World of Goo fans and people who appreciate fine videogame music should probably hustle over to Kyle Gabler’s website, where the World of Goo co-creator is giving away free copies of the game’s “official” soundtrack.
“This is probably as close to an ‘official’ soundtrack I’ll ever make for the game World of Goo,” Gabler wrote on his site. “I’m making it available here on my personal portfolio for free. I wrote much of this music specifically for the game, but many of the tracks were excerpts from music I had written previously for various small projects, or just for fun. This soundtrack includes the full versions of most of those songs, as best as I was able to recover them.”
The music was composed primarily with computer instruments, with a few live performances mixed in “to add a bit of warmth.” Gabler cites Danny Elfman, Vangelis, Bernard Herrmann, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone and “all the big movie guys” as influences in his music. 27 tracks are included, adding up to an 85 megabyte download.
World of Goo is a physics-based puzzle game for the Wii, PC and Mac developed by Gabler and Ron Carmel, former Electronic Arts employees who joined to create the independent studio 2D Boy. The game has earned accolades for its unique and innovative design from sites like GameSpot and IGN and also drew considerable attention at the 2008 Independent Games Festival, and took home the prize for Best Independent Game at the Spike Video Game Awards.
The free soundtrack is surprisingly beefy and, like World of Goo itself, very good. Get it while it’s hot, along with a groovy World of Goo Soundtrack image and a link to Gabler’s track notes, at kylegabler.com. Give the World of Goo demo a try while you’re at it, available via Steam, Direct2Drive, Greenhouse and at 2dboy.com.
(Thanks to the IRC crew for the heads-up.)
