INTERVIEW: Inside the soundtrack of Yars Rising

Fans of WayForward know certain things about the company are almost always true. First up, the studio excels at crafting 2D adventures in tried-and-true genres. Be they polygonal or sprite-based, WayForward keeps cranking out stellar Metroidvanias, platformers and run-and-guns. Second, it’s incredibly hard to find a WayForward game that has anything less than a fantastic soundtrack.

Ever since WayForward debuted in 1992, they’ve been releasing games with tons of toe-tapping tunes. That attention to musical detail really ticked up a notch when Shantae released on the Game Boy Color, as the game’s soundtrack was just as amazing as the game itself. In the decades after Shantae’s release, WayForward only seems to get better at making software that is accompanied by unforgettable music.

The latest example of WayForward’s impeccable audio track record is Yars Rising. While the game itself is a lovely Metroidvania full of challenge and charm, it also packs in a killer soundtrack from top to bottom. The game’s OST runs the gamut in terms of genre and styles, and it throws in plenty of tracks that offer up sensational vocals.

It’s not surprising that Yars Rising continues WayForward’s tradition of banger soundtracks, but it’s still mind-boggling how they keep upping their game. How in the world did they piece together yet another outstanding collection of songs? We had the chance to chat with numerous people involved to find out.

To get the scoop on all things audio in Yars Rising, we virtually chatted with James Montagna (game director), Tommy Pedrini (music director), and Megan McDuffee (musician). From instruments to lyrics, composition to styles, we talk about everything in the Yars Rising OST and then some! If you’re dying to learn more about how this phenomenal soundtrack came to be, read on!

GN: The Yars Rising soundtrack is incredibly eclectic. Could you break down the areas/genres of music it pulls from?

Tommy: I’m really happy people are noticing the eclecticism! I think this is something that James and I were particularly philosophical about trying to nail for the sound of Yars Rising — we discussed a lot together in the early phases of the project about how to present this kind of futuristic cyberpunk world; we wanted to explore sonic ideas that could also be a little playful, exploratory, and modern, instead of just dark and synthy as is often expected in this type of setting.

James: I remember describing to Tommy at one point that we’re inventing our own take on the cyberpunk subgenre. It’s kind of a standard to paint that sort of world in a dystopian light and derive the music from there, but the world of Yars Rising has a more lively spirit at its core. And I felt the music genres should reflect that, along with also being a reflection of the game’s protagonist herself, Emi Kimura.

Tommy: Right, we settled on this being Emi’s own musical taste. If we think of Emi as kind of a cool twenty-something living 20-30 years from now, she would be somewhat like younger people we see today, leaning into a blend of both modern sounds and “retro” sounds. So we adjusted our internal clocks and tried to guess at what “retro” music might be really popular to future trendsetters.

James: To that point, the term “retrofuture” was our guiding light when figuring out the sound. And you know, it works on multiple levels because Yars’ Revenge itself is also a retro brand, yet here we are crafting this future vision of it. Alongside that was my personal goal to represent “on trend” or up-and-coming music stylings that you just don’t commonly hear in other games at the moment, so that Yars could have its own musical identity in the gaming landscape.

Tommy: Our discussions landed us on city pop, which has been having a real and widespread resurgence, along with more “modern” takes on those sounds. This includes future funk, nu-disco, and vaporwave, which often sample or remix old city pop songs, or breakcore, a very sample-heavy genre in general. I think city pop works for a cyberpunk setting in particular because both genres are diametrically opposed sides of the largesse of the 1980s; the seemingly-endless capitalist expansion that defined the “bubble economy” era. As the soundtrack evolved a bit more, we dug into some adjacent sounds for specific areas or particular emotional or sonic beats we wanted to hit — parts of the game feature special guest tracks that lean on J-electro, kayōkyoku, and even ‘90s J-pop…”Heisei retro” is very much a thing now! Also, for the fun of it, we even threw in an ‘80s cheeseball rock song. Sometimes a specific sound or nod was just the right vibe for the right moment.

GN: Are there any particular bands/performers that served as an influence?

James: There’s so many. For one, Moe Shop. I was just grabbing lunch in Tokyo with Moe last week and we got to talking about this game, and how well everything came together. And from there, the topic turned to this mutual desire to keep it going on future titles if we can. That moment made me feel really grateful we’ve forged this connection, but I also had to stop and acknowledge how uncommon and special it is that we did. Because, at the outset of every new game project I step up to direct, I put together a list of like three or so songs influencing our magnetic north tonally, and more specifically which artists to model the sound after. And the sky’s the limit as to what songs or artists I’ll pick as inspiration, but this is the first time ever that one of the artists from the initial influences list ended up actually being involved. So, I’m still not over how cool that is.

