We were in this constant leapfrog sort of
escalating, escalating
until Sony asserted itself as the adult in the room and said,
this game has to f****g come out someday.
This is Austin Wintory, the composer for Journey,
a game you might remember as a seamless, dreamy tone-poem platformer,
delivered fully formed by the video game gods.
Before there even was a game,
Director Jenova Chen asked Wintory to write a summary of the game’s music:
a basic theme that could guide their development.
and can you do it in the next couple of weeks?
And I walked to my car,
which was maybe a hundred feet and
by the time I got there I had it.
* cello solo, Journey's main theme *
Wintory says Nascence was the easiest song to write.
That wouldn’t be the case for Apotheosis, the song in the game’s final level.
After years of delays and creative dead ends, nothing would be harder than figuring out
the game’s ending.
I was very keenly aware if I f****d this up,
I will be single handedly responsible for
ruining this game because there's nothing to fall back on.
Journey tells a wordless story of exploration, drive, and connection.
One that intentionally follows Joseph Cambell’s monomyth theory beat-for-beat.
You know, the Hero’s
Journey (wink sound effect)
A lot of the track titles in Journey draw their names from the specific markers that
Joseph Campbell put into his archetypal hero’s journey, the stages the hero inevitably goes
through on their path towards rebirth in the, in the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
And apotheosis tends to be that sort of last great moment of transcendence before the rebirth.
But before Wintory could get to Apotheosis...
He had to help create the rest of the game.
Jenova Chen, the creative director was very adamant about letting the music be kind of
like the emotional North star.
Wintory would write music for a level, send it to the developers
and they would create a rough prototype based on it.
Then Wintory would play that level, get inspired
and recompose the song.
This cycle would repeat, over and over, with Wintory constantly reworking songs to
elevate their emotional resonance.
Think of it as an artistic arms race.
this process worked great… for a while.
To help people follow this wordless story, Wintory made use of motifs, or recurring musical
formulas that correspond to different elements of the game.
The cello, played by the renowned Tina Guo, represents the player.
From the very beginning of the score, the cello is all encompassing.
* Painfully beautiful cello solo *
The reassuring bass flute represented the elder guides known as Ancestors.
Hearing it feels like remembering a hug from a grandparent.
* bittersweet and somber bass flute solo *
The orchestra first reveals itself when a star shoots from the shining top of the mountain,
emphasizing the ultimate goal of your journey.
there's a little sparkle of the orchestra to say,
maybe there's something bigger to this
than just wandering alone in the desert.
And the harp and viola represent your online companions.
This was one of the many dynamic elements of the soundtrack.
* inspiring viola and harp dueling solos *
the score is like this accordion that can stretch and expand and change shape
based on how you play the game.
And if you play through completely alone, you'll have a very different musical experience
than if you play through with a person sporadically.
And yet again, another musical experience if you’re like
tightly there together with somebody from start to finish.
Beautiful!
It sounds like everything is on the right track!
WRONG.
The whole path up until that climactic finale was starting to work really well.
And then playtesters were just
falling off a cliff.
Every time the finale of the game would come up, everyone would kinda go, eh.
The finale felt like a letdown
and that’s not something you want when your final level
is a glowing mountaintop you’ve been running towards the entire game.
Up till now, Wintory and the developers had been working in tandem,
each iterating upon the other’s work.
But this time, the developers cracked the code first.
They figured out that in the final level, players would be resurrected,
and with a newfound power, rise up to the mountain summit.
And in parallel to all that, I was trying desperately to figure out the music and, and
constantly suffering as well.
One of his first ideas was to make the ascent sound
(mystical voice) SURREAL.
To get to the surreally it should be like slow moving and no real discernible melody.
It's like when your eyes are almost entirely closed and things start to just become blurry
colors and shapes.
He layered in a secret sauce that hadn’t appeared in the soundtrack yet: a lush choir.
* dreamy, aimless synthesized choir *
This new element would combine with the cello and flutes, and a host of percussion instruments
to create a mysterious tapestry of sound.
And short version,
it was super boring.
What a let down! You go through this stuff,
you suffer in the snow.
I’m trying to avoid spoilers even though people have had
7 years to play this game
You suffer in all the snow
And then this magical thing happens
And for the music to shift into this very abstract sensibility felt like we've
let all the air out.
So Wintory took it in the opposite direction: lively, energetic, and aggressive.
It's not about getting bigger, it's about momentum.
It was like this galloping horse where the music is just ticka ticka ticka ticka ticka
* an overexcited version of Journey's theme *
And I listened to it not long ago again, and I was like, what the hell was I thinking?
Cause it sounds like it's The Fast and The Furious.
It was a tonal mismatch for the score.
Journey is a lot of things, but it’s not aggressive.
Wintory had overshot his mark.
we're in this beautiful poetic journey of the soul and then suddenly it's like,
ALL RIGHT LET'S DO IT!
These experiments were an important part of the composition process.
