“We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We walk backwards into the future,” Marshall McLuhan said of the human journey on the ever-changing, fast-paced highways of life. The famous scholar would surely have liked to explore the cyberpunk universe, which emerged in the latter stages of his life and epitomizes many of McLuhan's prescient observations on culture, technology, and existence itself. Perhaps he could have planned to undertake this quest journey in a flying police spinner, a Kawasaki Blitzkrieg motorcycle, or a Rayfield Aerondight S9 hypercar, vehicles that have traveled through various cyberpunk worlds since their first conceptualization in the early '80s. Much like a Nostradamus from In media theory, McLuhan recognized that tools, objects, and things would be more transformative than information itself, anticipating the Internet decades in advance and predicting what often awaited us in both our past and future. A retro-futuristic vision sits at the center of these elusive worlds, such as Ridley Scott's 1982 cinematic wonder Blade Runner envisioned, Mike Pondsmith's hugely influential 1988 board game Cyberpunk, and CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077. Red. (CDPR), spectacularly delayed. videogame. The most recent incarnation has been years in the making, and as it blends a variety of influences into the neon barrage of the Night City landscape, the highest-grossing blockbuster of 2020 is once again tasked with showing us what's to come. it may not be so unknowable at all. This is the contradiction inherent in cyberpunk and the music, score and soundtrack are at the heart of the urgent beats. What makes this factor so essential in building future worlds like Cyberpunk 2077? In a recent gameplay trailer, CDPR's Marcin Przybyłowicz, one of three composers deployed to create the music for this warped and inevitably dystopian RPG, identified it as "the main driver of emotions in movies and video games." .
Composers seek inspiration in a new decade
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PT Adamczyk, Paul Leonard-Morgan and Marcin Przybyłowicz (Image credit: CD Projekt Red) In an interview with TechRadar, alongside Paul Leonard-Morgan and PT Adamczyk, Przybyłowicz explains how the game's sound has developed since it was introduced. Five years ago. He quickly realized that the project required a further recalibration of the myths that inform our understanding of cyberpunk, especially the decade in which Scott and Pondsmith first popularized it, following the chemtrails of personality. literary artists such as Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. "The problem with the '80s was that the public had a very specific image of cyberpunk music. We have Blade Runner, we have Ghost In The Shell, we have the Deus Ex franchise in video games. There was Akira and Dredd. But the cyberpunk genre is not as densely populated like a fantasy." Marcin Przybyłowicz “The problem with the '80s was that there was a very specific image of cyberpunk music that the public had,” Przybyłowicz tells us. “We have Blade Runner, we have Ghost In The Shell, we have the Deus Ex franchise in video games. There was Akira and Dredd, but the cyberpunk genre isn't as densely populated as fantasy. There aren't many examples to search or analyze. But the things we found in this language and its sound contribution were of no use to us. "Because there are tender moments, there are contemplative moments, there are human-to-human moments in Cyberpunk 2077, but overall it's not a slow game where you travel hundreds of miles at night while it's raining and contemplate where man ends and machines begin. , for example. There is also a place for action, for gang robberies, for company wars, everything that Mike Pondsmith wrote in the Cyberpunk 2020 sources, ”explains Przybyłowicz. He imagined finding "that punch and attitude in the 90", a decade infected with the incendiary poison of Rage Against The Machine, Beastie Boys, The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails. CDPR Creative Director Adam Badowski agrees and the result is an intense and merciless melee of electronic genres, evoking the boisterous finale of HEALTH's Max Payne 3 soundtrack and Mac Quayle's contributions to the score of The Last of Us 2. Perhaps even the equivalent sound of George Orwell's 1984 sound: "If You want an image of the future, imagine a boot imprinted on a human face, forever."
