How Pacific Drive’s soundtrack finds the beauty in ugliness
8.12.2024
By Thomas Wilde, Contributor
Much of Pacific Drive is about what happens as you carefully navigate through the ruins of a localized apocalypse. The word “liminal” has been overused in recent video game discussions, but in a real sense, Pacific Drive is set in a liminal space. Its journey is its destination.
The game casts you as a delivery driver in 1998 who’s been pulled into what’s become known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Here, military experiments have turned an abandoned stretch of rural towns and forests into an unstable pocket of reality. To navigate the bizarre hazards of the Zone, you’re forced to rely on an old junker of a station wagon. You collect parts, dodge anomalies, participate in dangerous science experiments, stay one step ahead of lethal storms, and—above all else—keep your car running.
As with any road trip, PD starts with its music. It’s by turns ethereal, haunting, and discordant. Many of its tracks crawl into your head and stay there, lingering between silences.
The original score for Pacific Drive was written by Seattle-based composer and games industry veteran Wilbert Roget. Roget’s other credits include Mortal Kombat 11, Destiny 2: Forsaken, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and this year’s surprise hit Helldivers 2.
The idea behind Roget’s soundtrack was to reflect not only the characteristic mood of Pacific Drive’s rural Pacific Northwest setting, but also the sense of decay that permeates much of its map.
“The more I wrote, the more I realized that you can’t get away with telling the story with harmony that I normally do,” Roget says. “It has to be through texture.”
According to Roget, the issue was one of contrasts. When you enter the Zone, it’s been abandoned for decades. Its buildings are ruins, its roads are littered with junked cars, and humans cling to life on the few patches of relative stability.
That meant a typical score wouldn't match PD’s characteristic mood or theme. Other game soundtracks, such as Roget’s work on Star Wars, are often loud and bombastic, with complex harmonies and an orchestral focus. For PD, Roget had to go minimalist.
“I very quickly realized that it had to be reined in to almost an absurd degree,” Roget says. “If you listen to the forest section, for instance, which is the first thing that I composed, you’ll realize that there’s just two chords in the entire biome… It was so weird, because it taught me that sometimes the mood has to be like that. I think I wrote most of the score during wintertime where there was this kind of gray haze to everything.”
Roget continues: “The notes almost don’t matter, if that makes any sense, especially after I’d developed the main theme. For instance, in all the pieces of garage music, I would just noodle. I would make something that sounds roughly like it’s starting to be a song but never really develops.”
PD’s music design was influenced by performers and composers such as Nine Inch Nails, Brazilian composer Amon Tobin, and Radiohead—Roget says he only first discovered their acclaimed fourth album Kid A when he was roughly halfway through working on PD.
Before Roget really set to work, however, he collaborated with Alexander Dracott, PD’s creative director. Dracott is also a musician, and had a distinct idea of what would become PD’s distinctive sound before Roget got involved.
“We [Roget and Dracott] were both in this group of game devs that like to do horror game jams every year,” Roget says. “You have two days to make some kind of horror or horror-adjacent game start to finish. The one that Alex worked on was called Do You Copy, which is also surprisingly successful. We worked together on that one.
“We basically decided, hey, let’s work on something together. He started this project [Pacific Drive] and he brought me in. The cool thing about those game jams is that I was able to use musical styles that I normally wouldn’t be able to... I adopted more of an electronic style using a lot of synthesizers and guitar, very influenced by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame. That was the style that was laying the groundwork for what Alex wanted for Pacific Drive.”
The beginning of PD’s unique sound came from Dracott, who created a Spotify playlist of songs and musicians that matched the planned mood of the game. Artists on that playlist included Lorne, Apparat, and Woodkid: artists unified by a sense of electronic melancholy.
“This is the first time that it was a truly collaborative process before we even wrote a single note,” Roget says. “He annotated [the playlist] in such a brilliant way, where he explained exactly why he chose each track and what I should take from that. I analyzed each track that he listed and did my best to reverse-engineer what was going on in terms of production and harmony.”
To create the sound of PD’s score, Roget ended up using multiple analog methods, such as re-recording some of his tracks on a cassette recorder, or playing on a metal colander with a double bass bow. He’d then create an interactive “pad” for each sound, which let him freely tinker with its pitch. Some of the music in PD comes from unusual sources, such as a phone clip of construction noise from Roget’s apartment building.
Perhaps the weirdest part of the soundtrack came from a trip Roget took to Wales for a party. While there, he had to share a room with a man who Roget describes as having the strangest snoring he’d ever heard.
“The day after the first night, I was like, ‘Hey man, do you mind if I record your weird-ass snoring?’ He said ‘Yeah, sure. That’s the strangest thing anyone’s ever asked me, but sure.’”
That bizarre snoring became the basis for some of the music in Pacific Drive.
“The idea behind all of these sounds was that you take something that’s inherently ugly and then just try my best to make something beautiful out of it,” Roget says.
“That’s the aesthetic I was getting from the game. You have this car that’s literally a piece of junk, that barely runs, but it’s your job to make something out of it. To make something that’s greater than the fanciest brand-new Lexus—something that’s truly yours.”
Roget’s upcoming projects include the soundtrack for Ubisoft’s Star Wars: Outlaws, out on Epic in August, and the Netflix series Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance.
Pacific Drive is available on the Epic Games Store.