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Beloved ‘Celeste’ and ‘Minecraft’ composer shares new soundtrack for scrapped game

'Minecraft' and 'Celeste' composer Lena Raine at the 2019 BAFTA Games Awards.

Lena Raine, a celebrated composer who’s worked on music for Celeste and Minecraft, has shared a new album of music from scrapped game Earthblade.

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Earthblade was being developed by Extremely OK Games as the follow-up to cult pixel-art game Celeste. The project was first announced at the 2022 Game Awards but in January, the game was cancelled after one of the studio co-founders left. “Celeste‘s success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” wrote another studio head, with EOKG wanting to focus on “smaller-scale projects”.

Now the game’s composer Lena Raine has shared an album of music written for Earthblade and inspired by Cowboy Bebop, Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind. “It’s a combination of sounds I really love and hope to explore on some other project in the future,” Raine explained.

The nine-track album ‘Earthblade: Across The Bounds Of Fate’ is available to buy and stream on Bandcamp, with half of the proceeds going to the Trans Lifelines charity.

“Earthblade was in development for a number of years and over that period of time, I wrote quite a few pieces—both conceptual and implemented tracks—that began to depict the world of the game. Because we’ll never get a chance to tell that story in game form, I decided to cobble together every bit of music I’d written for the game to the point of its cancellation in order to tell my own version of it,” Raine wrote.

“‘Across The Bounds Of Fate’ is a concept album,” she continued. “The music I wrote for the game is highly dynamic, in the tradition of what I wrote for Celeste. I took it many steps beyond, in ways that temporally-constrained pieces of music can’t really do justice. But I did my best to arrange them into the emotional arc of their progression, much like I would for any soundtrack release.Tuck in and enjoy around 30 minutes of music that paint the picture of what I hoped Earthblade might be.“

In other news, Call Of Duty: Warzone developers have confirmed the return of OG map Verdansk to celebrate the game’s fifth anniversary – however a lot of fans aren’t happy.

The post Beloved ‘Celeste’ and ‘Minecraft’ composer shares new soundtrack for scrapped game appeared first on NME.