G.A.N.G Summit – Philosophy of Music Design in Games: Portal 2 and FEZ
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G.A.N.G Summit – Philosophy of Music Design in Games: Portal 2 and FEZ

Audio for Video Games Workshop

Sept, 26th, 2012 | 7.00 – 10.00 PM

FEZ

GANG & Pyramind are proud to present an evening with two of the game industry’s most interesting people. Composer/sound maker/game maker, Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace)discusses his philosophy behind his soundtrack for the indie game hit, FEZ. FEZ gained a lot of press, not only for it’s many pre-release awards but also for it’s inclusion in the film, INDIE GAME, The Movie.

Our other speaker, Mike Morasky (VALVE) will discuss his audio/music work in the award winning PORTAL 2, which blurred the line between music and sound design, and had some extremely clever audio implementation that was deeply integrated into the game design. Following the talks will be a panel and Q/A session to discuss some of their game audio philosophies in further depth.


 

Rich Vreeland

Rich Vreeland

Rich Vreeland (also known as Disasterpeace) is a freelance composer / sound designer based in San Francisco, CA, with a focus on producing and directing interactive treatments for games.

He grew up in New York clacking rhythms on his teeth and writing guitar licks, before graduating from Berklee College of Music with a Bachelor’s of Music in Music Synthesis.

Along the way he interned with Singapore-MIT GAMBIT, wrote original music for classic franchises like Bomberman and Bonk, and developed a critically acclaimed interactive music game. He performs his music regularly at big events like PAX East, and was invited to speak about interactive audio at GDC 2012.


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Rich has worked on just about every contemporary platform, knows his way around middleware tools, and likes to get his hands dirty. Most recently, Rich wrote the music for the 2012 IGF Seamus McNally Grand Prize winner FEZ.


Mike Morasky

Rich Vreeland

For Valve, Morasky composed the music for Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 (including composing and playing the guitar, keyboard and bass for the fictional hard rock band “Midnight Riders”), Portal 2, and provided additional music for the original Portal.

He also worked as a visual effects supervisor on the The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix film trilogies.

Morasky was part of the now defunct hardcore punk/noise rock band “Steel Pole Bath Tub”, which he founded in 1986 with Dale Flattum. S.P.B.T. disbanded in 2002.


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On Valve’s official website, his function his described as follows: “Morasky’s life and career looks a lot like one of the post-modern audio collages he is so fond of creating. Guitar player in a full-time bar band in Montana as a teen, award winning experimental composer in Tokyo, audio hardware programmer in Silicon Valley, underground art rocker touring the world, 3d animator and director for television, electronic audio collage artist in France and Japan, visual fx artist on the Lord of the Rings and Matrix Trilogies, AI animation instructor at an art college and currently he is applying some combination of all these things to games at Valve.”[2]