Kevin Riepl Interview

Video game composer Kevin Riepl, known for having worked on a wealth of titles, including recently Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, has been interviewed by NerdReactor. The interview devotes a good number of questions to inXile Entertainment’s dungeon crawler, and here’s an excerpt about Kevin’s work on the game:

From start to finish, how long did it take to complete Hunted: The Demon’s Forge?

It’s tough to give an accurate answer on this one. Sometimes for games you’re brought on early in the development stage to start creating ideas and themes for the game. Sometimes this could be a long iterative process between myself and the creatives on the developer side. A lot of times during this process I’m not writing every day back-to-back. It’s a cumulative process to get to a point where we all agree on what the direction of the music should be. Once there, then I’m off and running, creating music non-stop to feed to them for review and approval. From this point, I had about six months to create the score.

Are there any out of the ordinary instruments (real or virtual) that you used for Hunted: The Demon’s Forge? For example, a pot from the kitchen, which you mention in the Around Dark Corners Trailer?

I actually didn’t end up using the pot. What I did was, a few months prior to starting work on Hunted, I created what I ended up calling ‘˜The Cello-Bucket’ or as friends would call it, ‘˜The Riepl-Bucket’. I only named it a Cello Bucket because I used a Cello bow to bow the metal string I had fastened across the top opening of the 5 gallon bucket. It’s not the most intricate or sophisticated instrument I’ve recorded, but miking it various ways then adding different effects and tuning to manipulate an already disturbing sound turns it into something completely different and quite effective in a score like Hunted. I initially experimented with this effect for use on Crackdown 2, but I ended up using more bowed guitar for that score. The sound of the bucket which I blended with the lowest possible rumblings of a trumpet ended up fitting nicely within Hunted’s environment.