CHAPTER 9: The Castle's Score
With Marcus on board and the first Alucard sprites integrated into the engine, the game was starting to look like something real. But every time George ran it, the same absence hit him like a silent punch: there was no sound.
Alucard walked through the placeholder tiles without his footsteps producing any echo. He jumped and landed in an acoustic void. Dracula's castle existed in total silence, and silence was the opposite of what Castlevania needed. Because Symphony of the Night was not just a game of exploration and combat: it was an atmospheric experience where the music carried half the emotional weight. Without music, the castle was a skeleton. With music, it was a living thing.
George remembered every theme from the original game with the clarity of someone who had heard them hundreds of times. "Dracula's Castle", the entrance theme, with its urgent strings and its rhythm that pushed you forward. "Marble Gallery", elegant and melancholic, like a waltz in an empty room. "Wood Carving Partita" in the Long Library, with its harpsichord that sounded of dust and lost centuries. "The Tragic Prince", which defined Alucard better than any piece of dialogue: noble, sorrowful, dangerous.
He couldn't hum these melodies to a composer and say "make something like this". He couldn't send the original scores because they didn't exist in this world. He had to describe in words what the music needed to make people feel, and trust that someone with enough talent could translate those words into notes.
He needed to find that person.
* * *
On Tuesday, April 21st, at ten in the evening, George connected the modem and went on IRC.
Internet Relay Chat was, in 1998, the place where people who did interesting things found each other. There were no forums with elaborate profiles or social networks with likes and followers. There were text channels where hundreds of people wrote in real time, with cryptic nicknames and a culture of their own that mixed the nerdy with the anarchic. If you wanted to find the best digital music composers in the world, you didn't go to a record label or a music school. You went to IRC.
George opened mIRC and connected to EFnet, one of the largest IRC networks. He typed the command to join the #trax channel, the virtual cathedral of the tracker music scene.
The channel had two hundred people connected. Messages scrolled across the screen at teletype speed: people sharing links to their latest modules, discussing sampling techniques, debating whether Impulse Tracker was superior to FastTracker II, asking for feedback on a track they had just finished at three in the morning. It was a community that existed out of pure passion. Nobody earned money from this. Nobody was famous. They were musicians who composed because they didn't know how to exist without composing.
George observed for half an hour without writing a word. He read the messages, noted the nicknames that seemed most active and respected, and followed the links they shared.
Each link was a .IT or .MOD file that George downloaded and played in Winamp. The download took between thirty seconds and three minutes depending on the file size. And each file was a mystery box: it might be frantic techno, or spacey ambient, or a guitar ballad, or industrial noise, or something that defied any category.
George was looking for something specific. Not techno, not ambient, not rock. He was looking for someone who understood the orchestra. Someone who could create tension with strings. Melancholy with a piano. Epic moments with brass. Someone who, within the limitations of the tracker format, pre-recorded samples, no real-time synthesis, none of the production tools that would exist in the future, could evoke the sound of a chamber orchestra playing in an abandoned castle.
At eleven-thirty at night, after listening to more than thirty tracks, George found a nickname sharing a link with the comment: "new piece, feedback welcome -- funeral_march_v3.it"
The nickname was Ethereal.
* * *
George downloaded the file. It weighed 487 kilobytes. He opened it in Winamp.
The first bars were a solo piano. Slow, spaced notes, like drops of water falling in a cavern. The reverb was artificial, it was a processed piano sample, not a real piano, but the effect was convincing. The notes built a melody that was both simple and devastating, the kind of melody that stayed with you for days without being able to explain why.
At thirty seconds, the strings came in. A violin that slid over the piano like smoke over water, rising slowly in a crescendo that was in no hurry. Then a cello, lower, darker, anchoring the piece with a deep weight. The three voices, piano, violin, cello, intertwined with a sensitivity that seemed to come not from a computer program but from human hands playing real instruments.
At ninety seconds, when George was already leaning toward the monitor as if the screen might reveal something more if he got closer, the piece changed. The brass came in: trumpets soft at first, then a french horn that added majesty without crushing the intimacy of the strings. The percussion arrived last, a discreet timpani that gave pulse without dominating. The piece grew like a wave, patient, inevitable, to a climax where all the voices played together in a chord that was simultaneously triumphant and profoundly sad.
And then, silence. A clean cut. The piece had ended.
George sat with the headphones on for a minute after the music ended, listening to the residual hum of the file and the pulse of his own blood in his ears.
This was what he was looking for. It was not the same as Michiru Yamane's music. It couldn't be and shouldn't be. But it had the same essential quality: the ability to create an emotional world with sound, to make you feel that you were in a place that mattered, that the story you were living had weight and consequence.
George went back to the IRC window. He searched for the nickname Ethereal in the user list. Still connected.
He sent a private message.
* * *
<GHightower> Hey. Just listened to funeral_march_v3. It's incredible.
Forty seconds passed. In IRC, forty seconds was an eternity.
<Ethereal> thanks. it's still a WIP, the brass section needs work
<GHightower> I'm developing a 2D exploration video game for PC. Gothic setting, castle, vampires. I need a composer for the soundtrack. Would you be interested?
