“I might be having a conversation with someone on the team, and they’ll say something, and I’m like, okay, there, yeah, grab the iPhone and just hum something because there it is,” he explains.
“It’s pretty much an unconscious thing,” McConnell says. But before you get there, how do you even bottle and convey something so abstract as a mental world? Returning to an old IP like Psychonauts is a chance for McConnell to deepen what he has done with the material. If you were hearing a trumpet, I want it to be a trumpet!” “Everything’s gonna be live we’re not gonna have any fake instruments in this version, and to me, that’s everything”, he adds. “It’s so wonderful to be able to come back and go, right, now we’re going to treat these themes, and we’re going to take them somewhere,” McConnell explains. he’s a pro!” Schafer added.īut returning to score another Psychonauts game has felt particularly special for McConnell, especially given the expanded scope of the sequel. “Having a composer that could do any style, because you never know what our setting is going to be - like oh, it’s a Spanish Villa, or, you know, under the sea or spy-themed - and he can just hit all these different genres and just go between them, but then still maintain, you know, Sasha’s Theme, or a theme for Milla or something and still keeping that theme going behind any sort of style. Studio head Tim Schafer explained their relationship as part of a recent interview with NME: “We’ve been working on music ever since I think Monkey Island 2, it’s a long time,” Schafer said.
Credit: Double Fine Productionsįrom the heavy metal operatics of Brutal Legend to the matryoshka mayhem o f Stacking, McConnell has been a key musical collaborator for Double Fine as the studio has grown over the years. who’s gonna play the bongos? Well, I guess I’m going to play the bongos … but I’m so proud of the vibe of the original Psychonauts music and that sprightly sound that it has.” Tracks like The Meat Circus and Whispering Rock still resonate today, painting vivid pictures of the game’s environments. “I did everything I could live, but I did not do all the things live I wanted to do live. “Sometimes the neighbours weren’t too happy about that,” McConnell says. McConnell created most of the score for the original Psychonauts in his small apartment in Berkeley, California. So let’s just say we didn’t have the same resources to work with that we do now,“ he says. That was where Double Fine was in those days. “And when all the monoxide had, you know, floated up in the air, they went up into an open area above the cars and worked.
“They drove into this garage South of Market that had a big door that looked stunningly like the garage door puzzle from Full Throttle,” McConnell says. “Back then, Double Fine was literally in a garage,” he added. “It was very satisfying because Psychonauts was the first game I worked on as an independent composer,” McConnell says. More than 15 years after the first game’s release, Psychonauts 2 is here, and McConnell has slipped back into its unique world, delivering over three hours of original score. READ MORE: ‘Call of Duty: Vanguard’ multiplayer preview: that MW magic, with the same old annoyances.A 3D platformer where you explore the inside of other people’s minds, McConnell’s music helped Psychonauts’ unfathomable environments come to life, making fans out of a generation of players who engaged with the game’s artistic interpretations of mental health concepts. In the early 2000s, he lent his ear to fellow LucasArts ex-pat Tim Schafer’s Double Fine to score the studio’s surreal debut, Psychonauts. Peter McConnell is a legendary video game composer responsible for crafting the eclectic soundscapes of classic adventure games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle.