Metal Hellsinger is essentially what Doom would be like if it was turned into a rhythm game and its metal influences have certainly struck a chord with the gaming community. More than one million people have so far downloaded the game’s demo and it was named as the most wanted PC game at Gamescom this year. But how on earth did The Outsiders settle on making its own original music for the game?
Well, it largely boils down to two key things: budgets and development.
In an interview with The Loadout at Gamescom, director David Goldfarb and executive producer Shila Vikström admitted that the team wouldn’t have been able to afford a completely licensed soundtrack, so they turned to the game’s composers, Two Feathers.
“From a marketing perspective, going with a band like Metallica would have been easier because people would have played the game because they were on it, right?” Vikström tells The Loadout. “But it was not just about what songs we used.”
If you’ve played the demo, you’ll know that as you build up your Fury metre in game and do more damage, more of the song is unlocked. To set up these multipliers in development, The Outsiders needed to split the song into layers, adding rhythmic beats as it went. With licensed tracks, that task would have been made ten times harder.
“From a technical perspective, making the songs ourselves was really important because we don’t just put the songs over the levels and do the rhythm thing,” Vikström continues. “There’s a very deep and complex technical system involved here. The music is broken up into layers and we just couldn’t have done that with licensed tracks.”
Of course, having a bespoke soundtrack also means that Metal Hellsinger is an incredibly streamable game. The Outsiders has confirmed the music is DMCA-free, meaning content creators can play the game to their hearts’ content without getting a warning.
Hopefully then, that means by the time Metal Hellsinger launches on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on September 16, we’ll see plenty of players moshing their way through layers of hell.