Searching for beacon 88

Hey there Mobius-ers. Mobii? Mobiuses?

    Sean, here. I wanted to kick off one of the first posts of our dev blog talking about what the process of finding the music of Beacon 88 has been like, and to share some of that inspiration with all of you.

    As a composer and music editor in my time outside of Mobius I've found the best way to communicate musical ideas is to use examples. But with Beacon 88 I knew that just wouldn't work. I can't tell you how or why, but when we started creating this game. I knew music just wasn't going to do it. There is something inherently wrong in Beacon 88... There's a darkness to it that simply can't be communicated with music.

    Without pretense, my mind immediately was drawn to the sound of radio static. There's a disconcert in the sound of failed communication. I needed to get this feeling into the game, not only that, I needed to make it the central theme of Beacon 88. And along side it I needed to find a way to hint at the incredible gravity behind our Fleet's mission, to find a new world to inhabit. So along these lines I scoured the Library of Congress for great historical recordings and speeches, slices of history to give players context. My experiments produced the following sketch of Beacon 88's first draft "Scorescape", a combination of sound design and music.

    I find this sound weird and beautiful; a collage of music and sound that produces a nostalgic melancholy, a lament for what was and what is.