Desert planet music

Allan Zax is on a roll! After composing the lava planets theme he was eager to make more of Super Space Galaxy‘s soundtrack, and now he’s finished the desert planets’ theme as well. If you’ve been following the blog you’ll know that Allan is also responsible for the music for the galaxy map, solar systems, the combat, the cities, and ice planets.

I have a bunch of old games I care about and I always enjoy using them to inspire the artists I work with. The first port of call was the desert level in One Must Fall 2097. This track had echoing guitar that I thought communicated the vast, dry landscape of the desert well. There were also desert levels in the original Jazz Jackrabbit.

When it comes to desert-music in games, there seem to be a few common approaches. The deserts in the two games above have a rather American approach with electric guitars in both tracks. Often, though, a desert level is played up as exotic and instruments from Persia are used instead.

This is particularly common in fantasy games. Traditional Medieval fantasy is implicitly based around Europe and England in particular. You can expect the ‘home’ areas to be green fields or woodlands, and any desert areas to be treated as foreign. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance, the villain Ganondorf is from the Gerudo Desert and the good guys live in green plains and woodlands. Even if England isn’t the centre, chances are there’s a vaguely ‘Western’ feel to everything and anything ‘Eastern’ is treated more distantly. I was also reminded of the way Persians are treated in the film 300, where the Spartans are the heroes and the Persians are presented as scarcely human.

Let’s watch these motherless dogs as they’re embraced by the loving arms of Greece herself.

Dilios, 300

I have nothing particularly against depicting one side as ‘foreign’ if it suits the story (in 300, it makes sense in context), but this wasn’t something I wanted to do for the desert planets in Super Space Galaxy. Centring the game on green fields would be arbitrary as you can visit any planet in any order you want. If anything, I wanted all the planets in the game to feel alien and exotic. In space, there is no Persia!

I mentioned some of this to Allan and he shared a meme about how the soundtracks in desert maps tend to sound gratuitously foreign. We both agreed to have minimal ‘Persian-ness’ in the music. There’s a few nods to it in the final track, but it’s not the only influence.

Allan himself was mostly inspired by the music from old Westerns and put a lot American influence in there, which is also something I wanted.

The music went through 3 stages. The first version Allan gave me sounded appropriately ‘big’ and had some nods to Persian and American-style deserts, but I thought it was too sombre to be appropriate for your spaceship adventuring across the galaxy. He added some things to lighten the mood (including arpeggios, my favourite). The 2nd version was now too busy to convey a sense of emptiness, however. I sent him music from Demon’s Souls to show what long pauses could convey, and it prompted Allan to pare down the music to something more minimalistic.

The 3rd version was now just right! Allan was very co-operative and did a great job tying all the elements together. He somehow put size, emptiness, dryness, Persia, America, adventure and space together into the same track. I’ve posted a video below that includes all the versions of the music so you can hear the progress.

Super Space Galaxy is now close to having music for all the available planets! It’s only the Rock and Islands planets to go. After that there’s still some planet-types that aren’t accessible yet, so subscribe to the blog to see what we come up with next…

Thanks for reading,

Kenneth Dunlop