Beauty of Annihilation

Monday, December 8, 2008

World at War: Nazi Zombies

So by now, most of you have heard about the Nazi Zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War.

This amazingly fun little mode was originated by Jesse Snyder (our lead designer). You can find out more about how it came about on his blog.

In terms of the sound, I've seen posts recently wonder what in the world the song that plays is when you 'die'. Most people liken it to John Murphy's piece from 28 Weeks Later.

While quite a compliment, Kevin Sherwood (one of our many talented sound designers) wrote the riff that plays when the camera flys through the environment essentially as a quick fix (we could have just clipped some of the in game music, but we thought it could be cool to do something totally different). Once it got in, however, we didn't want to change it...and in fact, decided that it should be a full song.

So once the project was completed, Kevin blew the 8 bar piece into a complete song. Kevin is on guitar(s), Elena Siegman (a really kick ass game producer and singer) is doing the vocals. All of it was recorded and produced at Treyarch Studio's. Its called "Lullaby of a Dead Man".

Aside from the end game stinger that's in there, you'll also find a little radio if you look around enough. (HINT: check near the magic box in the HELP room!)

If you shoot (or otherwise damage) the radio, you'll hear a new song pop up evert time it's damaged. Most of the tracks on the radio are edits from the Call of Duty: World at War soundtrack...but we also thought it would be fun to have some crossover with True Crime: New York City, given that Sean and I worked together on that game as well. So if you are familiar with that title, you may recognize 3 or 4 of the pieces on the radio now that you know what it is.

In addition to the gameplay score from TC: NYC, you'll hear a few other interesting pieces. The first song that plays on the radio is called "WTF". Kevin basically tossed some guitars on a trancy piece I did a few years ago just for fun. We thought it fit pretty well for kicking zombie ass, so we put it in.

Also included on the radio is a song I wrote for the 'dance' station in TC:NYC called "Dusk". Yeah, dance music doesn't really go with the WWII era, but hell, you're killing Zombies with a ray gun, so we just threw 'period' out the window for this one.

3 comments:

Telixion said...

I love that radio! The songs on it shouldn't stop however for when you activate the magic box or when the rounds end. And deffinatley crank the volume up! lol. Anyways you guys are amazing and I love that kind of music. When are you guys going to get a name for your group and make some cd's? You got my purchase.

Brian Tuey said...

I can see where you're coming from about not stopping the songs on the radio---but, its really tough to make multiple pieces of music (or musical stingers) play at the same time without them just sounding awful.

So what we do is play the gameplay relevant music stingers (round begin\round end) and just 'duck' or turn down the radio while the stingers are playing.

Anonymous said...

My favourite part of playing Nazi Zombies! Is the radio music EVER going to be available to the public? I've been searching for it for EVER. :'(