For the record, other artists beside Moe Shop that were formally on the influences list were Desired from the French house artist group Sailor Team, and Yamashita Tatsurō. I’m sure Tommy has plenty of influences too on top of that.

Tommy: Probably too many to list! I think we were lucky enough to get to work with a few artists that were already big inspirations to me personally — like Moe Shop, YUC’e, & TORIENA. On a personal level, I tried to dig deep in and explore the vibe of a lot of different artists and producers for tracks. Just a few that come to mind: Ohta Hiromi, Yamaguchi Momoe, ANRI, Yamashita Tatsurō, Sugar Babe, Ohnuki Taeko, Takeuchi Mariya, Yagami Junko, Komuro Tetsuya, Kanno Yōko, and uh…Macintosh Plus and Kenny Loggins? Yeah, we were a bit all over the place.

One side note about “influences,” perhaps in a different way, is that I was also deeply influenced by being able to work with both a number of friends and colleagues whose music I respect greatly — like Megan McDuffee, Maddie Lim, Jason Zaffary, Dale North, Tobokegao, James Landino, & FLOOR BABA — and some super fresh new voices like Sean Bialo & Jett Mance. When you all get along and are having fun as a team, it’s really easy to be influenced by the team and the spirit of collaboration, and that definitely shaped how I wrote my piece of this work.

GN: This soundtrack is ginormous! How long has it been in the works and how many people were involved?

James: Truly huge! Yars Rising features without a doubt the most ambitious WayForward game soundtrack of all time in terms of the effort it took to coordinate and number of contributors involved. Even though much of the real work happened over a more narrow time period, I think we spent about 18 months working out the details of this soundtrack, with a lot of that time spent planning, conceptualizing, shortlisting artists, reaching out to determine availability and getting things scoped out.

Tommy: Thankfully the actual writing/production time was quite a bit shorter, and that’s largely because we had a whole lot of people working simultaneously on their parts. That said, the large number of vocal tracks still meant there was a lot of work involved in that phase. We had something like 21 distinct musical artists — composers, producers, vocalists — plus Robbie Altschuler who did the final production, mixing, and mastering for every track. If we include the good folks at WayForward who worked on the production, music design, and implementation chain, the managers who helped facilitate artist relations, and the assistants who helped us with patch and sample design, I think we can safely say that more than 30 people contributed to the soundtrack in some way.

GN: How on Earth do you keep track of such a mammoth soundtrack?

James: It’s…challenging, for sure. When you factor those 30 plus people Tommy mentioned, you have to also consider the coordination and management of said people. One special thing about the music of Yars Rising was the fact that it represents a global music collaboration, with artists from here in North America, Australia, Japan, etc. It gives us an incredible result with a wide range of perspectives, but that also creates its own production challenges too.

Tommy: For starters, our lead music producer Robbie Altschuler at Command Creative Studios was a huge part of keeping everything flowing within the music team, and then he also mixed and mastered every song so there would be a cohesive sound. For my part, kinda steering the creative flow and occasionally helping Robbie with checking in on the artists…I think the answer to how it gets done is really something like “have a lot of conversations, big and small.” I want to make as many friends as possible everywhere I go, and so I believe a natural desire to talk to people and know them more helps to be more in sync with a project that relies on a lot of different voices coming together like this one.

One element of “keeping track” that might be harder to articulate was the need to not just manage people but also trying to maintain the flow and creative vision while prizing each artist’s unique style. I spent perhaps an inordinate amount of time worrying about the potential danger of a project like this landing in a way I’ve seen a few big team efforts over the past few years end up, with many different people putting out their own different tracks without a lot of cohesion or consistency between them, even though the tracks are very good individually. So I will add that for Yars Rising we spent a lot of time discussing as a team different elements to explore in pursuit of cohesiveness — and we all tried to write, produce, and transition across sometimes very disparate styles to create as much “glue” as we could.

GN: Is there any way you could break down how long it takes to write/record an individual tune? I know it’s hard to give an average for any song, but perhaps there’s a process that flows throughout the creation of any/all tracks?

Megan: It’s always a bit different, of course, depending on if the song is a vocal piece or an instrumental, what genre it is, etc. Typically instrumentals take me between 4-8 hours to produce, while vocal tracks take upwards of 10 hours easily. As far as my process, I usually start with drums and bass. I find that once I have a groove going, it’s much easier for melodies to come to me.

Tommy: Yeah, it really does depend on the song for sure. In my case, sometimes it flows and takes a few hours to complete most of the work on a track, and other times it’s very challenging. “Plastic City” is a song I came up with at the piano first. A few other tracks had something like 20 self-revisions before I was even ready to show them.

