IO Interactive has released the newest edition of its behind-the-scenes series, Beyond the Light, which gives us a glimpse into the development of 007: First Light. The latest episode focuses on the upcoming title’s music and sounds, and features missions and audio director Dominic Vega, along with in-game soundtrack composers The Flight. Check it out below.
Discussing the vision behind the music and other audio of 007: First Light, Vega spoke about how the audio department at IO Interactive had to take on different considerations than the rest of the team. While everyone else was focused on concept work, the audio department had to ask questions about characters, locations, and musical motifs, among other things.
“From the earliest get-go, kind of the core of the experience in Bond is about the character, and it’s about the mission that he’s on,” explains Vega. “He’s kind of living through and playing out this story. So from the very early onset of something, it’s concepted out, it’s drawn up for the team, but the audio department, we go off and we start thinking about what the musical motifs are going to be for the individual characters, what the sound of that world, that location is going to be, what kind of sound sources we’re going to need to record in the future, what kind of characters we’re going to see, what accents are we going to be hearing as we walk through the world, how do we want to lay this out acoustically?”
“We do some linear mock-ups as we get ready for that stage. We go out, and we’re recording a lot of source, getting ready for it. But we’re also prototyping the engine from day one, so as soon as we can get our hands on something new, we’re drawing things up and working back and forth with all of our designers. It’s a really inspiring process.”
While much of the work was done by in-house teams, Vega also confirmed that IO Interactive brought in experts when they were needed. This includes The Flight, who headed up the studio’s internal music team for 007: First Light. “Joe and Alexis [The Flight] work a lot with some spectacular and fantastic soloists who were brought in for specialty instrumentation, but we also recorded our entire brass segment at Abbey Road Studios. Some of the best players in the world play out of that hall.”
The duo making up The Flight spoke quite a bit about their involvement with the project, noting that they joined IO Interactive with their own perspectives on how the music should be composed. With the idea of not wanting to “update” things too much, they said that the upcoming game will be focused on sounding classic, but with the duo’s own bend on the ideas.
“The good thing about Bond as a franchise, ’cause it’s lasted so long, it’s already gone through a lot of musical tastes,” they said. “I like to think that, as children of the ’80s growing up in the UK, sitting down and watching Bond films on the sofa with our dads every Christmas, we just have it built in that you can play a figure, play a chord pattern or a melody, and you know if it’s Bond or not.”
007: First Light is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 27th. A port is also planned for the Nintendo Switch 2, which has been delayed to a Summer release window. For more on the upcoming Bond game, take a look at its title track as performed by Lana Del Ray.
