Album Visuals The convergent area of Graphic Design and Music
Bernardo Santos
Diagram
Videogame
He recommends asking yourself, “What are you transmitting to your audience? Can that be done purely sonically, or is there a new level of detail or understanding that might be achieved by adding a visual component?” - Richie Hawtin, in Spotify for artists
Film
daft punk
Even though album artwork is now (mostly) reduced to a tiny tile on our screens, it’s still such an important aspect of the creative process of creating a world for a particular album. - Deep Shah, in thei mportance of album artwork
Music grammy award
oneohtrix point never
Description
Videogames
Film
Music
Genre
Mu
usic
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Revolver, 1966 Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock band The Beatles and marks the final recording project before their retirement as live performers.It has since become regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative albums in popular music, with recognition centred on its range of musical styles, diverse sounds, and lyrical content. The Beatles recorded Revolver after taking a three-month break at the start of 1966, and during a period when London was feted as the era’s cultural capital. The songs reflect the group’s interest in the drug LSD, Eastern philosophy and the avant-garde while addressing themes such as death and transcendence from material concerns. With no plans to reproduce their new material in concert, the band made liberal use of automatic double tracking, varispeed, reversed tapes, close audio miking, and instruments outside of their standard live set-up. Revolver expanded the boundaries of pop music, revolutionised standard practices in studio recording, advanced principles espoused by the 1960s counterculture and inspired the development of psychedelic rock, electronica, progressive rock and world music. The album cover, designed by Klaus Voormann, combined Aubrey Beardsley-inspired line drawing with photo collage and won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Re
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The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut album by American rock band the Velvet Underground and it was recorded in 1966 while the band were featured on Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, which gained attention for its experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy. The album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico is recognizable for featuring a Warhol print of a banana. Early copies of the album invited the owner to “Peel slowly and see”, and peeling back the banana skin revealed a flesh-colored banana underneath.
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Unknown Pleasures, 1979 Unknown Pleasures is the debut studio album by English rock band Joy Division and was produced by Martin Hannett, who incorporated a number of unconventional production techniques into the group’s sound. The cover artwork was designed by artist Peter Saville, using a data plot of signals from a radio pulsar. The image was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 doctoral dissertation as a way to visualize smaller pulses within larger ones. It has since received sustained critical acclaim as an influential post-punk album, and has been named as one of the best albums of all time by publications such as NME, AllMusic, Select, and Spin.
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Double Fantasy, 1980 Double Fantasy is the fifth album by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and it was produced by both Lennon, Ono and Jack Douglas. The album marked Lennon’s return to recording music full-time, following his five-year hiatus to raise his son Sean. Upon its release, the album stalled on music charts and received largely negative reviews from music critics, with many focusing on the album’s idealisation of Lennon and Ono’s marriage. However, following Lennon’s murder three weeks after its release, it became a worldwide commercial success and went on to win the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards in 1982.
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Doolittle, 1989 Doolittle is the second studio album by the American alternative rock band Pixies, released in April 1989 on 4AD (British independent record label). The album’s offbeat and dark subject material, featuring references to surrealism, Biblical violence, torture and death, contrasts with the clean production sound achieved by the newly hired producer Gil Norton. Doolittle features an eclectic mix of musical styles. While tracks such as “Tame” and “Crackity Jones” are fast and aggressive, and incorporate the band’s trademark loud–quiet dynamic, other songs such as “Silver”, “I Bleed”, and “Here Comes Your Man” reveal a quieter, slower and more melodic temperament. Vaughan Oliver was a graphic designer who worked on 4AD and is responsible for this cover album which helped to shape the aesthetic of 1980s-era post-punk music.
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How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, 2004 How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is the eleventh studio album by Irish rock band U2. Much like their previous album «All That You Can’t Leave Behind» (2000), the record exhibits a more mainstream rock sound after the band experimented with alternative rock and dance music in the 1990s. It was produced by Steve Lillywhite, with additional production from Chris Thomas, Jacknife Lee, Nellee Hooper, Flood, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Carl Glanville. It was also the fourth-highest-selling album of 2004, with over ten million copies sold, and it yielded several successful singles, such as “Vertigo”, “City of Blinding Lights”, and “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own”. The album and its singles won all nine Grammy Awards in 2005 for which they were nominated.
