This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, your backstage pass to intimate conversations with stars, creators, and industry leaders.

[0:15] Gordon Cox: On Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: I'm Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to a writer, a composer, and an actor.

[0:24] Gordon Cox: But not about a new theater project.

[0:26] Gordon Cox: I'm talking to them about a video game.

[0:28] Gordon Cox: A video game that's also a musical.

[0:31] Gordon Cox: Stray Gods is a new game developed by the independent Summerfall Studios and published by Humble Games, and it calls itself a role-playing musical.

[0:40] Gordon Cox: If you've never heard of a video game that incorporates musicals and musical theater, that's because a game like that didn't really exist until now.

[0:49] Gordon Cox: The book writer for Stray Gods, if you will, is David Gaider, the creative director and co-founder of Summerfall Studios.

[0:56] Gordon Cox: He's worked on games like Baldur's Gate 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age.

[1:01] Gordon Cox: The songwriter of Stray Gods is Austin Wintory, whose credits include the games Journey, Abzu, and the Banner Saga.

[1:08] Gordon Cox: Now, the names of all those games might not mean a whole lot to you, the listeners of a theater podcast, but take it from me, as someone who was a video game kid even before he was a theater kid, I can tell you that these titles are among the most notable and in some cases influential of the last 20 years.

[1:25] Gordon Cox: Now, Gaider and Wintory joined me in the virtual studio with one more of their collaborators, the performer Anjali Bhimani, a theater veteran who made her Broadway debut in Metamorphoses.

[1:36] Gordon Cox: She's one of several theater folks in the game's voice cast, alongside Anthony Rapp and Merle Dandridge.

[1:42] Gordon Cox: With the game just released earlier this month, Bhimani, Gaider, and Wintory will take us behind the scenes, or is it behind the code?

[1:50] Gordon Cox: Of this unexpected musical game mashup?

[1:54] Gordon Cox: Hey everyone, thanks for joining me.

[1:56] David Gaider: Thanks for having us.

[1:57] Austin Wintory: This is exciting.

[1:58] Gordon Cox: I found myself just waiting for the non-existent live audience to respond to that.

[2:03] Anjali Bhimani: And then I thought, oh wait, that's us.

[2:05] David Gaider: That's us.

[2:05] Austin Wintory: We're the live audience.

[2:06] Anjali Bhimani: The overture as well, yeah.

[2:08] Austin Wintory: Yeah.

[2:08] Gordon Cox: We don't see many video games that are musicals, I can confirm, because I've looked for them and I haven't found any.

[2:16] Gordon Cox: Um, so I just wanted to start off by talking a little bit about just where the idea came from.

[2:21] Gordon Cox: Who did it originate with, and what was the germ of the idea?

[2:26] David Gaider: Uh that would be me, I guess.

[2:28] Gordon Cox: Uh that's you, David, from what I understand.

[2:30] David Gaider: Yeah.

[2:31] David Gaider: Yes.

[2:31] David Gaider: Uh um I was working at a uh uh game studio called Bioware in Canada um back when we were working on a game called Dragon Age Inquisition, and I reached a point after making a number of role-playing games that I thought there has to be some way to more easily access a player's emotions.

[2:55] David Gaider: And uh I think I was watching um uh the Buffy musical episode "Once More, with Feeling" that I thought, oh, this is great.

[3:02] David Gaider: Like the music is such a great shortcut to the soul.

[3:07] David Gaider: Can we put that in games?

[3:09] David Gaider: And so I uh uh engineered a musical bit, like uh uh an interlude in the Inquisition story.

[3:17] David Gaider: It wasn't interactive, it was just uh basically a long cutscene.

[3:21] David Gaider: Um, but the process of making it, of working with the composer and writing the lyrics and stuff like that, I thought, oh, this is neat.

[3:28] David Gaider: Um, but all my experience has been with making things interactive and branching.

[3:34] David Gaider: Could we do that with music?

[3:35] David Gaider: And so I initially proposed it as a uh downloadable content uh for Inquisition, and uh the powers that be got a little bit nervous about that uh the amount of work was even though the team themselves were they were like, Oh my god, this is amazing, let's do this.

[3:51] David Gaider: So um after I left Bioware in 2016, um it was always this in the back of my head as this bucket list thing um that I wanted to try.

[4:03] David Gaider: So when Liam Messler, my uh co-founder at uh one of my co-founders at uh Summerfall Studios, um first asked, like, what would our first game be?

[4:14] David Gaider: What can we make that you know we're making this indie game that's really hard to get indie games noticed?

[4:19] David Gaider: What's something we can do that would be a little bit different and that we would find cool to work on?

[4:24] David Gaider: Um, and that my first answer was interactive musical.

[4:28] Austin Wintory: Right.

