you?

There'll be some more expansion music For the King II, which should already be out by the time people are reading this. There may be some physical versions we’re working on… maybe in the kind of large, round and black variety of some soundtracks that you might wanna put on your shelf that may be announced in the coming months. I'm very excited about that.

That has been a fun time to put those together, and I'm really proud of how they're looking. I'm being incredibly cagey because I need to be incredibly cagey until those things come out. And then I've got some really cool stuff in the works and as most of the folks listening to this, as game developers know, you’ve got fun NDAs with you. You can't talk about stuff, and it's all a secret. So you just gesture at the vague cloud of redacted nonsense behind me. 

But yeah, stay tuned. I'll make the announcements on things as soon as I can.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

So you can find me on my website, johnrobertmatz.com. My Bandcamp, which I've tried to have all of my discography or as much of it as I can, in there. And then I am on Instagram, Bluesky and regrettably on X.

You can find me there and listen to my stuff and shoot me a message and say that I need to get a haircut. I don't know, whatever. But yeah, that's how you can find me and follow me.