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Demon Days, 2005 Demon Days is the second studio album by English virtual band Gorillaz. Produced by the band, Danger Mouse, Jason Cox, and James Dring, the album features contributions from De La Soul, Neneh Cherry, Martina Topley-Bird, Roots Manuva, MF DOOM, Ike Turner, Bootie Brown of the Pharcyde, Shaun Ryder, and Dennis Hopper. Sputnik Music wrote that the album’s style “is a strong foray into the melding of hip-hop into pop and rock music.” Odyssey said that the album was “apocalyptic dark pop at its finest, strangest, and most topical”. Vice called the album a “British pop masterpiece”, and wrote that its music “flits between UK rap, alternative rock, piano-pop, trip-hop, reggae, and Beach Boys psychedelia”. The designs of the virtual band came from the lead member Damon Albarn and the comic book artist James Hewlett. Inspired by American animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, Hewlett received his own success with the ‘designer of the year’ award in 2006, with the virtual band’s significance in popular culture. 19
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Random Access Memories, 2013 Supernatural is the eighteenth studio album by Latin rock band Santana and it resulted from a new record deal between Arista Records president Clive Devis and Carlos Santana. The pair collaborated with A&R man Pete Ganbarg on the production of Supernatural as Santana wanted to focus his musical direction towards pop and radio friendly material and proceeded to do so by collaborating with various contemporary guest artists, including Eric Clapton, Rob Thomas, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Lauryn Hill, Dave Matthews, Manรก, KC Porter and Cee-Lo Green. In 2000, the album was the subject of nine Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, making Santana the first Hispanic to do so, and Best Rock Album, tying the record held by Michael Jackson for the most number of awards in a single night. Davis won Album of the Year. Santana also won three Latin Grammy Awards including Record of the Year.
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Random Access Memories, 2013 Random Access Memories is the fourth studio album by French electronic duo Daft Punk and it features collaborations with Giorgio Moroder, Panda Bear, Julian Casablancas, Todd Edwards, DJ Falcon, Chilly Gonzales, Nile Rodgers, Paul Williams, Nathan East, and Pharrell Williams. They were recruited as session musicians to perform live instrumentation and limited the use of electronic instruments to drum machines, a custom-built modular synthesizer, and vintage vocoders. It has won in several categories at the 2014 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, Best Dance/Electronica Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. The album has been noted by music critics as a disco album, while drawing influence from progressive rock, pop and pays tribute to late 1970s and early 1980s American music, particularly from Los Angeles.
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RR7349, 2016 RR7349 (its cassette release titled HD037) is the third studio album by Texas synthwave group Survive and it was released by the labels Relapse and Survive’s own Holodeck with the cover art being done by graphic designer Bryan Olson. As with other Survive works, the album is a slow tempo synthwave record containing “foggy atmospheres” and many elements of dark wave, electro, and intelligent dance music, AllMusic journalist Paul Simpson wrote. The album has a 1980s film score style as the works of John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, and Vangelis. Simpson described the album’s structure as “heavy and spacious,” or “heavily detailed without feeling dense or overloaded.” Critic Patric Fallon wrote that the LP has two categories of tracks: ones having “predictable structures with the tension and broad scope of soundtrack music” and normal synthpop tracks. The band gained wider fame after members Dixon and Stein composed the musical score for the Netflix series Stranger Things.
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Age Of, 2018 Age Of is the eighth studio album by American electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never which was recorded with the contributions from James Blake (who additionally produced and mixed the album), Anohni, Prurient, Kelsey Lu and Eli Keszler. The artwork, which employs Jim Shaw’s “The Great Whatsit” as a central image, was designed by David Rudnick.ssThe album has been accompanied by the conceptual “concertscape” MYRIAD, which premiered in May 2018 at the Park Avenue Armory. The sound palettes it uses are those from a variety of styles such as chamber pop, “android”-like folk and country music, yacht rock, smooth jazz, R&B, Future-style soul, ‘sadboy elegies’, black metal, new age, stadium pop, as well as post-industrial sounds on tracks like “Warning”, “We’ll Take It” and “Same”, and, in particular, baroque music and medieval music on the opening title track, “Age Of”.
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A Hard Day’s Night, 1964 A Hard Day’s Night is a musical comedy film directed by Richard Lester and starring the English rock band The Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — during the height of Beatlemania. It was written by Alun Owen and originally released by United Artists. The film portrays 36 hours in the lives of the group. The film’s credits state that all songs are composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. However, also heard in the film is a portion of “Don’t Bother Me”, a George Harrison composition. In addition to the soundtrack album, an EP (in mono) of songs from the film titled Extracts From The Film A Hard Day’s Night was released by Parlophone on 6 November 1964.