[4:30] Gordon Cox: And then at what point did uh Austin get involved?

[4:36] Austin Wintory: I mean, I can definitely chime in with yeah, it the crazy bit of Kismet is I'm pretty sure that my side of that was very tightly parallel in just a bit of crazy happenstance because um uh 2018, uh so not long after sort of this crossroad uh of David's with sort of moving on from Bioware and all that, I I was called up by a friend um who we'd never worked together, but we always thought it'd be fun to work together, a guy named Ken Wong, and he said, um why don't you pitch me a game instead of me make a game and then see if you would want to write the music for it, which is the traditional composer-developer relationship.

[5:23] Austin Wintory: And so uh I showed up to a meeting with him with a list of ideas, and the first among them was what about a video game musical, you know, where this the music is you know interactive and branching and and a real core part of the gameplay.

[5:40] Austin Wintory: And he goes, I am so not the person to make that game.

[5:45] Austin Wintory: He goes, That sounds cool, but like it's just not me as a developer.

[5:50] Austin Wintory: But he goes, but weirdly I have this friend named Liam.

[5:53] Austin Wintory: We were in San Francisco at the game developers conference.

[5:55] Austin Wintory: That's a bit of context here, which is this annual gathering of like 30,000 plus people of essentially representatives of most every game studio and publisher in the whole world.

[6:06] Austin Wintory: I mean, it's just this massive annual gathering in San Francisco.

[6:10] Austin Wintory: And um, so I showed up, and he um uh and and with this pitch in mind, and he said, My buddy Liam is here, you two should meet, because he's kind of looking for collaborators on a musical or something.

[6:23] Austin Wintory: He didn't know much, he just said, You you should meet this guy, Liam.

[6:26] Austin Wintory: And so Liam and I found each other online, and Liam said, I'm going to the airport in about an hour.

[6:32] Austin Wintory: You have time to meet right now.

[6:34] Austin Wintory: So we hoofed it across downtown San Francisco to convene on each other's location, and it was like this speed dating of like, you know, okay, so just what are you all about?

[6:45] Austin Wintory: What are you into?

[6:46] Austin Wintory: What kind of musicals do you like?

[6:47] Austin Wintory: And just like, because we had no time to go through the normal song and dance of getting to know each other.

[6:51] Austin Wintory: But the thing, as David already mentioned, was striking was that of all the musicals one could name, um, the one that both of us immediately said was part of what inspired the interest in a game musical was the Buffy musical.

[7:07] Austin Wintory: Um, and the and I think the I think the thing in my mind that made it there were two things about it.

[7:14] Austin Wintory: I I promise not to belabor this answer much more because we have Anjali here, she's way more interesting than anybody.

[7:19] Austin Wintory: So but the thing that that spoke to me about the the Buffy musical that made it feel like such of all the musicals in the world and have seen a lot, and that what made this one kind of speak to what games could potentially add to the mix was that number one, it's diegetic.

[7:38] Austin Wintory: The characters are fully aware they are in a musical, and that's core to the story.

[7:43] Austin Wintory: In the case of Buffy, they're if they don't get out of it, they'll die.

[7:47] Austin Wintory: Um so you know it's like a it's like an evil spell.

[7:50] Austin Wintory: But the idea is that they're very aware they're singing and they're kind of embracing the absurdity of that, and that just something about that seemed very naturally compatible with the idea of a game, however, that could manifest, and there's a lot of different ways one could do it.

[8:03] Austin Wintory: Obviously, we chose one particular way to do it, but but that could that could go a lot of different ways.

[8:07] Austin Wintory: Um but also what I loved was that um the Buffy musical is sort of about characters that are not naturally in a musical, and that navigating that and and resting major plot development on that is also very compelling and interesting, and I I think very actually creatively courageous in the in the Buffy case, and I liked the idea that you know, a musical where the characters are somehow caught in that one way or the other, it's not about just this is just the language of this world and the story the way most musicals are.

[8:39] Austin Wintory: You just accept that they sing without any question as to why they are.

[8:44] Austin Wintory: That's just part of the vocabulary of the medium.

[8:46] Austin Wintory: But in this case, it's like, well, what if we made that part of the thing?

[8:48] Austin Wintory: And then lo and behold, I meet Liam, and he's like, Well, you know, David and I have basically been brainstorming on all this.

[8:54] Austin Wintory: You should just hitch a ride with us.

[8:57] Austin Wintory: And that was five years ago, and here we are.

[8:59] Gordon Cox: Right.

[8:59] Gordon Cox: Yeah, we're gonna wind back a little bit to talk a little bit about how you sort of got started on that process.

[9:05] Gordon Cox: But before we do that, Anjali, by the time you got involved, I imagine the project was a little further along.

[9:11] Gordon Cox: Like, did it exist as a script?

