What was the composer’s “go-to secret sauce”?

The soundtrack to metroidvania game Outbuddies is available now for purchase ahead of the game’s release next month.

Composed by OGRE Sound, Outbuddies’ soundtrack has been created using a range of vintage synthesisers in order to capture that 16-bit sound throughout the course of the game.

“We wanted any retro audio touches to be an oblique suggestion rather than an obvious throwback, but I definitely wanted to keep a clandestine 16-bit flavour throughout Outbuddies,” said the composer via a press release.

He added: “Most of the synth sounds you hear are generated from an old Yamaha TX81Z FM synthesizer, which is notorious to program, but has a lot in common with the old sound chips from the Megadrive/Genesis era. It was my go-to secret sauce. I wanted to splice in some of that time period’s DNA on some level, so the soundtrack is a deep-sea pressure fusion of ancient analog and dawn of digital synthesizers mixed with organic and real acoustic instrumentation.”

Spread across 13 tracks, the soundtrack to Outbuddies is available now from OGRE Sound’s Bandcamp page.

“Prior to composing the soundtrack, I was reading Steve Reich’s collected Writings On Music, which I’d argue has similar ideas to Berlin school composition,” OGRE Sound said. “It seemed natural to employ some of these aesthetic choices when working on Outbuddies’ soundtrack, namely thematic sequences which evolve, distort and change as you dive deeper and traverse the game’s levels. Mantras and repetition have so many spiritual connotations, which seemed to me a perfect fit for a game about Old Gods stirring in the deep.”

OGRE Sound has also composed soundtracks to other video games such as the interactive story Actual Sunlight, strategy-adventure series This is the Police, and the Hacknet: Labyrinths downloadable content expansion for hacking simulation game Hacknet.

Created by indie developer Julian Laufer, Outbuddies is scheduled for release this October on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.