In a sense, I was trying to add my own element of ‘depth’ to the story.”Īnd it’s not just game music that Maddigan is drawing on to make DLC work so well, not by a long shot. “So I kind of tried to compose as if I were creating a much larger sound world. “Listening to some of the great RPG OSTs ( Final Fantasy VI through Final Fantasy IX come to mind), there are often many different musical styles over the course of the game,” says Maddigan. Maddigan explains that, musically, Studio MDHR goes a little bit more into the 1940s in The Delicious Last Course than it did on the base game – something mimicked in the animation style, too. “I knew after the first game that there were still some areas I wanted to explore – like the early Hollywood/early Disney sound – but it wasn’t until really digging in and exploring different musical avenues that a lot of the soundtrack began to take shape in my mind.” “I didn’t really want The Delicious Last Course to be exactly ‘more of the same’,” he tells me when I ask how he ‘plumbed the depths’ for more inspiration after cranking out nearly 180 minutes of rich music for the base game. Playing through the DLC, and listening to the soundtrack outside of it, it’s safe to say Maddigan has made lightning strike twice. Cuphead won the BAFTA Games Award for Music in 2018, and rightly so – even a cursory listen will put you in mind of Duke Ellington or Count Basie, but always with something else percolating just beneath the surface. The original score was already breathtaking whether you want barbershop, ragtime, big band, jazz, or anything in between, it had you covered. This soundtrack would have been a challenging proposition without having to deal with a pandemic, let alone during one.”Ĭuphead – The Delicious Last Course. “Much of this can also be credited to Jeremy Darby, our incredible recording engineer, who managed to record this while still maintaining small, Covid-safe groups in multiple studios over many sessions. “There are almost three times as many musicians involved in the Delicious Last Course as in the original game, and I think it shows in the depth of the sound,” Maddigan explains. Between shifting bosses, arenas that evolve as the fight progresses, and all the detail that’s been pumped into new playable character, Miss Chalice, the DLC isn’t just some cheap tack-on horse armour. Because, coincidentally, the animation runs parallel to the music: there are as many animations in the DLC as there are in the base game. The result is a sound that is richer and fuller than what you would have heard in the base game – and that suits the DLC just perfectly. “The full 50+ piece orchestra is obviously a big part of that, but even the big band – which could be considered the ‘core’ of the Cuphead sound – is larger than last time.” “While there is technically ‘less’ music duration-wise in The Delicious Last Course, what is there is often much richer and fuller than what is heard on the original OST,” Maddigan tells me. The original Cuphead OST featured nearly three hours of original jazz, early big band, and ragtime music, and for the DLC – or The Delicious Last Course, if you will – “didn’t want to do more of the same”. Just like its inspirations, Cuphead is subversive and surreal – whether its rubber-hose animation based on the work of Fleischer Studios and early Disney cartoons, or the something’s-not-quite-right-here narrative of two naive cup-headed brothers wandering blindly into a deal with the devil himself, you can tell the game holds deep and significant respect for the weird and wonderful world of media in the 1930s.īut where the developers were inspired by Japanese wartime propaganda films and age-old cartoons watched on grainy VHS tapes, the composer – one Kristofer Maddigan – took his inspirations from more recognisable areas: from popular music of the 30s and 40s.
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