[9:13] Gordon Cox: As I like, what did you get?

[9:19] Anjali Bhimani: Well, first thing I got was a text from Troy Baker saying, Hey, do you sing?

[9:23] Anjali Bhimani: Um and uh and the answer was yeah, what do you want?

[9:26] Anjali Bhimani: Up tempo ballad, you know, a typical theater girl answer.

[9:30] Anjali Bhimani: Um Troy is one of those people that if he asks you he I think everyone here is kind of of the same mind that if he asks you to join him on a project, the the answer is yes, and then ask questions later.

[9:43] Anjali Bhimani: Um and so I sent him some singing stuff and you know, stuff from my phone and whatever.

[9:49] Anjali Bhimani: And then when the offer came in and I saw what it was, and I saw who I was playing, and I saw not only is it an interactive musical, but it's an interactive musical based on mythology.

[10:00] Anjali Bhimani: And it immediately my my eight-year-old nerd child brain exploded because it was all the things I loved in one place.

[10:11] Anjali Bhimani: It was games, it was singing and musicals, and it was mythology.

[10:17] Anjali Bhimani: And when people ask you as an actor, like, oh, do you have a dream role?

[10:22] Anjali Bhimani: And some people are like, I'd like to play the Scottish King, I'd like to do this.

[10:25] Anjali Bhimani: I'm usually like, I don't know.

[10:26] Anjali Bhimani: I mean, probably, but I haven't seen what it is yet.

[10:29] Anjali Bhimani: And this so far is the closest that I've come to someone to someone just landing in my lap and me going, oh, oh, oh wow.

[10:38] Anjali Bhimani: Someone thought of me before I thought of me, before they knew me.

[10:42] David Gaider: Yeah.

[10:42] Anjali Bhimani: Um, if that makes sense.

[10:44] Anjali Bhimani: So by the time I came on, all I got from these lovely fellows, I got a uh I got some sheet music with a bunch of different options and a bunch of different you know branches.

[10:54] Anjali Bhimani: And then I got a track, which was a man singing the Medusa part with some piano plunked down.

[11:02] Anjali Bhimani: So it was very different than what you hear in the final game, but it was it was uh such so bare bones.

[11:09] Anjali Bhimani: And what I didn't know at the time, but what these guys informed me of later was that this was gonna be the first recording session that they did for the game at all.

[11:17] Anjali Bhimani: So everyone was kind of finding their feet.

[11:20] Anjali Bhimani: And uh so when I came on, obviously they had, I would assume, a lot of material for everybody, and they knew who was going to be in it.

[11:28] Anjali Bhimani: Um, but it was definitely a diving off point where we were all trying to see what it was going to become.

[11:35] Anjali Bhimani: And so that made it the between the energies of of all three of them of Troy, Austin and David, it was such a safe and fun space.

[11:44] Anjali Bhimani: Um that uh it, you know, it just felt like there were no wrong answers.

[11:48] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and we should uh add that uh it seems it's an unusual intersection, you know, theater lover and game lover, but uh I was saying before we recorded that I'm one of those people and Anjali, so are you.

[11:58] Anjali Bhimani: You were saying that uh when you were in Metamorphoses on Broadway, which is a show that probably a lot of listeners saw or at least have heard of, you would go home at night and play video games.

[12:07] Anjali Bhimani: You would go from the show to your console.

[12:09] Anjali Bhimani: Oh, I wouldn't just go, I would not just go home at night to do it.

[12:12] Anjali Bhimani: I would go home and between shows and hop on my laptop.

[12:17] Anjali Bhimani: No, there was a long period of time where um the two things that uh or the three things I should say that I uh determined what time it was or what season it was in my life was what show am I doing, what snacks am I eating, and what games are and uh so I think Broadway was the heroes of might and magic thing.

[12:34] David Gaider: Oh, all right.

[12:38] Anjali Bhimani: Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure that was that.

[12:40] Anjali Bhimani: It was also veggie and pirate booty, if anyone's interested in it.

[12:42] David Gaider: Okay, yeah.

[12:43] Anjali Bhimani: Very delicious, delicious pre-show snack.

[12:47] Anjali Bhimani: Very healthy diet that I was living on.

[12:49] Austin Wintory: That's a great way to do it.

[12:50] Anjali Bhimani: So funny.

[12:51] Anjali Bhimani: Such a ridiculous dinner.

[12:52] Gordon Cox: And well, and so David and Austin, I did you both mention the the Buffy musical, which is a thing that uh a lot of musical theater folks will know.

[13:00] Gordon Cox: And of course Josh Wheaton was inspired by people like Steven Sondheim and folks like that.

[13:04] Gordon Cox: So it what so you decide to make a musical game.

[13:07] Gordon Cox: How much do you think, oh, I I need to learn some more about musical theater?

