Music Supervising 'Directive 8020': Music with Two Meanings
A spoiler-free retrospective with Kenny's own behind-the-scenes.
This is one of those posts that I never thought my Substack would lead me towards (this digital portfolio, collection of ideas, ‘dear diary’ if you will) but one I am very excited to document 🫡 Ever since uploading specific songs to early insta posts, it’s always been an aspiration to be a music supervisor. Being both a multi-instrumentalist and a gamer since I was super small - to be a music supervisor for a video game? That’s IT.
This Substack is a part-retrospective, part-quirkology analysis for all of the music & gaming outcomes I wanted to engineer prior to the get go.
I’ve been a fan of Supermassive Games for years, and having the chance to work with the team has been a really big moment for me personally. Big shout out to Barney and James from the Supermassive team for bringing me in, and to everyone at Feel For Music for the ace support as always.
Here’s to soundtracking my first true game credit: Directive 8020.
The Dark Pictures Anthology & Directive 8020?
Task: What Would The Crew Listen To?
Kenny’s Easter Eggs
Going ‘Voyager 1’ with Blood Red Shoes
1. The Dark Pictures Anthology & Directive 8020
For people familiar with Supermassive Games and The Dark Pictures Anthology, Directive 8020 continues the studio’s signature style of cinematic, choice-driven horror storytelling. These games are largely choice led, with every decision having knock-on effects, leading to multiple endings, hidden paths, secrets and dramatically different outcomes. Everyone can die, by the way.
Directive 8020 follows on from big hits like Until Dawn (One of the highest selling PS4 games) and The Quarry.
Directive 8020 is set aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia, the story follows a crew searching for a new home for humanity after Earth’s decline. After awakening from hypersleep, they discover an alien organism capable of perfectly imitating human beings has infiltrated the ship, turning paranoia, distrust and identity into the core threat of the experience. The rabbit hole gets much deeper…
This time, the formula introduces more stealth gameplay alongside a new ‘Turning Points’ system, allowing players to revisit major choices and see how many alternate routes branch from that moment without fully revealing them upfront.
Here’s one of the lead trailers that we sourced the music for:
2. Task: ‘What Would The Crew Listen To?’
The directive for Directive 8020 was fairly straightforward in its nature, but the execution required lots of attention to detail.
There are spots across the game where Supermassive wanted to use music in a purposeful way. Music was used to bring the crew members to life, with selections that the crew may well have brought with them on this mission used across the game. The aim was to create authenticity, empathy for the crew, and to make everyone feel trustworthy to make those decisions a little harder…
Pragmatically, I tend to create a framework/taxonomy of where the music is upon its request quite literally first, before going into the tin-foil hat theories of how it all connects. There was a mixture of in-scene moments (According to my own taxonomy - Main Music), some end of chapter ‘pit stops’, similar to Resident Evil’s save room aesthetic, purely made to reduce heart rates down from 200bpm (Optional Music) and to consider all the above for marketing uses too (Advertising Music), amongst other inspiration I’ve had from previous studies of cool techniques I’ve seen.
Here’s a fireside chat between myself and Barney Pratt from Supermassive we did for UKIE, talking all about the inner workings for this game. For a deep dive, check it out. Spoilers in here!
3. Kenny’s Easter Eggs
The above UKIE covers all the practical detail for inclusion, scenes, licensing etc. but I wanted to mention a few things in my mind at the time, so I’m using this Substack as a way to remember it all.
Check out the lyrics for all of the tracks. One of the main aims was to believe the music is just music upon first playthrough, but to have a completely different perspective on the music once you’ve played it through. Just like the games, the soundtrack is also replayable with different perspectives before and after a playthrough. We wanted all the lyrics to be foretelling. Mikky Ekko’s opening is a good start.
‘Do You Know?’ was commissioned and briefed in a 1 min 37 sec voice note I sent to Tess Obscura. Minimal edits!
One of the original aesthetic options I proposed was going for a ‘90s Trip Hop aesthetic, including I Monster’s ‘Daydream In Blue’ or Olive’s ‘You’re Not Alone’, given my prediction for its cultural return.