Challenge after the Witcher 3 score
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(Image credit: CD Projekt Red) It's not Vangelis. It has absolutely nothing to do with The Witcher 3, the highly acclaimed CDPR song that predates Cyberpunk 2077 and was evocatively marked by Przybyłowicz. How different was this project? "For me, the biggest challenge was finding a way to deliver cinematic applications from non-film genres, like techno, industrial, IDM, and use them as a narrative tool in our game." Marcin Przybyłowicz “For me, the biggest challenge was to find a way to deliver film applications from non-film genres, such as techno, industrial, IDM, and use them as a narrative tool in our game,” explains Przybyłowicz. “My problem was that, like others, I am a trained musician and during most of my training I was taught that music has to have a melody and that is missing in these genres. "It's easy to work with melodic material when shooting a game or a TV series, but it becomes much more complicated when you remove the melody as one of the elements of the image and find it with the pulse, a rhythmic layer, a structure and a fabric. sonic, the texture. You have to take care of it and still create movie apps for your music to do the things it's supposed to do. Finding that balance was a real challenge," says Przybyłowicz. Leonard-Morgan agrees: "There are some beautiful melodies in the game. It's not an endless wall of electronics, but we use them more as patterns than melodies. They show up during the emotional parts, those moments of humanity, which you're always going to find no matter how dark and dreary you find life. But it's not like a John Williams soundtrack where you can have a whole 30-second theme, which Marcin did with The Witcher 3. With that comes a lot more little patterns and telling you something's about to happen. The score, recorded mostly on analogue material, is eight hours long but has a constant "sonic unity", suggests Leonard-Morgan. It supports 12 in-game radio stations with exclusive and officially licensed material including Run The Jewels, Grimes, ASAP Rocky and Gazelle Twin.
Keanu Reeves becomes Johnny Silverhand
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(Image credit: CD Projekt Red) Exploring these themes, Adamczyk explains how CDPR's musical choices aim both to reflect his individual framing of this cultural genre and to strengthen the narrative scope. "80s cyberpunk music and this retro-futuristic version is always very upbeat and this game is not so upbeat. Even though it's very dark at times, things like Blade Runner still have a fairy tale feel to them." PT Adamczyk "80s cyberpunk music and this retro-futuristic version is always very upbeat and this game is not so upbeat. Even though it's very dark at times, things like Blade Runner still have a fairytale feel to them. "One way to see the difference, the 80s is the decade of Mötley Crüe and the 90s is the decade of Nirvana. They still play rock music but it's a different approach," he says. This context has a deeper connection to a specific character: Johnny Silverhand. On a track copied from USP, the presence of Keanu Reeves is undoubtedly one of Cyberpunk's biggest draws. 2077. As Silverhand, fronts fictional rock band SAMURAI, played in the script by Scandinavian hardcore punk band.Rejected.Described by Pitchfork as "the kind of live band that would cut your head off", they released the album "devastating "The Shape Of Punk To Come in 1998. How did you get involved? “There were a lot of parallels. The Rejects have broken up, like SAMURAI. They made similar music, certainly in our version of cyberpunk. In the original, Johnny is more like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, he's more like a prog rocker who can smash our version is basically a rhythm guitar player also the rebellious attitude that the Refused had, especially on The Shape Of Punk To Come, they really spoke politically, their songs had a lot of that kind of '90s attitude and they were a '90s band. "The only thing that didn't click was that they were Swedish and we had to be careful to put the right stamp on them and get the right accent for Johnny and especially for Johnny played by Keanu Reeves," says Adamczyk. A central character in the main campaign, Silverhand is a rude ghost in the trailers, half-man, half-machine, seemingly half-alive, half-dead. His presence, intangible if it remains, is one of the few constants in the development of Cyberpunk 2077, which was first announced in May 2012.
Mike Pondsmith's key cyberpunk influence
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(Image credit: CD Projekt Red) "There was no report," Przybyłowicz confirms of CDPR's initial plan. In an environment perhaps definitively described as "lowlife and high tech" by Bruce Sterling in the preface to Gibson's Burning Chrome, there remains another thread to note: the influence of Pondsmith's Cyberpunk franchise, which has tracked many characters. , locations and themes set in the fictional Night City, a sprawling, mechanized metropolis of techno-shaken lawlessness, located in the Northern Free State of California. “It's still a source of everything we've done, but it's still a source. There is a reason why the most recent pen and paper edition is called Cyberpunk 2020 and our game is called Cyberpunk 2077. This 57 year gap has its purpose historically and because of this gap we also had to iterate on certain concepts or music. ideas for him to click together, ”concludes Przybyłowicz. But how exactly do they work together? The world is finally about to find out what the future looks and sounds like. Cyberpunk 2077 launches December 10 on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Stadia, and is playable on Xbox Series X | S and PlayStation 5.