One thing about the workflow for Yars Rising that is interesting and unique to the game is because of the genres we were looking to as inspiration — especially future funk and vaporwave — a number of the tracks had to be written twice so that we could make part or all of a “base track” and then “remix” it for that authentic “a high schooler dumped this track into FL studio and used a sidechain to duck the master recording” aesthetic.

GN: How much is known about the level/scene a song plays in before its composed?

Tommy: In a perfect world, we would have some direct sense of experiencing the gameplay and the art of a scene or setting before sitting down to write the music, but in games, development usually happens at the same time and so materials you get depend on what part of the game a track is in and how “done” that area is. I would actually say that when compared to many other projects, in Yars Rising we had a solid amount of information about the areas and context for the music that was needed — James is really meticulous about gathering the details and any concept art or screenshots & reference tunes that might be helpful. Occasionally on every project, though, something will change in the course of development and a few tracks have to be shuffled around to new locations for a variety of reasons.

Megan: It also depends on where in the development process we’re brought into the project. Sometimes I’ll just get a general description of an area, sometimes artwork, and sometimes some actual gameplay footage. I especially love having a collection of reference music to analyze before starting on composing anything. Reference tunes, coupled with a simple description of the vibe and area, are a perfect combination to get me started.

GN: Were there any tracks that were a particular struggle to put together?

Tommy: I think I probably struggled the most with “eighty two” because I placed a lot of what I guess you could call “functional” importance on it; I conceived of it with the idea that it would need to be able to stand alone and also would have to be a kind of “glue” between the other tracks and styles featured in that part of the game: Megan’s “Hacking My Brain” and Moe’s “ONLINE.” Since “eighty two” was riding alongside such bangers, and because it was also one of the first presentations of Emi’s own musical theme in the game, I probably stressed out the most about it! It was also somewhat challenging to find the exact way I wanted to present the kind of dark ’80s-styled pop song that was being “remixed” for the B section of the track, and producing that section of the “original” song involved a lot of self-revisions. But I was ultimately happy with how it came out.

Megan: I struggled with one too, actually! Initially when I was given reference songs for the opening tune “So Alive,” I thought to myself, “Okay, this is a fairly straightforward funky song with big band elements and a dance beat.” But when I sat down to produce the song, after wrestling with it, I did some research and discovered that future funk is almost exclusively based on sampling existing city pop songs. Since I couldn’t legally sample any city pop songs, I had to create my own. So I went back to the drawing board, produced a funky, jazzy big band city pop instrumental, mixed it, then used it as a sample to tweak, chop up, and craft the drums, additional bassline, vocals, and synth elements around. It was a process I hadn’t done before, but once I figured out the steps I could then move through them.

GN: I might be wrong, but did I hear an Otamatone used in a couple of the songs? I play a ton of games, but if an Otamatone is indeed used, this might be the first game I’ve ever heard one in!

James: Hey, good ear! That is indeed professional-grade Otamatone playing brought to you by none other than the “Otama-Mama” herself, Michaela Nachtigall.

I’ve had an enormous love for Maywa Denki since even before they introduced Otamatone, avidly collecting the Knockman family of toys. So it was only natural that when Otamatone was introduced, I pre-ordered from the first release batch and have been obsessed, collecting ever since. But my collection pales in comparison to that of Michaela, who also happens to wield an incredible talent playing them as an instrument. That mutual passion is just one of countless things that brought Michaela and I together as tight friends, and frequent collaborators.

You can hear the tracks Michaela has composed alongside her beautiful strings in various tracks throughout Yars Rising. And while her Otamatone is prominent in several of the boss themes, it’s not our first rodeo of invoking such madness into a game together. Michaela’s Otamatone playing was also featured in Vitamin Connection and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, so be sure to check those games out and listen closely!

GN: WayForward consistently puts out games with phenomenal soundtracks. How do you keep up such a track record? Is there a process or team you’ve come up with to ensure such a high quality for your works?

James: Wow, thanks for saying so. I don’t really know what the WayForward secret is in this department, but it may be a combination of a sheer love for the craft of music and surrounding yourself with incredible people. Maybe someone else can tell me what we’re doing right otherwise.

Tommy: Well, I can’t speak to the inner workings of the company, but from the perspective I’ve had as an outside collaborator, the unifying element across a diverse number of WayForward projects and teams has indeed been a deep creative passion for art, music, and expression in general. There’s a tendency with the people I’ve worked with there to really care about and value the small details and extra layers of polish, and of course there’s the strong WayForward musical tradition of “go very hard” that I think we all feel like we want to honor and build off of. It was also helpful for Yars that James and I have particularly similar musical tastes, so when we were working together, we’d sometimes even suggest the exact same references for certain tracks!