[13:10] Gordon Cox: Were you musical theater people?

[13:12] Gordon Cox: Did you do it did you study anything?

[13:14] Gordon Cox: Like what what how did you think about approaching the idea of writing a musical game and how much was it related to kind of the canon of you know the greats?

[13:24] David Gaider: Uh maybe I'll I'll answer first thought.

[13:26] Austin Wintory: Yeah, go ahead, Dick.

[13:27] David Gaider: Yeah, go ahead.

[13:28] David Gaider: Yeah, I my background in the actual production of a musical like the knowing the heart, the the the bones of how one makes one.

[13:37] David Gaider: Uh not very much.

[13:39] David Gaider: I'm I'm like a listener.

[13:40] David Gaider: I mean, I I I can list off all the musicals I've loved for sure.

[13:44] Austin Wintory: Yeah.

[13:45] David Gaider: But uh thinking about how they are constructed was new.

[13:50] David Gaider: A lot of that uh uh Austin and the the lyricists had to sort of educate me.

[13:55] David Gaider: But I I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing because uh the thing I I learned over uh my time working uh on branching narratives is that as soon as you introduce agency and choice into a story, the nature of it changes dramatically.

[14:12] David Gaider: So I knew that if you went, if you went, if you approach this project thinking, okay, we're making a musical and it has to follow the rules of a musical, that most of those rules were gonna go flying out the window as soon as you you introduced the interactive element anyway.

[14:28] David Gaider: So I mean uh there were some things that were like uh um between Austin and the lyricists that were like, no, no, we have to include at least these parts of like the heart of what makes musical like like the the first song has to be the I feel song, right?

[14:42] Austin Wintory: That where you start off where we're where is the the main character emotionally? And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that that makes sense. But uh yeah, a lot of the other rules went out the window.

[14:54] David Gaider: Yeah, I can definitely um one up that. I mean, the um or like second it is what I mean. One up sounds very competitive. Uh I can I can destroy that terrible answer. Um, I uh yeah, I can second all of that uh thoroughly in that the sort of what you might think of as the traditional structure of a musical, you know, you've got your big act one closer and and all those kinds of very typical uh bits of architecture, the game didn't have much by way of direct corollary to by virtue of the structure of the game. You know, we definitely have a three-act structure, but part of the way that that David built it is the middle act is highly modular and sort of non-linear compared to the rest. So we don't get the typical anchor points that a musical hinges on in order to kind of do all the things that a typical musical needs to do, you know, not least of which pragmatic things like, you know, how do we make sure that they're super excited when the intermission hits?

Uh and and you know, and how do we kind of walk them back in, or do we want to you facilitate a time jump, or all these sorts of things that that the natural sort of uh theater landscape or even a movie musical kind of would invite itself to.

[16:14] Austin Wintory: So I think in terms of you know, inspirations as a result, like m my kind of hero of all time is Leonard Bernstein. Um I I literally have a painting of Bernstein on the wall in my studio. Um now, ironically, being, you know, so obviously universally well known for West Side's story, um, it's not like Sondheim where he has this giant boatload of musicals that he wrote. Although I do really love On the Town. Um that to me is just one of those that I just it sheerly musically is just so delightful and wonderful. Um but one of the things that I always loved is that there's a quote I came across in one of his books where he basically was saying that no matter what he was writing, whether it was, you know, he wrote three symphonies, um, and you know, On the Town began as a ballet, and you know, he did one film score and a few other, you know, the famous there's a piece called the Chichester Psalms, which is more of a almost recall almost like a religious choral piece.

Um he always said no matter what he was writing, he was writing for the theater. Um like even if it's a symphony, the cottage symphony, it's still a theater piece, you know, fundamentally speaking. And I I always I always loved that, but um, but in terms of sort of despite how much his sort of influence as a musical mind, I don't really think my music sounds like his, but as a thinker on music, I he definitely got right down into the core of my being um early on. Um it's it's hard to not feel like Sondheim is sort of cast the biggest shadow over this over Stray Gods. If only because Sondheim's the unity of lyrical idea and musical idea as part of his thing is was essential for us because that was usually the only way we could track player agency.

The idea that rather than it being a game where, okay, I have door number one, door number two, door number three, and if I pick door number two, a song will result. It's like, no, no, that's too easy in a way. What if every few seconds you're making a choice in the middle of a song and it's like this branching river system where every so often you have all these little forks that you need to sort of decide which way to go. Well, the only way to make it not just sound like some through composed, you know, constant just barrage of new material, is to have little traceable bits that can come back and we can you know sort of place them in there strategically while honoring what the player just did or just chose.

