Hey, how are you doing? I'm Steve Szczepkowski,
I'm the Senior Audio Director with Eidos-Montréal
and we're here to talk about Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy game
who's celebrating its 1-year anniversary.
So to give you a little bit of history
for those who haven't heard the story,
how the Star-Lord band came about.
It's actually pretty interesting.
Our Creative Director, JF Dugas,
approached me one day, early on in the development,
and he was telling that they had an idea
to add to the lore of the game,
and create basically a fictional band
that would be the reason why Peter Quill took the name Star-Lord,
and put that cool patch on his jacket.
So of course, as musician I was definitely
excited and intrigued.
I've spent all my life playing in and out of bands
while I was working in video games and all that.
So I was... "Yeah, let's try this"
I knew I needed some help to do this.
It was a big undertaking.
I needed a big guy to help me,
so I found Yohann Boudreault,
who's a big guy and a big talent to match.
And he was gonna be my co-writer for this project.
Hi! My name is Yohann Boudreault.
I'm a producer, co-composer and guitarist for the Star-Lord album.
So we figured, let's try one song.
Let's write something and let's see what comes out of it.
The first track we ever did was "Space Riders (With No Names)".
We recorded it without anybody knowing,
and we then brought it in.
I sat with JF in a room,
and I played it for him.
I'll always remember his reaction, you know.
His face was just kinda like,
you could see his eyes lighting up,
like "Holy crap, this is actually good", you know.
And then he turned to me and he's like:
"So, uh... Where did this come from?"
And I said, "Well, Yohann and I did it".
He's like, "Who's singing?"
And I said, "Well, I'm singing for now,"
"obviously you need to hear the melody and lyrics."
"Eventually I'll find a singer to work on the project."
He was like, "No, why?"
"Why would we find a singer? You sound great."
Obviously, I was thrilled.
I was ready to jump and down like a 5-year-old on Christmas morning.
But I still knew there was a lot of work ahead of us to do.
Now we knew we had proof of concept.
We had a track everybody liked.
Now it was about finishing the other 9 songs to deliver the album.
Regarding "Zero to Hero",
funnily enough, it ended up being the most popular track on the record.
But it was the last one we delivered,
and it was delivered under a bit of a time constraint.
Time was getting tight,
and there are other departments that have to, you know,
put the lyrics on the cassette jacket, art and everything.
There was a lot of other people waiting for this track to come in.
When Steve contacted me for the last track on the album,
he told me, "That's it man. It's the last track."
"Let's give everything we have, let's go crazy."
He even told me, "We should maybe try something a bit more uptempo".
Immediately, I already had this riff in my head.
And voilà, from there, I recorded it,
I made a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus.
I sent it to Steve and he was like, "Yeah man!"
"I think we have something good here."
Afterwards, Steve developed it on his side,
He created the lyrics and the vocal melody.
We met up to record everything... and you know the final result.
Yohann sent me the riff for the song.
It was a great riff, I loved it right away.
I knew we had something solid
I just had to find the melody and lyrics,
and what was I gonna sing about.
I'd obviously already covered quite a few of the topics that
JF and I had laid out on what we wanted to write about.
To be completely transparent,
I had the track probably for all of December.
I was working on it and working on it, but...
I never seemed to get that fire going,
where I felt like, "Ok, this is it".
"Chew on this, you have something good here."
Now we got into January and JF's like,
"So... Where's the track?"
And I'm like, "It's coming, it's coming".
The pressure came on but I seem to work best when I have that pressure on.
I'll be honest, I had the catchline of,
"Tonight we ride, straight into the fire."
"Are you ready to go, go, go."
That was the hook that I had,
and I wanted to build the chorus around that hook.
And then, I think once I found that first opening line
"From the time I was young, I knew this day would come."
I was like "Oh, ok. This is cool."
"We could tell Peter's higharching story."
And then it was all about, the lines just came one after another.
His mother telling him, "You're always gonna be on the run".
"There's gonna be a price on your head."
And I was like, "Yeah, this is kinda cool."
"This fits with the story and we haven't written about this yet."
Let's talk about the arrangements of the track.
One thing we absolutely wanted to do
was to have big backing vocals for the chorus,
to have something very powerful and big,
to answer Steve's voice.
Like for example...
Tonight we ride, straight into the fire.
FIRE!
This "Fire" and the following backs,
I think we recorded like 25 or 30 tracks, I don't remember.
We really worked hard on having a big crowd
to have something that sounds big.
The result is really larger than life.
Finally, on a personal note,
I just want to send a big thank you and a big shout out
to everybody who played the game.
And not only that, everybody who went beyond the game
and continue to listen to the album and play the music,
and send positive comments whether on Twitter, YouTube or whatever.
I mean, I try to see and respond to as much as I can,
but it's really been overwhelming.
From the bottom of my heart,
thank you for making this kid's rock 'n roll dreams come true.