James: Ah, I almost forgot, but that really did happen, and more than once! It’s kind of eerie how in sync we were.

GN: I really appreciate how WayForward isn’t afraid to include songs with vocals in their games. Songs with vocals certainly aren’t new in gaming, but WayForward continues to embrace the idea in game types/genres where it’s mostly unheard of. Does this present any particular challenge, and is there an impetus for including lyric-based tunes in genres where it’s usually not expected?

Tommy: James is really passionate about using vocal music to tell a story and help build a world, and I’m very on board with that kind of approach. As we fleshed this idea out more, the vocal tracks also evolved to reflect Emi’s tastes, or her moods at a specific arc of the game, and the sort of emotional landscapes surrounding the areas you traverse in Yars Rising. If you hang out in Emi’s room long enough, there’s an easter egg that hints at a sort of in-world canon regarding the music, a little ad that plays to suggest that “QoTunes Enhanced Playlists are always watching you…and DJing appropriately.”

There are definitely challenges to a vocal-heavy soundtrack. For starters, you have to write lyrics, and they need to strike the balance between “this is about the thing you’re experiencing” and “this could stand alone as a song” while also carrying the scene; there actually needs to be quite a bit of subtlety to the lyrics in order to effectively use them for foreshadowing, invoke a deeper theme, state a character or thematic motif, or advance the story without parroting it back.

Another challenge was the need to balance vocal music with a pretty significant amount of dialogue; we ended up implementing an adaptive music system using a karaoke track for each vocal song to duck the vocals whenever a character talks. This means that for every track that’s in the game, it has to be there twice, with each version synced to play back at the same time. Overall, I think the vocal tracks helped us to do a lot of storytelling that we wouldn’t otherwise get to experience, so solving those puzzles was worth the effort.

GN: Is there a track the team is particularly proud of?

Tommy: I know that Robbie, our lead music producer, is very proud of “Shoot From My Heart,” because it’s this great fusion of the Command Creative core music team, with Jason Zaffary’s strong writing and guitar, my singing, and Robbie mixing; our powers combined!

I’m wowed by what every artist contributed, so I have too many answers to this question. Among my contributions, I’m the most proud of “Plastic City,” the ending theme. “Plastic City” reflects Emi’s transformation into someone who, while still a bit acerbic, is capable of caring about others; milkyPRiSM wrote lyrics and delivered a stellar performance with that in mind, both of which are very sensitive to a more optimistic message. The song is also special to me beyond Yars Rising because we wrote it while thinking of our dear friend Greg Hignight, who passed away at the start of the project, and whose relentless optimism and deep love of city pop were huge inspirations to me and still carry me forward. I wanted to think that he would be listening to and enjoying the song from wherever he is now, probably Tokyo, so I wrote it with everything I had!

James: I had an unusually specific vision of what I wanted to hear for ”Kodoku Na Rainy Night” that I thought might not be possible to fully capture. Yet somehow, Haru and Tommy completely aced the vibe I was going for so much that I often feel a chill when listening to it.

I guess I’ve got to share that I’m proud of the fact we were also able to honor the history of Yars’ Revenge as a brand with a particular deep cut of a track. In 1982, there was this Yars vinyl record released with a song called “Fly, Yar Warriors!” and I thought, when else could there ever be such an opportunity…we had to do a cover of the song 42 years after the original recording. So, our almost identically named track “Fly, Yar Warriors, Fly!” is a new version of this song. Because it’s a song I just love so much, I made a selfish request to the music team to take a shot at doing the vocals myself, and we rolled with that. I was hoping to share it with the co-creators of the original track so they might feel honored, but it seems one of them has long since passed away, and I’m unsure how to track down if the other is still around.

GN: Please tell me there’s at least some talk of doing a physical soundtrack release for Yars Rising!

James: That’s really up to Atari since they have ownership of the music entirely, but I also know they’re always listening to what players want and trying their best to deliver. This has been a pretty common request. I can’t formally confirm anything here today and don’t actually know of any specific plans, but I’m optimistic and there’s a lot of ideas in discussion to generally continue celebrating Yars Rising, so I will just leave this with a “stay tuned.” In the meantime, we have “Yars Rising Radio: Emibeats – Complete Soundtrack MEGAMIX” on YouTube where you can enjoy the entire soundtrack for free right now, which I hope will also inspire listeners to check out the game itself!

GN: Are there previous soundtracks, WayForward or otherwise, that helped pave the way for the works in Yars Rising? Perhaps some things learned from other games that were applied here?