So that means that while there are long lyrical melodic lines, they tended to be at the kind of end of branching cul-de-sacks instead of uh when we're in the midst of all this branching, relying on, you know, four or five little notes. I I think of that as a very Sondheim-y thing to do, um, which is it's a lot more uh attached to almost like the classical tradition than a lot of the Broadway tradition. But that's one of the things I think makes him so amazing is it's just this fusion of of kind of like musical genius and intellectual genius. Um, and um so we were we were biting at the heels um of of of that in little bits. Plus, you know, I I wrote these songs principally with these three guys.

There's this band from Australia that's like a musical comedy group called Tripod that are the closest comparison I would ever make to them is the Flight of the Concords where they're sort of comedian songwriters, but they're all deep musical theater nerds themselves far more than probably anyone I know to be honest. And to your story, Anjali, one of the things I always loved about them is for years and years when they would tour, it they always used to say that the show was actually the warm-up act to the Halo match that would take place in the hotel room later that they were really just warming themselves up for the grudge match I mean it's like the reward. It's like yeah yeah the curtain call is sort of a reward that's always getting home to the game.

[20:10] Anjali Bhimani: Yeah, exactly. Um but yeah they they make no Sonnheim in particular as a as a huge influence um for them there's the obvious choices uh but but it's just you could feel it in the way they approach things as well in a big way. And so what does like Anjali when you got we all know the the I and the listeners of this podcast will know what the you know book and score of a musical look like. But like when the the final product of the uh if if they were to hand you know uh stray gods to you as a you know the equivalent of the book and score of musical theater, what would it look like? How many pages would it be? How many words was it? And how many lines did you have that's that's way above my program.

[20:58] Anjali Bhimani: Um I I don't remember counting a thing. But what I what I do remember, and it's interesting because when you were talking about your influences, Austin and both of you were talking about structuring the the show. Two things did hit me um that I feel like would be a a nice link for for theater audiences as well. Which is that, you know, I've I've done a lot of work with Mary Zimmerman who did Metamorphoses and a bunch of other things, and a lot of what she does is adaptations of lots of different kinds of literature, whether they're epics like Greek right, you know, Greco-Roman epics like the Odyssey or whatever, uh, or Metamorphoses, or they are other epic poems. But what they always do require is your ability to create a character and show who that character is in a very limited space in a limited amount of time, which is essentially the same thing that we have to do in Stray Gods as actors for most of us, because most of us, unlike other than you know, Freddie and and uh Grace, Laura and Janina, opposite casting there, but um, other than the two of them, most of the characters have a little limited time to convey all of that, and many of us, like Medusa, only really has that one encounter, and so when I I think it's less about the number of lines and the number of pages that you would get than I remember reading the words in between the music and like yeah, like learning the music, which was incredibly challenging and awesome, which was exciting, but like really reading the words and then thinking how can I convey all of the subtext of this in this phrase?

Because I'm not just gonna I'm not gonna have the whole song to convey this. The gamer might only hear this one phrase, they might only hear this one sentence to convey that entire emotion. So that sense of of urgency and potency of the portrayal of a character was really, really very much there. Um, and I I definitely sensed that from the written material that I got more than anything is that okay, you've got you got this much time, and I'm making a very small gesture with my fingers. You've got very, very, very little time to convey this. How are you gonna make that happen?

[23:13] Austin Wintory: Um, and I do think it's very similar to if you were to see uh uh some of the published works of Mary Zimmerman, you'll see they're very sparely written, very sparsely written. Would be a little confusing too. Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but I mean, like the thing that we were concerned about uh always was here we're gonna give you a bunch of music, and now uh your normal song is gonna last last like a few minutes, right? But here, a single song, because of all the branching has like 20 to 30 to minutes of total content, if not more. Right, but it's all in little little disconnected pieces because uh the the songs are arranged sort of in in a in the in blocks.

[23:50] David Gaider: Yeah. So this is what's cool about it, and again, I I keep going back to Mary, but it's very much a part of this kind of rehearsal process, and also the kind of collaborative theater adaptation process that happens a lot in Chicago, which is where I first started doing theater. Um, is that this experience is very reminiscent of the rehearsal process when you're putting it together, and when you're trying to figure out, okay, we know we are telling this epic story, but we're not entirely sure which way we want to tell this epic story, and what parts of this character do we want to show, and what parts of the story do we want to show, and do we want them to affect this character or that character? So, in that rehearsal process, you'll be doing all sorts of experimentation and sometimes experimentation with voices, sometimes experimentations with physicality, whatever it is. But it's it was very reminiscent of that.

[24:34] David Gaider: Now we're gonna throw that out because we just finished recording that.

[24:37] Anjali Bhimani: Now we're gonna play with this.

[24:40] David Gaider: Now we're gonna play with this possibility. And so it it really hearkened back. The more and more I think about it, the is the more excited you can see I get, the more and more I think about it, it really harkened back to those early days of doing theater in Chicago, which sparked my heart and and made storytelling the the place that I got my greatest joy.

