Toby: They probably should have also named the song that plays when you play the Snake minigame this. Anyway this is based off of “SNAKE GENESIS” which I wrote first. I’m honestly so surprised you hadn’t heard of it. It is an extremely important moment in american cinema AND meta comedy. This one was called “Why’d it have to be STRIFE” a reference to the classic line in Indiana Jones where Indy, a known pacifist, questions the violent tone of the film. James: Originally all the strife song titles had the word STRIFE in them.
Toby: I literally didn’t understand why it was called this until I read James’s comment on it. Anyway Toby and I thought it would be really funny if we made the mansion theme sound like the Sephiroth song from Final Fantasy 7 and originally the directors hated it but I cried until I got my way. There is no secret Undertale reference in this room. James: Cohen named this one this because it is the basement and Toby was living in Andrews basement at some point while he was working on Undertale. Like some sort of Will They/Won’t They Tuba standoff. James: We just kept telling each other to add Tuba to things. This turned out to be a really tuba-heavy soundtrack somehow. Toby: It sounds kind of like Yoshi’s Story to me. You will see more of these dynamic music changes in ACT 2. In the time since then, though we decided to have music changes based more on “narrative” and less on just “location.” You don’t spend that much time upstairs so it would seem kinda silly to have the “MAIN THEME” of the mansion be heard for the two minutes you’re in the hallway. This was originally going to be the theme for just downstairs.
Stripping down Toby’s song in this way makes it sound kinda like Luigi’s Mansion, which rules so it all worked out. James: Overall it felt like the mansion wasn’t dorky enough so I wrote this even MORE toned down version of it for when the lights go out. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out from a musical standpoint, though I guess it’s kind of serious given how goofy the house looks. Toby: This is one of the first tracks I did for the game. Toby ended up doing the final version of this one, though I think a piano version I did exists somewhere too. When we first came onto the project Andrew told us “it’s like a haunted house” so we really made it like… spooky but months down the line Andrew was like “ok lads reel it in it’s not actually haunted just lonely” so we switched it to piano and toned it down a bit. It used a lot of harpsichord originally, which we then thought we’d use a little more sparingly. James: This went through a bunch of revisions, too. Toby: I think my original version of this was like 40 seconds long or something… James did a really good job fleshing it out and making it something that’s listenable for long enough to look at the Bubsy poster 40 times in a row. Joey feels most at home in her bedroom, which is a sanctuary from the rest of the awful house she lives in. One of the design choices Toby and I settled on really early on was that each character would have a “room” that be the purest form of their theme.
James: When Toby sent me the original piano sketch for Joey’s theme it was real good but I thought since Joey dances, what if I made it sound like a dance recital? I used to take dance classes when I was a kid, and I have very distinct memories of a kindly old woman playing bouncy piano chords in ¾ time. The original version of this sounds a lot more like “SINGULAR PERIL” without any drums and not sampled, so just like, straight 8ths. It is one of the VERY first things written for the game. Toby doesn’t like to use a lot of percussion, so I wrote this based on what was originally a piano piece. James: In its current form, I think this is one of the best examples on this soundtrack of what Toby and I’s respective styles sound like mixed together. It’s based around Joey and Jude’s theme, and has a few nods in there to some others if you’re listening. This latest version is meant to tie in with the title screen music. It’s so much better now than it used to be. James: This is the track that has been rewritten the most. Wait…did I say all this once before already? No. We’ve got the first half of the discussion today, with the next half going up next Wednesday. But more interestingly, it’s James and Toby, giving some commentary on the first half of the HIVESWAP: Act 1 soundtrack, available now on Bandcamp or bundled with HIVESWAP: Act 1 on Steam and Humble.