2023 was the year of Australian videogame music
Will the music industry notice?
The big Australian music story of 2023 was, almost certainly, the international success achieved by local musicians getting their music into videogames.
Take a quick look through the highlights:
River Boy (Narayana Johnson) became the first composer ever to receive a World Soundtrack Award for a videogame for his incredible work on Cult of the Lamb. At the awards (which, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are a big deal) Johnson sat alongside composers for other media like Nicholas Britell (Succession, Andor), Volker Bertelmann (the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front), and Simon Franglen (Avatar: The Way of Water). A big deal indeed.
Pitchfork listed Katarzyna Wiktorski’s delightfully jazzy score for Gubbins, a mobile word game (a genre and a platform where good music is hard to come by), as among the year’s top picks. “Piano chords fall like plunking raindrops, a trumpet buzzes cooly through a run of notes, and strings brush away any inclinations to overthink,” writes Nina Corcoran.
A sold out Hamer Hall gave possibly the most rapturous response I’ve ever seen to an extraordinary concert of indie game music from Orchestra Victoria. “Indie Symphony” felt like more than a watershed moment for videogame music in Australia. When was the last time a sold out Hamer Hall gave a standing ovation to an orchestral concert featuring at least 50% premiere Australian music? I suspect we are talking decades and decades here.
To top it all off, the astonishing achievements of Jess Serro, Tripod and Austin Wintory with Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical have been nominated for a Grammy Award. We await the outcome with fingers firmly crossed.
I have a special interest in the affairs of the Australian music and games sector, not just as a composer myself, but as a researcher. In 2023 Dr. Brendan Keogh (QUT) and I won a tender from Creative Australia to create a benchmark report on the local game music sector. Along with our co-author, Taylor Hardwick, we ran a survey, we spoke to composers, performers, industry professionals, and game developers.
What we found was in many ways gobsmacking. The full report (free and forever public) paints a picture of a small but redoubtable sector, achieving things on the world stage that other similar industries with a much larger spotlight on them would love to be able to boast about. Australians who make music for videogames do so for a global, adoring audience. They do so under better conditions than their comrades in the screen composing sector, and perhaps not unrelated, they also do so without any serious attention or assistance from the music industry in the form of labels and publishers, who it must be said are largely blissfully unaware of what is happening here on their metaphorical doorstep.
The (non)relationship between the substantive music industry and the Australian game music sector is worth thinking about in greater detail, particularly now that local music rights management organisation APRA AMCOS have signed a deal with PlayStation Europe to collect performance royalties from their digital store on behalf of Australian members.
However, the grim news is that the local music industry may have already missed their window (or at least a window), as the international videogame industry has entered, along with most of the other aligned tech and creative industries, a period of major crisis. The games—and the music—may have been good, but 2023 was almost certainly one of the worst years on record for the videogame industry, as a variety of factors, including and certainly not least capitalist greed, resulted in thousands upon thousands of redundancies and layoffs. 2024 will not be a year of freeflowing success, but Australian game making has experience in weathering international financial storms and is at least better equipped to survive than it was during the Global Financial Crisis more than a decade ago.
We will see what this year holds for local game musicians. My bet is that there will be more success stories, stories that may overshadow the quieter, more private and more widespread pain that’s out there right now.
Welcome to Substack?
I’ve started this newsletter as an attempt to get away from one entirely toxic social media platform (shall we call it X?), and inadvertently might have stumbled onto another that’s just as bad. Ah. We live in an era of platform capitalism where anyone sufficiently empowered enough to make big bucks from the whole thing is likely to be diametrically opposed to any decent world view, I guess. I suspect like most, I will have an eye on the exit here (but exit where? This is surely the story of the internet over the last decade: every life raft is worse than the last).
I don’t plan on posting to any sort of schedule. Knowing me, it may be months between posts. I also most definitely do not plan on turning on paid subscriptions, which perhaps is one small consolation as there won’t be any money for this website’s ethically-dubious overlords to take a cut from.
In all, this will be a way for me to share things I’ve done with the world in an opt-in, non-280 characters, non-like and subscribe jazzhands sort of way. Just a hello—every so often. Despite everything I do, fundamentally, I like writing. It’ll be nice to have a little place to do that again.
So what have I been up to?
The end to 2023 had a few nice turns for me, personally, even while the world continues to offer some of the very worst.
Mars First Logistics, a lovely little rover-builder from the wonderful Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley, and Shape Shop, was released into Open Access and has already built an enthusiastic community. I made a synth soundtrack for the game, my first in that style. The musical palette is drawn from Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jean-Michelle Jarre and Vangelis, using a tonne of Jupiter 6 and Juno 8 sounds, but musically really aims for that super light and carefree synthpop world of the ‘80s. Basically I saw Ian’s rover creations and immediately was overwhelmed by the thought of them doing a little dance on Mars. The great Ruby Innes was kind enough to put it on her Game of the Year list at Kotaku Au (“arguably has one of the best soundtracks of 2023,” Ruby, I’ll take it, thank you). The full soundtrack is available on Bandcamp, and of course the other streaming services too.
I also had the opportunity to release two new tracks for the Frog Detective series, which has remained one of my favourite things ever to work on. These final two tracks were for The Entire Mystery, which compiles all three Frog Detective games into one release for PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, and adds a delightfully silly bonus scooter game which takes liberal inspiration and loving mockery from the Tony Hawk series. Of course I had to write a Tony Hawk-style punk ska version of the main Frog Detective theme. Free to download here.
We did a handful of performances with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra of our Hans Zimmer Art of the Score show. All sold out, too, which was lovely. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over being able to host concerts of film music with a live symphony orchestra (let alone being able to help programme and write them), but the MSO, as the orchestra I grew up seeing play live, will always be special. This year we’ll be in Perth with WASO (May) and in Adelaide with the ASO (July), too, as well as some others not yet announced, so if you’re there we’d love to see you.
I was on Kirk Hamilton’s beloved music podcast, Strong Songs. Kirk and I have long been firm internet friends, and as we say in the podcast, we’ve kind of watched each other develop somewhat parallel careers from the other side of the world. It felt especially cruel that fate conspired for us to miss each other when Kirk was in Australia in 2023 for Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb’s podcast, Chat 10. Anyway, on our Strong Songs episode, Kirk and I talk for far too long about John Williams, and for far less than we should about Charles Mingus. I so wholeheartedly recommend Kirk’s podcast if you haven’t listened to it already, too. If there’s someone out there having more fun analysing music and sharing his love and expertise with the world than Kirk is, I don’t want to hear about it.
I wrapped up another year hosting Screen Sounds on ABC Classic. This was a dream gig when I began back in 2019, and it remains a dream gig today. Talking about film music for the national broadcaster? Astounding. I’ll be back in 2024—more news on that coming soon.