ARC Raiders’ Audio Director Reveals the Game Samples a Piano Recorded in Chernobyl’s Forbidden Zone
ARC Raiders has one of the more distinctive soundscapes in a crowded extraction shooter genre, and part of that comes from a genuinely strange source. In a new episode of Embark Studios’ “Evolution of ARC Raiders” documentary series, audio director Bence Pajor revealed that some of the game’s music was built from a sample library recorded on an old piano left behind inside Chernobyl’s Forbidden Zone.
A Sample Library From the Exclusion Zone
Pajor explained that someone had traveled into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and made field recordings of an abandoned piano still sitting there decades after the 1986 disaster. Embark later purchased that sample library and worked the recordings into Arc Raiders’ score and ambience. “We bought a wonderful sample library from a piano in Chernobyl,” Pajor said, describing it as one of several unusual source materials the audio team has leaned on to give the game its own identity.
Arc Raiders’ sound team has built much of the game’s score and ambience from unusual, hand gathered recordings rather than standard stock libraries.
From a Prototype Trumpet to a Lure Grenade
The game’s playable instruments started out as a stranger idea than most raiders probably realize. Early in development, one of the gameplay designers built a playable trumpet almost as an experiment, and the team initially found it too out of place for a tense extraction shooter. That concept eventually evolved into the lure grenade, now one of the most useful gadgets for herding arcs into a trap or pulling their attention away from a vulnerable teammate. The instruments scattered across today’s map, including piano, guitar, harmonica, flute, banjo, recorder and a shaker, still serve a similar double purpose, letting players bond with strangers while also drawing unwanted attention exactly where they want it.
Items that started as odd prototypes, like the trumpet that became the lure grenade, still shape how raiders interact with each other and with the arcs on the map.
Composers Who Record Their Own Material
Composers Patrik Andrén and Johan Söderqvist have worked on Arc Raiders for close to seven years, and Pajor says the pair prefer building their own raw sound libraries over leaning on stock recordings. Both are former performing musicians with friendships across Sweden’s jazz scene, which Pajor credits for a lot of the game’s more unusual textures. The duo has reportedly gone as far as hooking up various fruits to a synthesiser to generate strange noises for the arc machines. According to the team, a typical three hour recording session yields only a few usable minutes of material, but those short stretches end up shaping much of the atmosphere players hear while scavenging through the ruins.
Keep the adventure going! Check out more Gaming News on Gamersuniverse.
Picture Source: Embark Studios
