On a snowy weekend in mid-January, fans and industry veterans alike trudged through the snowy streets of New York City. Their purpose was to pack into the SVA Theater, just down the street from the historic Flatiron Building. The occasion? The 15th annual New York Game Awards.
The eventful weekend was hosted by the New York Videogame Critics Circle, a non-profit of experts across gaming, journalism, tech, and more who advocate for the underserved in their community, educate students, and connect them with opportunities in gaming media.
The brand-new GG Fest kicked off the awards weekend with a stacked lineup of panels, an extremely welcoming atmosphere, and capped off the night with a live concert. The Pokémon Company was there in force, and how could you not snag a pic with Pikachu and Eevee when presented with the opportunity? The entire day was a celebration of art, creation, and the people who help make the games we love.
A new event this big deserved a big headliner – or rather, a Supergiant one. The crescendo of the night was the “Supergiant Games: Unplugged” live concert, performed by musical duo Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett.
Korb and Barrett treated the audience to a 90-minute performance spanning all of Supergiant’s soundtracks from Bastion to Hades II, and even brought a couple of highly talented friends on stage for a few select tracks, to the audience’s delight. For fans of any of Supergiant’s games – and let me assure you, the theater was packed with ‘em – it was a blast, made more so by the relaxed and friendly nature of everybody on stage.
For almost 17 years, Darren Korb has managed all things audio at Supergiant Games as Audio Director and Composer. From directing voiceover and voicing Zagreus and Skelly himself in Hades and Hades II, to creating every single musical track in all of their award-winning games and performing live all over the world, Korb has been a creative force in and out of the studio.
SUPERJUMP reached out to Korb via email to talk about his Unplugged concert at GG Fest and the catalogue of music he’s created over his career at Supergiant Games. The following conversation was held over a video meeting and is lightly edited for clarity and flow.
SUPERJUMP
Thank you again for taking the time today. It was an awesome experience seeing you and Ashley perform live at GG Fest at the New York Game Awards.
Darren Korb
Cool, yeah, yeah, that was fun.
SUPERJUMP
You had mentioned that you were there for the very first New York Game Awards; was that the first time performing an unplugged set of Supergiant songs?
Darren Korb
Yeah, so that one was maybe our first live performance of Supergiant songs, actually. Basically, I think we did “Build That Wall”, “Setting Sail”, like the mixture of the two. I think that was the very first time because it was the end of 2011, the game came out in 2011, so it was really our first opportunity to do anything like that. Yeah, that’s wild. We’ve done a bunch of those since, over the years, acoustic sets and stuff. We used to do them more frequently, but I think that was the first time we did that.
SUPERJUMP
That setlist must’ve grown quite a bit over the years, huh!
Darren Korb
*Sipping from a Mario-themed water bottle* Mmhm!
SUPERJUMP
At GG Fest, there were about 20 or so songs on that setlist?
Darren Korb
Yeah, about 20, 21, it was 90 minutes, and I mean – there’s more songs! Like we could’ve played more songs! But we had to pick and choose a little bit. That was a good time. That was the longest set we’ve ever played, especially in the acoustic format. It was a lot of tunes.
SUPERJUMP
Oh yeah, and you do have quite a discography at this point. You use a lot of different instruments on your tracks, from baglamas to mandolin, to… autoharp?
Darren Korb
Yup yup yup yup yup autoharp yup
SUPERJUMP
What was the process like to try to arrange your music into just an acoustic set when you use so many different instruments?
Darren Korb
You know it’s interesting, it’s sorta like, I’m just trying to distill the instrumental part down to just the essential bits. And I’m not someone who is particularly adept at making really complex acoustic guitar arrangements. I’m not doing like crazy finger-style stuff **begins to mime finger-tapping the neck of an air guitar** with voice leading and the bass, I’m not doing classical guitar style arrangements that are more complex, so I’m generally trying to just do a fairly bare-bones guitar arrangement, and a lot of times it’s just whatever the part is that I’m playing on the record, you know, and sometimes it’s really spare.
But sometimes I find that it serves the song pretty well just to have the guitar part and the vocal part together, even if there’s a lot more stuff going on with the album version, on the studio recording.
Sometimes I’ll do a new arrangement, and sometimes I’ll modify it accordingly. Like for “We All Become” for example, we have kinda like a more folksy arrangement of that tune, which we have done it before where it’s more true to the vibe of the recording, and I prefer – when we do it acoustically I prefer to do it the way we did it which is more like changing the vibe accordingly to match the instrumentation.
SUPERJUMP
You and Ashley have this tangible comfort and harmony when performing together. Over the years, as a performing musical duo, how have you both developed or grown in performing live?
