In the occasion that the music for The ER: Patient Typhon has been completed, we will share with you a true horror story that have affected the game’s music.
We were affected by a gruesome news story that swept over our home country, Denmark, late summer 2017. The Swedish news reporter, Kim Wall, was brutally killed while working on a story about Raket-Madsen (Rocket-Madsen). He was a famous, Danish, privately run inventor who had built his own submarine and was working on creating space rockets. He invited Kim Wall on a trip in his submarine as part of the interview. Video showing them sailing off in the submarine is the last time we saw Kim alive. When they didn’t come back at night the alarm clock went off and a search party started. The next day, Madsen was picked up from the sea and he told there had been an accident on the submarine and it had sunk. But the details didn’t make any sense, and we soon learned the truth, when body parts of Kim Wall were found.
On Wednesday 25 April 2018 at 13:00, Peter Madsen was sentenced by a unanimous judge to life imprisonment in the Copenhagen City Court for the murder of Kim Wall, sexual intercourse other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature, indecent treatment of a corpse, and violation of the rules on safety at sea.
When we first started talking with our composer, to find out if she was the right composer for this project, we told her how this news story had affected us and changed some core things in our game. She revealed that she had been on a trip with Peter Madsen in his submarine as part as a job recording sounds. She had a colleague with her on this trip, but had she not… Who knows?
It was not because of this experience we choose to work with our composer. It was neither because she was a well-known game composer. Actually, she has never worked on a game project before and really do not know much about games. But we knew we wanted to work with her, when we listened to one of her songs for the first time and it brought us right back to the feeling, we had the first time we played Silent Hill many years ago. We were impressed by the many creative ways, she created atmospheric music. Like making music out of the recordings of bees that was really dark and gloomy. Some of her bee music is in The ER: Patient Typhon, but we are not sure you will notice it, because it’s so strange.
Nearly a half year later after our first talk with our composer, we started working on the music for The ER: Patient Typhon. We had been listening to a lot of her older work to try to pinpoint what we really like in her style. There were some sounds in one number we really like, because it had the feeling that this project has in us. And you know what? We found out that this sound was recorded in that submarine.