During a scene with a distress beacon (you’ll know it…) there is a pretty big needledrop here for Portishead - ‘Roads’. This purposefully moves away from the ‘musical palette’ of the game. My belief here is that what you learn during this scene is (imo) a completely different storyline, and therefore required a completely different soundtrack. This does not fit on purpose. It comes and it goes away, and leaves a mark on the finer details for the rest of the game.
One of my desired outcomes was the music to be discovered by the fans rather than front and center of the game. My metaphor here is that the stereo used to be the main entertainment feature of the living room 50 years ago, then the TV took over, and slowly we put a games console underneath it. The stereo is still in the room, but there’s a time and a place when it’s on. I wanted the soundtracks thought and attention to slowly creep up to long time fans of the Supermassive series for its under-the-nose espionage. After spotting Reddit forums like ‘The Music of Directive 8020 tells you the twists and ’Can we all agree directive 8020 had a fire ass soundtrack?’ I can consider that a success.
I know I’ve written quite a bit about deeper, innovative types of inclusions when it comes to expressing music in a game. Directive 8020’s in-scenes and end of chapter moments are not necessarily groundbreaking utilisation methods, but they were mutually agreed foundational elements that fulfilled the purpose. Getting to the agreed aim is the number one most important role of a supervisor in my opinion.
4. Going ‘Voyager 1’ with Blood Red Shoes
As explored in the 2.5 years of this Substack, music and gaming collaborations are built to pierce beyond a games traditional medium and exist in many more ways. So how can we do that here?
After Supermassive’s team suggested Blood Red Shoes, I got on the phone to them to make friends. After chatting with them more and more, their approach was excellent - despite being self confessed non-gamers, they were interested in the medium and aware that some of their fans knew the series, and they were keen to trust us, lean in and learn more about this world. I knew their album ‘Ghost On Tape’ had such a strong aesthetic that matched with what we were trying to build, that I wanted to occupy the space a bit more with tracks from this album.
Going beyond even further, I asked them if they had any additional unreleased recordings from this album that they would be interested in suggesting for this game. Lo and behold, they had one unreleased, incomplete track. When we had a listen and shared this with the Supermassive team, we all knew that it was an instant banger. Blood Red Shoes finally finished this track with lyrical inspiration from Directive 8020’s story.
As mentioned above, ‘COMPLY’ felt perfect for this game both from a dynamic trailer perspective but also aesthetically and on theme. A trailer is a ‘keyhole’ to the game, and I think this was spot on. A short while after the game release, we created an official music video using footage from the game for Blood Red Shoes too:
Lastly, Steven messaged me while I was on a family trip to the Canaries not long pre-launch. It was along the lines of ‘How can we play the game?’ - an excellent point. Between nap-trapping duties I sent a note over to the Supermassive team to see if they would be happy for Blood Red Shoes to come over to play at the offices which they gladly accepted.
After over a year of hard work, was nice to have a proper debrief with everyone in the same room playing through the game!
Without pushing at all, we got a few articles from music publications including NME and Radio Times publications referencing Blood Red Shoes involvement with this game. Given the plan was to creep this into the hands of the true Supermassive fans, this was an additional win too.
Outside of the publications, a real win was with the fans of Blood Red Shoes. Steven and Laura were telling me that they’ve got lots of messages of fans of theirs who also loved the Dark Pictures series too. I wrote about noticing this crossover in a previous post titled Gamemotifs.
Without over-optimising, there have been stronger connections made for the game as well as the artist through this crossover and it makes sense to go as far as we could with. I’m proud to have worked on that, but also interested to see what the results of a subtle-sleeper hit style music approach is for the Supermassive fans (Who I know love the deeper lore) as the game matures within the catalogue. Hopefully this depth of consideration and curation is seen as a love letter to the Dark Pictures fans, giving them a replayable soundtrack that is different before and after playing the game - very Supermassive, I’d say.
TLDR
Music supervised Directive 8020 with an empathy-creating, authentic soundtrack that the space crew would have genuinely brought with them. This soundtrack is designed with 2 features in mind:
To have foretelling lyrics, enabling an entirely different perspective upon a post-game replay.
To be modest in its in-game positioning, so the true fans can discover and enjoy its curation.
Proud of my first credit, and love that it is with the legendary Supermassive team <3 Here’s a screenshot of credits, and an image from after all the licensing one of their influencer events. It’s real, I promise!
