How Dicey Dungeons’ soundtrack found the perfect balance between Earthbound and disco funk
Dicey Dungeons‘ soundtrack can really ramp up the pressure. When I played the game the most in 2020, the driving rhythms made every match feel like it was going to be a lot of fun. While I’ve since moved on to other titles, the soundtrack still gets a lot of play when I’m on deadline, thanks to its upbeat and funky tracks. When brainstorming for Polygon FM, our theme week celebrating the intersection of music and games, I knew we wanted to talk to composer Chipzel as part of this Q&A series.
(This interview was conducted via email and edited for formatting and clarity.)
Polygon: Was there a game soundtrack or song that inspired you to start making game music? Can you paint the scene of what that felt like for you, and why the music was so effective?
Chipzel: My entry into game music was a bit unconventional. I entered the chiptune scene at 16 and started writing music on a Nintendo Game Boy. I released music online — all of it made from scratch using LSDJ. LSDJ is like a DAW for Game Boy where every sound is made using the Game Boy sound chip.
This led to many trips and performances all over the world. In 2012 Terry Cavanagh commissioned me to Super Hexagonwhich was a huge success, and led to a career in video games.
So while video games held a lot of core memories of my childhood, they weren’t particularly formative for my entry into music or the style I would write. It was the aesthetic of the 8-bit sound that initially resonated with me. What resonated most was the DIY punk culture of chiptune as a whole.
Can you break down one of your own songs and its influences? Was it inspired by game soundtracks, other music, or something else?
Dicey Dungeons is without a doubt my favorite game soundtrack that I have composed. “Swing Me Another Six” is my favorite piece of it. We were a very small team and we created something that we are all so proud of in just a year of development.
My first moodboard for this soundtrack was Earthbound/Substory meets funk, disco, jazz and French house. We went into Early Access pretty quickly after the team was assembled, which was intense. This intensity set the tone for what the soundtrack eventually became.
I was updating players with music for a game that up until now had nothing but great mechanics and gameplay (and extremely fun MIDI pop). But what we had up until now had such a strong sense of “luck of the draw.” I wanted the soundtrack to feel like winning a big chip with your last chip in the casino. The setting felt competitive, but the reality was that the player was only competing with themselves — a Terry Cavanagh staple.
I was also very inspired by the story of Alice in Wonderland In that particular dungeon crawler game it felt a bit like you were losing your grip on reality and was completely bizarre. The game initially seems to be completely against you and you feel like you have no control over it. I suggested using the game show setting quite early on and we ran with that concept. It wasn’t until the last few months that it really started to come together into what I wanted it to be and what it is!
What are the main instruments used to record the soundtrack for the game you highlighted above? How did you choose those instruments?
I wrote most of the parts as LSDJ pieces at first (the entire arrangement was written on Game Boy) and as we got further into development, with Marlowe adding incredibly vibrant assets and a wild variety of memorable characters, I became more motivated to give this soundtrack as much life as possible. I was really inspired by the idea of having a live band playing improvisation on a stage in this game show setting that we had all created and they were all just standing around waiting for their time to shine. The feeling of those viral videos of Too Many Zooz coming to mind where they were just jamming on the subway in New York — I wanted That feeling. But then with a Game Boy.
So, a lot of this was done by chopping up a lot of brass instruments — trumpets, saxophones, horns, etc. I wanted to throw in some super funky bass lines. Some disco samples and orchestral hits. I chopped and hacked my way through it with a combination of samples, lush Korg M1 presets, weird and wonderful glitch sounds recorded on synths and eurorack, and of course the old reliable Game Boy.
Is there anything else I should know about your approach to composing video game music?
Every project is like starting over from scratch. I try to approach everything from the same place of excitement and wonder that got me into writing music in the first place. This can be one of the most human, creative, and ever-evolving industries to be involved in, and things can get very formulaic and impersonal if we let them. The creative side of games — the art, the music, the story — they are the humanity and the soul of this entire industry.