[24:43] Anjali Bhimani: Cool, now we're gonna play.

[25:02] Anjali Bhimani: Um and role-playing games, whether tabletop or video games, um, were already a part of my fun time.

[25:11] Anjali Bhimani: So to make them part of something that you are actually doing for the consumption of other people and for the enjoyment of other people is like that's just that's everything.

[25:19] Austin Wintory: Yeah.

[25:19] Anjali Bhimani: That's everything. And I'm, you know, look, I'm I I the mystery of Edwin Drew just barely touched the surface of what can happen with uh with something like this. So, you know.

[25:30] Austin Wintory: I I got my pitch ready when probably.

[25:36] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with David, Austin, and Anjali right after the break.

[25:49] Gordon Cox: And now here's more of my conversation with the creators of the video game, Stray Gods.

[25:55] Gordon Cox: David, the uh the storyline is uh it's kind of an urban fantasy that's a murder mystery, the Greek pantheon is involved. Well at what point did the story settle, and why was this the story and the world that felt right for the form that you were kind of creating as you were going along here?

[26:13] David Gaider: I mean, I remember we first started. The way uh the way I've always worked is is uh I will come up with a few um high-level pitches for my my my my teammates, basically. Because I want everybody on board, and so I'll I'll make three or four things. So I think this was a case of here's this one really cool idea I have, and I'll give me some options because I'm giving you options. But there's a right and wrong answer.

[26:40] David Gaider: But there's a right and wrong answer here, people. Uh actually, but the initial idea um didn't have what what what and it didn't have the gods aspect, actually. That was uh Liam Sler threw it in a uh he he he he any but he it's been I think he'd been watching American Gods and I was like, well what about uh uh she's a muse because I was looking for I had this idea for uh uh uh um how to couch the murder mystery part. Um but it didn't it didn't have the muse and the and he's like well what if it it's the what like the one of the one of the Greek muses and I was like oh but then we need the the rest of the Greek gods as these characters and he and he's like yeah like sort of like sort of like American gods or or there's a um a comic book series I think called Wicked and the Divine at the time which we can we had I think I I'd read a little bit of it I was like yeah okay I see I see what you're going for and and that's where that's where that that germinated uh there's a lot there's a lot of plates to spin in that particular thing because I'm like oh I gotta introduce the whole idea that the gods are in the modern world and I why and how and and um so yeah uh that that's where it's Red Sports yeah and then uh Austin was there a uh as you were writing these songs and you were you had to branch all these into all these different blocks, did you how did you like I'm imagining yourselves writing yourselves into a corner and you have to come up with eight different rhymes for the same word because you have eight different options.

[28:14] Austin Wintory: What uh what what were the some what were some of the very specific challenges of of uh making these songs work? So, like I kind of alluded to a minute ago, one of the biggest hurdles was to make it feel like um it actually was a song. Uh the mental image I like to plant with folks who I'm describing this to and they don't really know what it is, is if if I imagine that I'm in the room playing it and the person I'm talking to is kind of elsewhere in the room and only half paying attention, and they just listen to it, they should think I'm watching a conventional musical. They don't, it doesn't occur to them that um at every sort of juncture, you know, some four or five, six, seven times within a song, every few second every twenty, thirty seconds, uh there's a choice that's being offered up to the player of of usually three very different emotionally different paths to follow.

So the question is, okay, how do you reconcile giving the player that kind of latitude and and agency over the story and over the emotional content while also uh making it feel like a s it actually tells a coherent story and is musically coherent.

[29:27] David Gaider: That was far and away the biggest challenge. And we tackled how to solve that very case by case. So I can't really generalize about the solutions because the solutions are wrapped up into whatever that song is trying to do and whatever it's trying to get across. So, but to use an example, please. Um there's a song fairly early in the game, the first third or so of the game, where Grace goes into this nightclub and meets the goddess Persephone and has to try to get some information out of her, and she's starting off on her back heel. So Persephone has made it clear before one word has been exchanged that she does not like our main character of Grace. This is basically not going to go well for Grace as the default setting, basically.

And so our choices center around these three emotional approaches. There's kind of what the red one, which is this very antagonistic, aggressive, we call it kick-ass, it's the fight fire with fire, get in someone's face, that kind of thing. The clever is the sort of it's the potentially intellectual, it's the conniving, it's the I will maybe outsmart my opponent rather than try to kind of get in their face and sort of make them succumb to my will, sort of a thing. Um and then the charming is sort of the genuinely compassionate or empathetic, where you know you're going, well, actually, maybe I can understand where they're coming from and we can connect on a more sort of earnest level and meet eye to eye and or something along those lines.

