Ghostwire: Tokyo Interview — Creating Music For Clashing Times
Ghostwire: Tokyo is something special. Although it might fail to overcome the problems of modern open-world games and it presents issues with its gameplay loop, it also has a visual and artistic craft that you normally don’t see in this type of game.
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The virtual streets of Tokyo are represented with a tremendous amount of care and detail, from its recreation of plenty of real-life famous places and buildings, such as Shibuya’s Scramble Crossing and the Tokyo Tower at Shiba Park, to the noises of its advertisements and stores.
However, it’s in the game’s music and sound design where you can see (and hear) the most impressive sign of Ghostwire: Tokyo’s identity: its duality between representing a city with a long history of traditions and culture and, at the same time, a place that has been affected by capitalism and its technological and production developments.
“There’s a lot of traditions and folklore that are used as the foundations of the culture for the city,” explains composer Masatoshi Yanagi. “They are so close to us, you know. They are something that our feet are kind of stepping on that tradition. So we wanted to recreate that sense where these feelings are very close by. But there’s also this other sense of modernity that’s also real and something that’s really in front of us. There’s a lot of tradition at the foundations of the music but also a lot of modernity that’s on top of it.”
Yanagi started working in the video games industry at Tango Gameworks, the developer behind The Evil Within series and Akito’s recent spiritual journey through a desolated Tokyo. The composer first worked on some of the original The Evil
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