Megan: Quite literally, yes. The third track I produced, “Rebel Hero,” was essentially an epic remix of a previous game score cue I had done previously for Atari’s Yars Recharged. One of the melodies from that game score I repurposed into the song for Yars Rising, by changing the genre, tempo, instrumentation, and adding lyrics/vocals. If you listen to “An Army of One” from the Yars Recharged score, you’ll hear the melody.

Tommy: As far as WayForward soundtracks go, it would be hard to find a previous WayForward soundtrack that hasn’t helped pave the way here — aside from some very obvious influential standouts like the Mighty series or Double Dragon Neon, I could even point to stuff like Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?!! or Wonder Momo: Typhoon Booster as having fed into this production. And that’s to say nothing of the all-star team we got by working with Megan McDuffee, Dale North, and Maddie Lim — add another stack of WayForward games with their sonic DNA woven into Yars Rising! Maddie, Michaela, Chiyoko and I also leveled up a lot of our production and team-building skills when working on Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, so I would definitely say that game also helped us get ready for a project like this.

All that said, if there’s one game I think set the stage for me more than any other, it would be Vitamin Connection, which involved a lot of the same core players, and was also a huge soundtrack with a ton of ambitious vocal tracks, saturated with color and specific genre nods to the past 50 years of Japanese pop music. Just like with Yars, we were given a lot of room to experiment and play with the concept of genre as an emotional and thematic tool, and also leaned deeply into some specific musical tastes that we all shared. So in many ways, to me at least, Yars Rising is a kind of musical successor to Vitamin Connection, as disconnected as the two games may seem.

GN: The Yars Rising soundtrack is filled to the brim, but there have to be some tunes that didn’t make the cut. How many B-sides are hiding in the WayForward vault?

Tommy: There are a few drafts here and there that maybe got rested or retooled early on for not being a fit, or for a change in scope or scene, but there actually aren’t any tantalizingly unreleased Yars Rising B-sides floating around in some stray folder somewhere. However, given the large number of “remixed” or “sampled” sounds needed to match the genres we were drawing inspiration from, there are a few “older” tracks that don’t really exist at all, but portions of them exist for the purposes of sampling or remixing. For example, the tracks “eighty two” and “ＶＩＳＩＯＮ” both seem to suggest they’re remixes of longer ’80s pop songs, but all you ever hear of either “original” song is the chorus plus the remix material that “reinvents” it. I like to imagine that these are considered classics to most of the people living in Syzygy City, though. Maybe we’d get to hear the full tracks if Emi paid her QoTunes bill…

GN: (For everyone) Do you have a favorite track in Yars Rising, and if so, why?

Tommy: I’ve already shared the track I’m most proud of, and I can’t quite pick a favorite track; this is like trying to pick a favorite child. One really lovely song that stands out to me every time I hear it is Jason Zaffary’s amazing collaboration with Laura Serafine, “Who Am I.” I’m particularly partial to the classic mix of the song, which is just this super on-point disco banger. The harmonies and arrangement are so sophisticated when they need to be, and the performance and vocal layering is so resonant and emotional. If we thread the idea I mentioned earlier of each playlist reflecting Emi’s inner narrative (that she maybe thinks of herself as too cool to say out loud), “Who Am I” is a really rare and vulnerable look at Emi’s uncertainty about her future as she modifies both her body and her overall outlook to become a reluctant heroine. I think it’s really cool — plus Laura’s voice is just completely dialed up to “goosebumps” on this one.

Megan: It’s a legendary effort by so many talented musicians. Of my own contributions, I’d have to say “So Alive.” It was an interesting, challenging song, and ultimately super satisfying when I felt like I nailed the brief. As for my favorite out of the whole soundtrack, I’ll get back to you on that. It very likely won’t be my own songs.

James: I can’t pick one! But if I absolutely had to mention one that gives me a rush…Sean Bialo’s track “You will be mine!!” just amazes me every time I listen to it. It’s our first time working together and without any prior WayForward history, Sean managed to knock out a track that feels so WayForward in its essence, it could be right at home in one of our Mighty series games. It fits the excitement, anticipation, and thrill we aim for players to feel when playing. And with that, I’d like players everywhere to enjoy Yars Rising to the fullest, knowing now some stories of what went into making the music for them.

An absolutely huge thanks to James Montagna, Tommy Pedrini and Megan McDuffee for taking the time out of their busy schedules to talk with us. Another big thanks goes to WayForward’s Chris Hoffman for making the interview possible!

Yars Rising is available right now on Switch in both digital and physical form. You can learn more about the game through the eShop listing.