The Fallout 4 soundtrack will be a vital component to Bethesda Game Studio’s upcoming post-apocalyptic journey. Anyone who’s played through Fallout 3 (or the not-Bethesda produced Fallout: New Vegas) knows just how important that soundtrack can be when you’re exploring the wasteland. Deciding what goes into the final version of the Fallout 4 soundtrack isn’t easy, says BGS Audio Director Mark Lampert. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.
“The fun part is we all had this great starting point from Fallout 3. Do we want to do more of that music? Absolutely,” Lampert told iDigitalTimes. “We not only wanna do more we also want to push the limits on where the time period is. I think before we stuck a little more closely to what is too early and what is too late. This time we bent the rules quite a bit more to find what would be really fun.”
Fans already heard one Fallout 4 soundtrack song that fit this category - “The Wanderer” by Dion - which was featured in the live action trailer.
“We gotta do that song. You ARE the Wanderer,” Lampert said.
Lampert revealed another song to iDigi that isn’t exactly in the era found in Fallout 3 but “ the lyrics are just too obvious” to ignore. Behold, another track you’ll be bopping along to in post-apocalyptic Boston - Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World.”
Unfortunately, this song wasn’t on our list of possible Fallout 4 tracks, but Lampert hinted at the fact that if we delved into the Dot Records catalogue and looked at the weird 1950s atomic war-pop song sub genre we’d probably find a few things that will be in the game.
“All these tunes [from the] early 50s where people are aware of nuclear power but the lyrics are like silly. It's like they don't know what they're talking about. No one really grasps how powerful the bomb is. How bad it can be,” he said. “There's some creepy ones. Some religious bent ones. 'Atom Bomb Baby' and loads of stuff like that and malt shop favorites.”
There is a lot more music on the Fallout 4 soundtrack than in previous games, too.
“It's multiples of whatever we did in Fallout 3. I've never totalled it up actually [laughs.] But more than we should have done probably,” he said. “There's the classic Fallout 3 rock station. We put a classical station in this time that kind of ties into the story. Radio Plays which are somewhere in between. There are different factions that have their own little thing. So more than three radio stations, but less than ten, depending on where you are in the world.”
Lampert’s job involves a whole lot more than picking tracks for the Fallout 4 soundtrack. As the audio director he is designing countless sound effects and musical cues as well as directing the voice overs and dialogue, too.
“The radio plays all these things synced together, and that's before you even get into all the sound design and sound effects. Forget about the 112,000 lines of dialogue or whatever it came out to be. Let's take what we did in Skyrim and just double it,” he said. “Amazingly it all works and it all fits in there.”