A minute of silence.
<Ethereal> depends. what kind of music do you need exactly
<GHightower> Orchestral, atmospheric. Each zone of the game has its own sonic identity. Some zones need melancholy (a library), some need tension (a giant clock tower), some need corrupted majesty (a chapel). And the bosses need epic themes, the kind that make your pulse race.
<Ethereal> how many pieces
<GHightower> Between 15 and 20 themes. Plus sound effects, but we can look at those later.
<Ethereal> 15 to 20 themes is a lot of work
<GHightower> It's a paid job. This isn't a hobby project.
Another minute of silence.
<Ethereal> i've never been paid for composing
<GHightower> First time for everything. Can we talk in more detail by email? I can send you the game design document and the musical descriptions for each zone.
<Ethereal> ok. [email protected]. send me what you have and i'll look at it
<GHightower> I'll send it tonight. Thank you. Can I ask your real name?
<Ethereal> Lena. Lena Kovac.
George stopped. He didn't know why he had assumed Ethereal was a man. Probably because ninety percent of the demoscene was male in 1998. It didn't matter. What mattered was the track he had just heard.
<GHightower> Nice to meet you, Lena. Talk soon.
* * *
George disconnected from IRC and opened his email client.
He wrote a long email. Longer than he would normally send, but he felt Lena needed to understand the complete vision in order to decide if she was interested. Saying "make music for my game" wasn't enough. He needed her to feel the castle.
He attached the full GDD. Then he wrote a section dedicated exclusively to the music, zone by zone, with descriptions he had composed with more care than any code he had written.
"Marble Gallery: The player enters for the first time into an enormous room. Unlit chandeliers. Dust-covered statues. Cracked marble beneath their feet. The music must be elegant but decadent, like a waltz playing in a ballroom where no one has danced in a hundred years. Main instrument: strings. Tempo: moderate, with room to breathe. Emotion: corrupted beauty."
"Long Library: Endless shelves full of books no one will ever read. Dust floating in rays of light. Silence broken only by the creak of pages. The music must be contemplative, intellectual, with a plucked string instrument, harpsichord or harp, as the main theme. Tempo: slow. Emotion: nostalgia for lost knowledge."
"Clock Tower: Giant gears turning without rest. Metal against metal. The sound of time passing. The music must be mechanical, rhythmic, with metallic percussion imitating the gears. But beneath the rhythm there must be a melody suggesting this tower was built by someone, that it has history. Tempo: mid-fast. Emotion: relentlessness."
"Royal Chapel: Stained glass projecting colored light over empty pews. A desecrated altar. Saints with their eyes erased. The music must be choral, religious, but corrupted. As if a choir of monks were singing a sacred hymn in a church that no longer belongs to God. Tempo: slow. Emotion: poisoned devotion."
George wrote descriptions for all fourteen zones of the castle, for the main boss themes, for the menu theme, for the Game Over screen, and for the final piece: the confrontation between Alucard and Dracula.
"Final Boss -- Dracula: The battle between father and son. The music must contain both emotions: the fury of the fight and the tragedy of a destroyed family. It starts aggressive, urgent, with brass and percussion pushing the player forward. But in the transitions between phases, when the battle pauses for a moment, the melody must turn sad. Because Alucard does not want to kill his father. He has to do it, but he doesn't want to. The music must make the player feel that."
When he finished writing, the email was four pages long. George read it back twice. Changed a few words. Removed a sentence that sounded too prescriptive. Added a note at the end:
"P.S.: These descriptions are a guide, not a mandate. If you read them and an idea occurs to you, an interpretation I hadn't considered, I want to hear it. The game's music should be yours as much as mine."
He sent the email. Disconnected the modem. It was two in the morning.
* * *
Lena Kovac did not respond on Wednesday. Or Thursday.
George told himself he wasn't worried. In 1998, emails were not instant the way text messages would be in the future. People didn't check their mail every five minutes. Lena might be busy, might be reading the GDD, might be processing the proposal. Or she might have decided that a project from an unknown student wasn't worth her time.
In the meantime, George kept programming. Marcus had started delivering the first tiles for the Marble Gallery: marble floors with delicate cracks, walls with baroque moldings, chandeliers with animation frames to simulate the flickering of flames. Every asset Marcus delivered was a revelation. George integrated them into the engine and the test room transformed: where gray squares had been, there was now a dead ballroom, beautiful in its decay.
Alucard walked through the placeholder Marble Gallery and George could feel how the game was materializing, how it was ceasing to be an idea and beginning to be a thing. The sound was missing. The combat was missing. Enemies were missing, items, menus, doors, bosses, the inverted castle, dialogues, credits, the thousand things that separated a prototype from a product. But the direction was clear. The vision was there, taking shape pixel by pixel.
On Friday night, George connected the modem with his usual routine: calibrated hope, contained expectation.
There was an email from Lena.
* * *
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Castlevania -- musical proposal
"George:
I read the entire GDD. Twice. I don't sleep much, so it wasn't a sacrifice.
A few things:
1. Your game is the most ambitious thing I've seen come from an independent project. I don't know if that's good or crazy. Probably both.