Darren Korb
I think the shared experience of having done it a bunch now, having prepped a bunch of sets and played a lot of these songs for 15 years together. Yeah, I think it certainly increases the comfort, and we’ve had the opportunity to play some really wild gigs **laughs** in really pretty nutty scenarios.
So I think that shared experience of like – playing The Game Awards with Imagine Dragons, and playing the Hollywood Bowl with an orchestra, doing all these pretty out there scenarios, singing live with an orchestra at Abbey Road, all these sort of wild things that I don’t think either of us could’ve imagined when we started doing this.
So I think having those shared experiences certainly gives us some comfort too, and I think once you do that kind of thing it’s kind of like well, **raises hands and smiles** ya know, the stakes just don’t seem quite as high as when you’re doing that kind of stuff, so it is easier – a little bit easier – to be a little bit more comfortable. Even though the acoustic set thing is really exposed and really, just, you know… all the mistakes are sort of **splays hands** they’re right there! You can’t hide! So it is a very vulnerable format, especially playing something where it’s a really friendly crowd, like the New York Game Awards, we felt comfortable to do kind of a relaxed-feeling performance, and hopefully that came across.
SUPERJUMP
It absolutely did! And those gigs you were talking about, those are quite a few bucket list items, I imagine.
Darren Korb
Yeah, pretty nutty, yeah, **chuckling** I don’t know how any of that stuff happened. It’s all like… an opportunity somehow arises, and it’s just a matter of not saying “no”. You know? Just like, “Yeah! Okay! That sounds cool! I’ll try that!”
SUPERJUMP
You said 15 years you’ve been at Supergiant now?
Darren Korb
Jeeze, it’s gonna be 17 in September, so yeah, it’s been 16 and a half at this point.
SUPERJUMP
That’s quite the journey. And with five games underneath your belt, is there any specific soundtrack so far that holds a special place in your heart – or is that kind of like being asked to choose a favorite child?
Darren Korb
I mean, they all have their own sort of specialness to me, and each one presented its own sort of unique set of challenges and unique set of pleasures. And for me, it’s always the most recent one that I’m sorta the most passionate about, but they all have special significance to me for different reasons.
Bastion was the first one, so it has a special place for that reason. And Transistor was one where I really felt like I pushed myself outside my comfort zone pretty hard, and so that one was really rewarding in that way, creatively. And Pyre was like… at the time, it felt like probably closest to my own sort of taste, you know, so that’s something that was really exciting and had its own set of challenges because of the way I wrote the stuff for that one.
And then, of course, Hades, I got to express my “inner rocker” more than I ever had before – that was really delightful. And for Hades II, it just had such a huge breadth of styles, and I got to write so many songs – I got to do so many wild, kind of out there things – I got to really play with synthesizers more than I had before, which is a lot of fun. So there are just a lot of reasons that each one has its own set of delights and challenges.
SUPERJUMP
I’ve noticed that over time, your soundtracks seem to be trending longer, from Bastion having 20 or so tracks to Hades II having 50. What kind of factors over the course of a game’s development lead to a longer album?
Darren Korb
I think, directly, the games for the most part have just increased in scale over time, and so the soundtrack by necessity sort of reflects that. Also, I think I’ve just gotten more efficient at making things, so even if I were to make the music for a Bastion-sized game again, I bet it would have a little more music than Bastion did, you know what I mean? Just because if we see an opportunity for a unique piece of music, chances are I’ll be able to create one a little bit more quickly than I could at that time, just because my workflow’s improved since then.
SUPERJUMP
You’ve leveled up the abilities over the years.
Darren Korb
Yeah, to some degree for sure.
SUPERJUMP
For Hades and Hades II, since those were developed in Early Access, what was it like to try to balance your creative instincts vs. what you’re hearing from the player and the community?
Darren Korb
You know, it’s interesting because those things aren’t really at odds. I’m happy with – whatever I’m putting out in the game, I’m happy with. And I feel good about it existing in the world. It’s more like, I just sort of get confirmation – like a lot of times it’s the things I think people are gonna really gravitate towards that they end up gravitating towards. And it’s nice confirmation, like, ‘Okay, cool, I can kinda double down on this stuff and lean into it.’
So it ended up being more like that for me, where I was able to just get reinforcement and wind in the sails, be like ‘Okay, cool, I’m gonna do the thing I thought I was gonna do, but let’s do it real hard, and go ham.’ **laughs**
SUPERJUMP
That’s gotta feel nice to get that, since it must be a very vulnerable space – putting your work out there and it’s not quite finalized – I don’t know if that’s the exact right term there – Early Access, so I know things can change.
