Game info: Wikipedia
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Pacific Drive is an open world survival-adventure game with a focus on driving; you drive your car around Fake Washington State, scavenging resources from abandoned buildings to repair your car with as you open up the map and advance the story. The game’s score was written by Wilbert Roget, II, a mostly orchestral composer of mostly AAA games who happens to be the only game composer I’ve ever shared a bed with[1]. He started at LucasArts, where he worked mostly on Star Wars games, before going freelance, and since then he’s worked on among other franchises Tomb Raider, Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, and Destiny.
However, Pacific Drive isn’t orchestral, far from it! For this spooky game that involves the unreal, Roget wanted to use a bunch of sounds that didn’t previously exist, so he made a bunch of field recordings and manipulated them into synth pads and percussion and such, which he loves talking about in interviews:
“I was at a bachelor party, and the guy sleeping next to me, he had the most interesting snore I’ve ever heard,” Roget says. “It was pitched and extremely aggressive. I couldn’t sleep, but the next morning I said, ‘hey man, can I record you snoring? This is fascinating to me.’ He was like, ‘yeah, sure. That’s not weird at all.’ But I did it and it turned into this really cool pad sound. And it was so useful for later on in the game when things get really weird and you get closer and closer to the center of the zone.”
Extremely normal music-making process. It doesn’t get more normal than that actually.
So this is mostly an electronic score, usually calm, somber/eerie ambient but with some tenser, more actiony pieces featuring drums or synth riffs. It doesn’t ever sound like it’s composed of random found objects; the manipulation is extensive enough that for the most part you might just assume the electronic noises are coming from more standard synth libraries, though a few have a nice corroded character to them. There are also some more traditional instruments in there to round out the sound, notably some guitar played by Roget himself and some wordless vocals and double bass by some guest players.
Because this is much more ambient music than his orchestral works, it for obvious reasons tends to be less complex in volume and substance, though he still manages to fit in a fair amount of odd time/meter changes and other things like intentional detuning to keep things fresh. The guitar in particular tends to make a lot of the music fall into a more noodling kind of ambience that I like less than pure sound design and chordal ambience, but there are still some fun sounds in there. It’s not bad!
In addition to Roget’s score, because this is a driving game where you spend a whole lot of time inside a car, there’s also almost three hours of songs that you can listen to on the radio; half of them were in the game at launch and the other half were added earlier this year in the Endless Expeditions update. The radio soundtrack is almost entirely licensed songs by random bands from the Pacific Northwest, where the game takes place. However, two original songs were also provided by Gordon McGladdery, who’s the director of the studio responsible for the game’s audio production, A Shell in the Pit (McGladdery also uses this name personally for his own music, though the studio has a lot of staff and a bunch of them also worked on the game). The only music I’ve heard previously by McGladdery are his tracks for Rogue Legacy, which generally mixed folk-leaning rock music with a chiptune layer or two. His two songs here are more actual rock songs, but they definitely have similar feelings in their guitar and percussion tones and writing so I think you can pretty easily hear similarities between them, with “Ghost on the Road” sounding a bit more like the stage themes and “I Swear You Wanted Me Dead” being a little faster paced like the boss themes. Neither’s really my kind of thing, though the beats production of the first one is pretty nice.
Recommended tracks:
All selections are by Wilbert Roget, II.
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“Instability” is one of the tense tracks, its meter is hard to grab hold of at first but at 0:26 the buzzy synth settles on a 5/4 riff
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“The Garage” starts melting a bit at the end
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“Driver” has some of those wordless vox in it
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“Atlantis” is one of the more noisy ambient tracks, dark atmosphere I like
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