2023’s best gaming soundtrack was co-created by a high school student and a first-time composer

Pizza Tower looks and sounds like practically nothing else in gaming right now, its wacky ’90s Cartoon Cartoon-style animation accompanied by a bafflingly catchy soundtrack—think classic blue sky, turn-of-the-millennium Sega vibes pushed to even greater heights. Of its two primary composers, Ronan “Mr. Sauceman” de Castel came to music late, with Pizza Tower not only being his first professional work, but first publicly available music, period. Catching up with the other main composer, ClascyJitto (also credited as Frostix), I found out that while they’ve been publishing their own work for a lot longer, they’re also still in high school.

Pizza Tower is already a game of the year contender in a packed 2023, with some of the crispiest, most inspired 2D platforming of the past 10 years forming the dough underneath that gorgeous art and bangin’ soundtrack’s sauce, cheese, anchovies, pineapples, etc.  The indie devs worked on it for five years bolstered by an active Discord, and that community is where de Castel and ClascyJitto first came to the project as fans. “I joined the Discord way early in development and I started making remixes of some of the early versions of the songs that were out,” ClascyJitto told me. De Castel had already been brought on as composer by lead developer McPig, and both were impressed by ClascyJitto’s takes on the early soundtrack. “Ronan liked the remixes and McPig suggested the idea of bringing me on as another composer for the game.”