These are crude generalizations, but these were the guiding light of we want the player to be faced with information and just role-play how they would respond. It's almost like improv theater where you just someone says a thing to you and you just ask yourself, how does this make me feel? Well, you know, this fucking pissed me off, so I'm going red. Um, but then when I see what pro reaction red provokes, maybe that makes me now suddenly feel empathetic. So red has to then go to green, etc. etc. etc. etc. And so finding a way to thread all this is why I mentioned that kind of very granularized musical motivic approach. Um, but also one of the things that I worked out, especially after the fact, once we had the basic sort of melody and lyrical content that I came up with very much in collaboration with the three guys from Tripod, uh Stephen Gates, Simon Hall and Scott Edgar, you know, we cooked this all up, throwing ideas back and forth and really working it out.

But in a very piano demo or guitar, you know, scratch kind of way, like Anjali said, you know, the Medusa scene was just plunking piano chords on, you know, half note rhythms while she sang this line. And in reality it's like this twisted EDM kind of music. I mean it's just so it's so not what she tracked to.

[32:26] Austin Wintory: Yeah. Almost every cast member was a little bit flying in the dark. And part of the reason for that, I mean the not part of the main reason for that, was to invite them to truly act and not just be a session singer. You know, the idea was how do you embody this character? You know, part of this stems from well another there's another cast member we were very lucky to have Anthony Rapp one obviously every listener of this podcast will be familiar with. A former guest on this podcast himself, yeah. Undoubtedly, yeah. And um he and I've known each other about uh the better part of 10 years. I met him through our director that Anjali brought up our performance director Troy Baker. They knew each other somehow and and Troy and I did a show in New York that Anthony came to and when he was touring with um If Then I remember I went and saw it uh when they were here in LA, and then he and I were getting a coffee after and I actually remember having the thought of the kind of mid-scene change of character to an alternate version of the same character felt quite gamey in a way.

And I was very impressed with how they all managed to be two people that would pivot on a dime from one second to the next, the whole cast. And I remember talking with him about that. And so, in a way, what we're doing is kind of like saying, what if the whole game is that? And it's an actual thing where you're leaning into it. Well, we want the actors to help shape what that means. So, you know, if it's like if Grace in the scene with Anjali, for example, is um gonna be very aggressive and in her face, well, we want Anjali to then say what is Medusa's response to being treated aggressively, and what is her response to being treated more compassionately or more kind of cleverly and connivingly.

And then how do I build the final sort of orchestration supportive of these vocals around the story that these actors are then helping us tell. Does that make sense? I feel like I told that in a super circuitous way, but I'm planning on you to call me on it something.

[34:29] Gordon Cox: It made perfect sense to me, and I'm sitting here learning things about the game that I've never thought of before. So thank you. It was a great experience. I mean, a lot of it was like Anjali, Anjali's experience was probably the most pronounced because when Anjali came in, we weren't sure how we wanted this character to sound. We weren't sure quite how we were going to do the recording a bit of it. Like I mean, I didn't have a clear idea of how I wanted Medusa to act, so that we pressed Anjali to give us this performance and to sort of explore. And I mean, part of that is us is giving an actor room to explore as well. I wanted this to be a collaborative process where they inform us as much as much as the reverse.

I'm not gonna sit there and dictate and we were free to mod to change lines on the fly if we needed to and just sort of feel it out. And that was both recording the dialogue and the singing. So that was very, very that was again very reminiscent of the theatrical rehearsal process in a way that most games are not.

[35:36] Anjali Bhimani: Yeah, I would think because I've been given leeway in a session in a recording session for a game, you know, to make some decisions and to make certain pitch decisions or whatnot. But in this session with these guys in that first session, it really felt like okay, play. Knock yourself out. What you got? Show us what you got. And that level of freedom can either be terrifying or exciting or both. Um and it was the right thing it was the perfect combination of both, because there was a little bit of danger to it too.

[36:11] David Gaider: Yeah. You know, and which is really, really, really fun. And just credit as a quick sort of practical thing, a big credit goes to all the actors, but particularly Anjali for being our kind of guinea pig at the beginning of the process when we were still working it out. Because as you can imagine, you know, sheet music, all music until the last 20 years where we started experimenting in video games with non-linearity has been linear. All music from the beginning of time to pre-language humans singing around a campfire through to, you know, today has been the piece starts here and it ends there. And so when you're when we created these pieces that are super branching and have just huge numbers of permutations that are possible, pragmatically there's still the challenge of, well, sheet music is designed as a format to just spell out linearly.

So that's what we did. So you end up with a song, I put in quotes, that's 900 bars long, 1500 bars long, and contains the shortest ones had 20 minutes worth of material. The longest ones were more like 45 minutes worth of material. Even though the player will only experience four minutes, three and a half, maybe five minutes, a couple of the longer ones get a bit longer than that, but it feels normal song length, particularly sort of theater song length for a lot of these that have a lot of story to tell in them. But um but at any given time you're only hearing maybe 20%, 15% of the total material that's there.

