If you’ve been looking for a gritty crime game to pass the time until Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out in November, might we suggest Samson: A Tyndalston Story? From industry legend Christofer Sundberg (Just Cause, Mad Max), it’s brutal and unforgiving with plenty of vehicular chaos to be found on the streets of the grubby fictional city – but there’s also a concise, emotionally-charged tale driving all that overblown violence forward.
You play as titular ex-convict Samson, who’s fresh from prison and has returned home to pay off a debt to the mob bosses who organised the failed heist that got him banged up in the first place. To make matters worse, they’re charging a hefty daily interest rate and have also kidnapped his younger sister by way of collateral. To save her, you’ll need to make a lot of cash fast. Fortunately, that’s very possible in Tyndalston if you’re willing to break the law a little – gather evidence against double-crossing gangsters, shake down shady night club owners or drive down hot-headed rivals who have got on the wrong side of your temporary employer.
Helping ground the bloody ‘90s gangster drama is an original, pulsating trip-hop soundtrack from acclaimed composer Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed, Warhammer 40K Darktide). The moody electronic anthems channel the fury of Nine Inch Nails, the enthralling fantasy of Massive Attack and the urgent sense of movement that pulses through Portishead albums.
“The music needed to have attitude to fit with the character of Samson and his flirtations with crime. It also needed to feel dirty and brutal because that’s the grim world he lives in,” Kyd explains. “Whenever you play, I want you to be reminded about where he’s come from.”
The soundtrack is rooted in the Danish rave scene
Kyd first got involved with Samson’s adventures in Tyndalston two years ago and has been working closely with developers Liquid Swords as the game’s music director ever since. “For this project, there really were no guidelines and everyone was looking at me to come up with the ideas [for the sound of Tyndalston]. It took me a long time to write the actual music because of how much freedom I had. It was not an easy or a quick project, but it was really refreshing.”
To put Samson in the right period chronologically, Kyd took a trip down memory lane. The composer turned 18 at the start of the 1990s and began working on video game scores shortly afterwards. “I went to a lot of raves back then. Dance music was becoming commercial thanks to Orbital, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Underworld. There was just so much new music being invented that we’d never heard before,” says Kyd. Naturally, it influenced his own art.
It’s filled with brooding trip-hop beats
He went through sugary boy band music, snarling grunge bands and swaggering hip-hop groups but nothing felt right for the game until he landed on the dark, atmospheric electronic music of trip-hop. “Tricky, Massive Attack, Earthling… there were just so many amazing bands.”
“The music needed to sound pissed-off with an edge of anarchy… but also needed to take players back in time 30 years,” says Kyd. “When you listen to rock, it’s all about the melodies or the cool riff but electronic music can really transport you somewhere else. That became the cornerstone of the game’s sound.”
Massive Attack inspired Kyd’s DIY approach…
As we’ve mentioned, Kyd absolutely adores trip-hop music. His favourite album of all time is Massive Attack’s groundbreaking 1998 record ‘Mezzanine’. “It’s a masterpiece and still feels so fresh.” But rather than take direct influence from it, or any of the other amazing records that established the trip-hop genre, Kyd copied their “overall approach” to making music. “I didn’t want it to sound like a knock off of your favourite bands, it had to be able to stand apart as its own thing,” he explains.
That meant a lot of time researching the genre before tracking down the same analogue synthesisers and vintage drum machines electronic bands in the ‘90s would have used, such as the Akai MPC 2000XL, the Minimoog and the OSCar. “You actually have to perform on those tools [rather than pulling up a list of pre-programmed beats], which makes the music livelier and gives everything this organic feel,” says Kyd. “I really tried to put as much authenticity into the music as I possibly could, because I know gamers and music fans would be able to tell [if we faked it].”
…which is a protest against AI-created art
Making music with real instruments and performing on synthesisers instead of just sequencing everything on a computer may have been time-consuming, but it was really important to Kyd. “In this day and age with AI, we should be doing everything we can to make music that sounds as authentic and real as possible, like there’s actually an artist behind it. Maybe if you’re creating music for a game that takes place in the future, you want something that sounds as polished as possible but this was not the game for that.”
It also gave Kyd freedom to bend the rules. “I figured if I had the same equipment, I could do my own thing and it would still be faithful. I wanted to create something that could live in that trip-hop era, but I still needed to update things so it wouldn’t feel dated,” says Kyd, who used modern mixing and production tricks to create a “hybrid”, inter-generational sound.
Samson could be the first of many Tyndalston projects
Despite the early-day comparisons to Grand Theft Auto and Sundberg’s own history with Just Cause and Mad Max, making Samson felt like a “brand new project” for all involved. “It was important for all of us to build this world from the ground up as a whole new thing,” says Kyd. And it probably won’t end with Samson. Apparently, Sundberg has 400 years of Tyndalston history mapped out, alongside ideas for games, films and TV shows with Story Kitchen (the studio behind upcoming Life Is Strange, Tomb Raider and House Of The Dead adaptations) already involved in early chats.
“I’ll think about that when I need to, otherwise my brain will explode,” laughs Kyd. He’s currently working on a “historical inspired” score after another project, the blockbuster Wonder Woman game at Monolith Studios, was scrapped last year. “We were doing something really out there for that, and it felt like it was going well [until it was cancelled].”
“There are so many exciting things happening in gaming right now with all these different genres being rebooted, rediscovered and reimagined,” says Kyd, who picks projects based on passion rather than how much they pay. It’s an outlook he first learned as a teenager as part of Denmark’s lawless underground “demoscene”, which blended music, visual art, sampling and computer programming. “It was always about who can do something unusual, who can surprise people and who can blow the lid off stuff,” says Kyd. “Samson: A Tyndalston Story was my chance to do that [again].“
‘Samson: A Tyndalston Story’ is out now for PC and the soundtrack is available to stream here