MUSIC SUPERVISION / ORIGINAL COMPOSITION / REMIXING
80+ MINUTES OF SCORE / 3M+ STREAMS / AWARD WINNING SYNC / 100M+ TRAILER VIEWS / 20M PLAYERS
Feel For Music led music supervision and licensing across Dead Island 2, developing a music strategy that matched the game’s distinctive mix of Hollywood excess, dark humour and visceral action. Working across both in-game music and marketing, we brought together commercial licensing, original composition and bespoke creative to help give the game a musical identity as bold as its setting. We were originally brought onto the project by the publisher to help develop the sound of the brand, initially focusing on trailers and commercial music within the game. Our role later expanded to include additional score and original composition in-game. We also worked across the entire marketing campaign, providing supervision, remixing and original music across numerous trailer and advertising assets, helping culminate in the biggest launch in Deep Silver and PLAION’s history.
MUSIC SUPERVISION
Dead Island 2 was all about tone, humour and juxtaposition, creating irreverent spectacle and often using songs as part of the joke. The music spans a wide range of genres, but everything was selected to reflect the game’s black comedy, energy and heightened LA aesthetic. We worked closely with both the audio lead and brand team to develop a musical palette that could work simultaneously across specific narrative and gameplay needs, as well as the wider marketing campaign. We licensed music from artists including Karen O & Danger Mouse, Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell and Kool & The Gang. For a number of in-game tracks, we specifically negotiated stem access so the commercial recordings could be manipulated and adapted dynamically around gameplay.
ORIGINAL COMPOSITION
Our in-house team composed more than 80 minutes of original score, working alongside the brilliant Ryan Williams. We also composed “Stay Alive”, the song accompanying the game’s opening CGI sequence, which has become by far the most popular original track on the soundtrack with more than 2.7 million Spotify streams. Our composition work extended across several DLC packs and the Neighbourhood Watch horde mode. Much of our music was designed to punctuate key lean-forward gameplay moments, major set pieces and boss encounters, including the final boss. Even Karen O & Danger Mouse’s “Drown”, used across the boot and menu screens, features additional composition from our team to make the track fit perfectly to picture and the wider game experience.
MARKETING
The Dead Island 2 campaign launched at Gamescom with the Reveal Trailer featuring Kool & The Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging”, which went on to win a Music+Sound Award for Best Sync in a Video Game Trailer / Promo. We provided music across the majority of the campaign, including subsequent DLC releases. We licensed commercial tracks, trailerised and reworked many of them to picture, and composed original music for numerous assets including the TV campaign, Accolades Trailer and more. It was a hugely successful campaign, generating 100m+ views across campaign content, with music playing a key role in establishing the tone, attitude and identity of Dead Island 2 from reveal through launch and beyond.