[37:43] Austin Wintory: Well so the challenge to the cast on unpacking that is you're trying to build a thread and you're trying the cast you could feel them all going into professional actor mode as is their default to say, how do I kind of make sure that this begets this begets this and it's like well bear in mind that this might not have been begotten by that. This actually is based on if the player did this and this that and so we had to kind of figure out the best ways to even unpack the order in which to record things because if you just sang it straight through it's kind of like reading the index of an instruction manual where you're getting this alphabetization of concepts that is not how they actually are doled out in the book you know what I mean where it's like the art it's an arbitrary realisting of things and and but we had no other option other because it was sheet music is fundamentally linear.

That's how we had to do it. And it was an interesting learning experience, you know. Every song we kind of changed the formula a little bit to see if we found a better one because it no one had ever taught us how to do this.

[38:40] David Gaider: One thing that struck me about the game is that it the form of it is pretty accessible even to people who are not gamers, like it is not a musical first person shooter. You don't have to know your way around the buttons, you don't have to like thank God I would never be able to play it. Right. And so it's it feels like I just wonder who your sort of end user is. Like who do you feel like is the player for this game and who were you writing it for?

[39:10] David Gaider: Well, I mean, we initially did have more mechanics in the game, like there was like a you had to build up um we call it flows, some points during the songs, which would allow you like you you would be able to get a certain endings or not, and like you had to play the games more. And the issue we found when people were first testing that out is that even minor mechanics in the songs meant that people would stop listening to the song and were mentally trying to figure out how do I get the result that I want and trying to reverse engineer it. So eventually we made the decision. I mean, it was it was hard because Liam and I and Ellie our third core cover, we're pretty hardcore gamers. Like, you can't have no mechanics in a game.

That's crazy. Uh and then when we took it out, everybody was just so much happier. And we thought, you know what? This works. In terms of our audience, there's gonna be people that are narrative focused gamers, but I think there's also room for people who don't think of themselves as gamers necessarily and and like might hear of a game that's like, oh, a musical game? Like a with with Greek gods. That sounds kind of cool. But I'm not, I don't play games, I'm not, I'm not a gamer, and like having a space where they could come in and figure out, oh, this I'm just making choices here. And it's it's more about the experience of it as opposed to the playing a game part of it.

[40:41] Gordon Cox: And now that the game is out in the world and receiving some very nice reviews, does uh David and Austin, does it make you want to do it again? Do do you make another musical as a game?

[40:52] David Gaider: I suspect I suspect opposite answers. As David's face looks world weary and ready for eulogizing.

[41:04] Austin Wintory: My answer is yes, conditionally. It's like I need some time to recover, maybe do something else for a bit, and then and then come back and be like, yes, okay, yes, let's write a song.

[41:19] David Gaider: I uh just uh I uh getting to the point where uh how do I write songs? I thought, you know, I'm a writer, I write interactive dialogue. Surely I can come in and and and write lyrics, that's not that different, is it? Turns out Austin, your answer.

[41:41] Austin Wintory: Yeah, well, it's so it's funny because my trajectory was sort of I came at it, it's like the other half of the coin. David spent you know a good long while working on branching narrative as a concept, and I had spent my career, you know, coming up on 20 years, uh obsessing over interactive music systems. My very first commercial game in 2005 was all about dynamic music, and it's been kind of the thing I obsess over, I very rarely write when working in games, can like what you could call tracks of music or whatever. It's all these sort of toolkits that get wrapped up into the programming of the game. And so for me it was it was simply just well, what if all the stuff that I've been doing is connected to the narrative in a more core way.

That's that's just called a musical now, but it's still it's basically the thing, it's basically my day job. Uh but joined more tightly at the hip with the creative director and the writer than normal. So from my standpoint, it's like I'm chomping at the bit to to uh of another time at bat because this is all I do all day anyway. Uh, and I and it and it exposed so many possibilities of oh man, this really showed like the concept, I think. I hope we leave it to the audience to decide, but the concept seems viable, but how do we approach it a new way?

[43:02] Gordon Cox: Well, the game is out now, and listeners can check it out on a number of potential platforms. Um, and thanks to all three of you for joining me. It was great talking with you.

[43:13] All: Thank you.

[43:18] Gordon Cox: That was David Gaider, Austin Wintory, and Anjali Bhimani from the musical video game Stray Gods, now available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. If you enjoyed this conversation on Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft. Find past episodes and subscribe at all the places you get your pods, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, a great place to find more theater for your ears. Until next episode, find me on Instagram and Twitter at GordonB. Cox. Thanks for listening. And see you at the theater.