From 115 to The Source: Worldbuilding Through Music

Now I know in Zombies, the music was hidden as Easter eggs.

Yeah.

And I do remember... trying to have a strategy with my brother like I'll hold them off and then you go find yeah that's like my favorite part like I'm not killing that one zombie that's all I have to do and then frustrating him endlessly when I die when you accidentally kill

them I'm sorry I stabbed the

zombie or I like lost focus and now I'm dead it's just it's never really worked out but I also think that that mechanism of of finding it like I don't know it made the song more rewarding it was like a like a mega dopamine

absolutely yeah I don't know where it all evolved to I know by the time 115 came out that that was like you know very well understood but 115 was the fourth song So, but I think there was this very specific, like breadcrumbing ethos to the whole thing, which was in part done by like, or just created by the fact that there were a lot of constraints, right? Like we have one map.

We don't, there's no cinematic budget.

There's no, we're not going to hire, you know, voice actors to come in and do a scene to explain what's happening.

So we're just going to like seed some stuff in the map.

Yeah.

And that's a really clever mechanism because it does reward people who find it and it rewards people who start dreaming about it, what it could be, what it could mean, talking about it.

That was a beautiful back and forth and it was baked into the gameplay as well with the like, you know, hunting for Easter eggs, trying to live a little bit longer.

I think these are things that if you wrote them down into a design doc and pitched it, people would be like, I don't know, this seems a little, like, rinky.

Like, I don't know how this is going to work because it was so unique.

But, you know, you just make it and see that it's fun.

Who knew? Yeah.

Go with

it.

I think that's how it started.

Yeah.

I mean, so many games have kind of treated us with Easter eggs, but they're, like, You're collecting bits of a journal or you're collecting this, but to collect music that you also can just like, you hear it, you hear it in the game and now you can take it to your headphones.

You could take it to your car.

You could take it to the gym.

It's like a different level of involvement that you don't necessarily get.

because the game cuts off but the music is with you