Wintory knew that the correct tempo lay somewhere between slow and aimless, and fast and harsh.
But he still needed the right inspiration.
So
he turned off the game.
I'm just going to think about this idea and I'm just going to try to compose as if I was
writing a symphony or something.
Up to this point, playing the latest build of the game had been a sort of ritual for
composing its soundtrack.
At times, Wintory literally had one hand on the controller and the other on his computer,
composing.
But not for this song.
It wasn’t just the pressure of nailing the finale that
drove Wintory to throw out the method that had worked so well;
Journey needed to be finished,
and soon.
Sony had already extended its deadline twice.
What was meant to take 1 year,
was already 3 years into development.
I was really desperate.
We were really only a few weeks from being done.
And this was years in
So he began to write.
And for whatever reason, and I have no explanation, I just started playing around with it,
kind of medium gallop of strings doing this
Dot De dah de dah de dah de dah de dah dah dah, dah, dah, dah dah.
* invigorating violin melody *
He had found the tempo, he was on the right path.
He pointed to a source of inspiration from that year, in the Pixar movie Wall-E.
And that scene where they're, they're floating around outside the ship.
I always was so mesmerized by, and I love the score in that moment by Thomas Newman.
But just that image of kind of dancing through space and realizing there's energy to it but
it's not fast and exciting.
It gave him his eureka moment:
that it didn’t matter that Journey’s characters were slow moving, and floaty:
they didn’t need to move fast to be energetic.
As Wintory wrote what would become Apotheosis,
he juxtaposed the soothing main cello theme
with the high energy violins.
The big epiphany also was
simultaneously be faster than I've been.
And slower.
We have this da ta to tee tah, tah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
In this little dance with each other and in dialogue with the rest of the orchestra,
but then below that you actually have the theme.
(music noises) Very, very, very slowly.
It's literally, you know, bwaaaaa
This technique is known as counterpoint.
In music, counterpoint just means multiple things happening at once.
Sometimes things move very steadily.
You know where like soldiers marching all together.
But in this case it was more like an infant crawling while Usain Bolt is running by.
It also reinforces what’s happening in the game at this moment.
The player is empowered in a way they have never been before.
But they’re also retracing the skills and mechanics they’ve encountered
throughout their experience.
It’s new and fresh, but at its core a celebration of all that has come to pass,
compelling you closer and closer to that mountaintop...
But the song still didn’t have an ending.
And neither did the game.
Everything about the ending was just a constant source of frustration and anxiety.
And one of the biggest problems was
the ending has to feel emotional
The issue was coming down to the literal last moment of the game.
What happened to your character when they finally reached the summit of the mountain top?
How would Apotheosis end?
How would the game end?
And so Jenova was like, this needs to be the moment of just maximum emotional fury.
You know, Tina can't play any louder.
And the orchestra's howling
* ridiculously epic, not-Journey sounding music *
It felt like I was yelling at you saying,
FEEL THIS MOTHERFUCKER
as opposed to inviting you to feel something.
But by chance, Wintory was given an opportunity.
He was asked to participate in a video game concert,
and volunteered to conduct a sort
preview of Journey’s score.
An independent expression of what I think Journey is about,
using that melody and using the cello
but with freedom to do whatever it wants because it's not like
it then has to go into the game.
It's just a concert.
Once again, Tina Guo would play the cello, and Wintory made extensive use of her skills.
One of those is playing in higher octaves, a tricky proposition for the cello…
but she is just super human.
And so, I wanted to write up there, I wanted to hear her just sing.
So I make the orchestra dissolve gradually and then she ends up playing all by herself.
And it just seemed like that's a nice way to end this piece.
It's not what we're gonna do,
Journey has to have a big, grand, epic ending...
* Impossibly beautiful cello solo *
It so happened that Journey’s development team was in the audience for this concert
and when they heard that piece played this way,
they realized what the ending really needed.
* audience applauding and cheering *
they saw the emotional potential in less is more
and if we dial it down to zero,
everybody leans in, as opposed to this
THX sound effect that makes us lean back.
They started changing the game and very quickly it became this minimalist, you just
disappear
and the cello disappears with you.
Apotheosis didn’t just synchronize with the game’s finale,
it pushed it in a new direction.
And by happenstance, it was written in a moment of Wintory’s own personal apotheosis.
it really did change me as a human being and it made me, I think a better person and it
definitely made me a better composer
because I never thought that deeply about music and
about the interaction between music and gameplay
as three years of just trying to make it
all it could be.
Read the comments on just about any video related to Journey’s music,
and you’ll stories
of some individual’s playthrough
and the friends they made along the way.
It’s a game that has enriched people’s lives in ways few pieces of art do.
The Journey score begins with cello,
representing the player.
Eventually, the orchestra swells up, laying out the path ahead of you.
And once you finally reach your destination,
it fades away.
and only the cello remains.
* a gorgeous and melancholy cello note *
Only you.
* sustained cello note that would make an angel weep *