2. The musical descriptions are incredible. 'A waltz playing in a ballroom where no one has danced in a hundred years' -- that's not an instruction, it's an image. I can work with images.
3. I made something. You didn't ask me to, but after reading the Marble Gallery description I couldn't help it. I'm attaching a demo. It's a draft, it's unpolished, the samples are basic. But it's what I saw when I read your words.
Let's talk about money after you listen.
-- Lena"
Attached: marble_gallery_demo_v1.it. 312 kilobytes.
George downloaded it with trembling hands. Not from cold. Not from exhaustion. From something more primal, more ancient: the anticipation of hearing for the first time the voice of a world that until now had existed in silence.
He opened the file in Winamp. Put on his headphones. Pressed play.
* * *
The first notes were a harp.
Not a real harp. A harp sample processed through Impulse Tracker, with artificial reverb and a carefully adjusted decay. But Lena had chosen the sample with a precision that made the distinction between real and digital irrelevant. The notes fell like drops in a pond, creating waves of sound that filled the space between the headphones with an almost physical presence.
Then the strings. A violin entering from below, from a register so low it was barely audible, rising slowly to a note it held for four bars. A waltz. Lena had composed a waltz. But not a cheerful waltz or a ballroom waltz: a ghost waltz, a melody that sounded as if it had been playing for a hundred years in a room where there was no one left to hear it.
George closed his eyes.
The cello arrived in the second minute, deep, resonant, anchoring the melody with a gravity that was at once sad and majestic. The harp wove ornaments around the strings, small cascades of notes filling the silences with brightness. And beneath everything, barely perceptible, a synthesized choir that sang not words but long vowels, a mass of human sound that gave the theme a spiritual dimension, as if the castle itself were remembering better times.
The theme lasted three minutes and forty-seven seconds. When it ended, George didn't move a muscle. He sat with his eyes closed and his headphones on, listening to the silence that came after, a silence that seemed emptier than before because the music had given it something to measure itself against.
Then he pressed play again. And again. And again.
On the fourth repetition, George opened the game engine. He loaded the Marble Gallery test map with Marcus's tiles. He integrated Lena's .IT file into the engine's audio player, which was basic but functional. Compiled. Ran.
Alucard appeared in the Marble Gallery. The chandeliers flickered. The marble gleamed with its palette of grays and golds. And Lena's music filled the room: the harp, the violin, the cello, the ghost choir.
George moved Alucard through the hall. He had him walk slowly, as if the character were also listening. The cape swayed to the rhythm of his steps. The parallax layers slid columns and arches behind the action. The music wrapped around everything like a velvet blanket, turning the tiles and sprites into something that felt alive, that felt real, that felt important.
George let go of the keyboard and covered his face with his hands.
He was not crying. Not exactly. It was something different, something without a name: the emotion of watching something that existed only in your head materialize in front of your eyes, imperfect, incomplete, but unmistakably real. The emotion of knowing the vision worked. That the pieces fit. That Marcus could give the castle eyes and Lena could give it a voice, and that together, the three of them, could build something no one in this world had ever seen or heard.
* * *
George wrote to Lena that same night.
"Lena: It's exactly what I needed. Better than what I needed. Let's talk money. I'm offering two hundred dollars per completed theme. Fifteen themes to start, with the possibility of more. Plus ten percent of the game's net profits. Delivery format: Impulse Tracker (.IT). The tracks are yours as compositions; I get an exclusive license for use in the game. If you want to publish them on your own outside of the game, you can. Let me know if this seems fair. -- George"
The reply came Saturday morning. George almost never connected in the morning, but something pushed him to the desk before coffee.
"George: Seems fair. I'm starting on the Long Library this week. I have an idea for a harpsichord that I think you'll like. Question: where are you? You never told me. -- Lena"
"San Francisco. You?"
"Sarajevo."
George stopped cold. Sarajevo. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nine thousand kilometers away, on the other side of the world, in a country that barely two years before had emerged from a war that had killed a hundred thousand people and destroyed a civilization.
Lena Kovac was in Sarajevo, composing ghost waltzes for a vampire castle in a free program on a computer that was probably older than George's, connected to the internet through an infrastructure the war had destroyed and that they were only just beginning to rebuild.
George stared at the word "Sarajevo" on the screen for a long time. Then he wrote:
"Welcome to the team, Lena."
* * *
That night, George sat on the futon with the marbled notebook and opened the first page, where a month ago he had written "CASTLEVANIA: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT" in capital letters.
Below it, in a space he had left blank, he wrote three names.
Programming, design and direction: George Hightower. San Francisco.
Art and pixel art: Marcus Webb. San Francisco.
Music and sound design: Lena Kovac. Sarajevo.
Three people. A programmer with memories of the future in an apartment with a futon. A pixel artist who had never worked on a video game. A composer in a country that had just come out of a war.
New Game Studios.
George closed the notebook and set it on the desk, next to the PC where Alucard waited in the Marble Gallery with Lena's music playing on loop and Marcus's tiles glowing on the screen.
There were three of them. They were enough. They were a team.
And Dracula's castle, for the first time, had eyes and a voice.
End of Chapter 9