Darren Korb
Yeah, the Early Access process was funky in that way where… all the stuff that I released musically, I treated as final, I treated it as “I don’t want to revise this later.” Like these pieces of music, I think this is how I want them to exist, and so I made sure I was happy with everything at the release of the Early Access, of the singles, and throughout Early Access.
But yeah, Early Access in general is kind of a funky process because there is stuff that will be subject to change, and you want to be able to take feedback on certain things, but for me, I kind of saw the process – my part of that process – just a little differently, at least with the music. I wasn’t really expecting to get notes and then change the music, you know what I mean, as part of that process, and that’s not really what ends up happening realistically either. The way I treated it was, I want to put out things that I see as complete, and then take the opportunity to make a bunch more stuff throughout the process and put that out.
SUPERJUMP
Absolutely, because I imagine at that point you’ve already worked with the writers on how to weave that into the setting and character narrative and everything like that, right?
Darren Korb
**Affirmative “Mmhm” while sipping water**
SUPERJUMP
It was cool to discover that you have some sheet music out there, too, on the Supergiant merch store. Has there been any thought to releasing full-on songbooks of your soundtracks?
Darren Korb
It’s one of those things where… when I make the music, I don’t write anything down. None of the music has charts or anything ‘cause the way I compose it is I just record it and play it. With the exception of the stuff we’ve done for orchestra, where I’ve worked with Austin Wintory and made these actual arrangements for these musicians to play, and made the charts for them to play.
So it would require a concerted effort to generate all these things. And there’s not a lot of redundancy over here, so if it’s going to take me off whatever we’re working on and it’s sort of like an ancillary thing, sometimes I gotta pick and choose those battles, you know?
SUPERJUMP
It’s not quite as easy as a copy & paste from one document into another.
Darren Korb
**Smiling** Right ‘cause again it doesn’t exist, so we’d have to make it exist. And we have a handful, like we did a chart for Bewitching Eyes that we put up, and we’ve got all the instruments charted out on that one, so that’s one!
SUPERJUMP
I was excited to find that one!
Darren Korb
Yeah,; but it’s tricky to make those, you gotta find the right collaborators to bring that stuff to life.
SUPERJUMP
I’ve seen some people online take it into their own hands – I found a tab for Rage of the Myrmidons from Hades, and so I noodle a little bit on my guitar with that one.
Darren Korb
Yeah, some of those are pretty accurate, and some of ‘em are a little… **shakes his head from side to side** questionable; you know, it’s all good.
SUPERJUMP
Speaking of Bewitching Eyes, you had said something along the lines – during your performance at GG Fest – how you couldn’t believe it was your job to write a power ballad (Darren laughs). Could you remember a specific point in time where you first had a thought like that at Supergiant? And does that still happen from time to time?
Darren Korb
Yeah, it absolutely happens! I mean, it happened on Hades 2 while I was writing that song! I love that I get – I mean, my job is so insanely fun, and I realize how sort of… rare that is as a thing for a job to be, you know? To be an exciting, fun thing to do, so I’m always really appreciative of that, especially – I’ll have those moments where I’m like… ‘I’m recording an orchestra at Abbey Road and like, **arms out wide and looking around enthusiastically** “This is my job guys! This is work!”
Or I’m eating a scotch egg at the commissary at Abbey Road and like, “This is my lunch break at work!” And yeah, it’s certainly wild, I have those moments from time to time, as recently as writing **chuckling with a smile** an 80’s power ballad for Hades 2. I was like, “This is my job! That’s ridiculous!”
SUPERJUMP
That’s the dream right there! And it’s got a very tasty guitar solo. I mean, the whole song is excellent, but I love the guitar solo.
Darren Korb
Ohh, thank you, thank you very much. That’s a fun one, yeah I was doing my best to channel the sort of **sweeps his hand up into a clenched fist** style of the 80’s power ballad guitar solos of the day, like “Alone” by Heart in particular has a great solo and that was one that I looked at and all that, and so definitely like I was trying to sort of evoke – not copy – but evoke the vibe of those guys.
SUPERJUMP
I think you nailed it. That song gets me amped.
Darren Korb
Aww, thanks so much.
SUPERJUMP
I want to be respectful of your time, so final question – is there anything else that you’d like to add, or plug, anything at all?
Darren Korb
I’ve got a couple of shows coming up which I’m excited about. I’m playing during GDC, there’s some fun stuff going on. I’m gonna be doing a thing in the GDC concert, and then on that Thursday night I’m playing with Premium Vintage at the DNA Lounge – we’re gonna do some Hades tunes, so that’s gonna be fun.
And then June 27th in London I’m gonna be playing with the full orchestra at Royal Festival Hall, doing a bunch of tunes from Hades and Hades 2 and some other games, so that’s gonna be really wild.
If you happen to be in London, come check it out!