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2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey is an epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel” and other short stories by Clarke. A novel released after the film’s premiere was in part written concurrently with the screenplay. The film, which follows a voyage to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL after the discovery of an alien monolith affecting human evolution, deals with themes of existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The film is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1991, it was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry and was nominated for four Academy Awards, with Kubrick winning for his direction of the visual effects. The initial MGM soundtrack album release contained none of the material from the altered and uncredited rendition of Ligeti’s Aventures used in the film, used a different recording of Also sprach Zarathustra (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm) from that heard in the film, and a longer excerpt of Lux Aeterna than that in the film. 32
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Apocalypse Now, 1979 Apocalypse Now is an American epic war film directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Harrison Ford, and Dennis Hopper. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola and John Milius and narration written by Michael Herr, was loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The setting was changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (a character based on Conrad’s Marlow and played by Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Brando, with the character being based on Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz), a renegade Army Special Forces officer accused of murder and who is presumed insane. Apocalypse Now was honored with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for eight Academy Awards at the 52nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Coppola), and Best Supporting Actor for Duvall, and went on to win for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. 34
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Pulp Fiction, 1994 Pulp Fiction is an American independent neo-noir crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, who conceived it with Roger Avary. Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, it tells several stories of criminal Los Angeles. The title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, and was a major critical and commercial success. It was nominated for seven awards at the 67th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won Best Original Screenplay. Its development, marketing, distribution, and profitability had a sweeping effect on independent cinema.
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Trainspotting, 1996
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Trainspotting is a British black comedy crime film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald in her debut. Based on the 1993 novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh, the film was released in the United Kingdom on 23 February 1996. The Academy Award-nominated screenplay by John Hodge follows a group of heroin addicts in an economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life. Beyond drug addiction, other themes in the film include an exploration of the urban poverty and squalor in Edinburgh. The Trainspotting soundtracks were two best-selling albums of music centred around the film. The first is a collection of songs featured in the film, while the second includes those left out from the first soundtrack and extra songs that inspired the filmmakers during production. The soundtrack for Trainspotting has gone on to become a pop culture phenomenon. This score is divided into three distinct groups, all representing a different eras and styles: The first being pop music from the 1970s, by artists such as Lou Reed and Iggy Pop; who are all musicians closely associated with drug use and are referred to throughout the original novel. The second group is the music from the Britpop era in the 1990s, with bands Blur and Pulp. Finally, there is the techno-dance music from the 1990s, including Underworld, Bedrock and Ice MC.
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Tron: Legacy, 2010 Tron: Legacy is an American science fiction action film directed by Joseph Kosinski, in his feature directorial debut, from a screenplay written by Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, based on a story by Horowitz, Kitsis, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. It is a sequel to the 1982 film Tron, whose director Steven Lisberger returned to produce. The cast includes Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner reprising their roles as Kevin Flynn and Alan Bradley, respectively, as well as Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, James Frain, Beau Garrett and Michael Sheen. The story follows Flynn’s adult son Sam, who responds to a message from his long-lost father and is transported into a virtual reality called “the Grid,” where Sam, his father, and the algorithm Quorra must stop the malevolent program Clu from invading the real world. The French electronic duo Daft Punk composed the film score of Tron: Legacy, which features over 30 tracks. The score was arranged and orchestrated by Joseph Trapanese. Jason Bentley served as the film’s music supervisor.
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Stranger Things, 2016 Stranger Things is an American science fiction horror web television series created by the Duffer Brothers and released on Netflix. The twins serve as showrunners and are executive producers along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, the first season focuses on the investigation into the disappearance of a young boy amid supernatural events occurring around the town, including the appearance of a girl with psychokinetic abilities. The Duffer Brothers developed the series as a mix of investigative drama alongside supernatural elements portrayed with horror, science fiction and childlike sensibilities. Setting the series in the 1980s, the Duffer Brothers infused references to the pop culture of that decade while several themes and directorial aspects were inspired primarily by the works of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King, as well as anime and video games. They also took inspiration from strange experiments that took place during the Cold War and real world conspiracy theories involving secret government experiments. The series has received multiple awards and nominations including 31 Primetime Emmy Award nominations (and six wins), four Golden Globe Award nominations, a British Academy Television Award nomination, two Directors Guild of America Award nominations, three Writers Guild of America Award nominations, and three Grammy Award nominations. 42
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Good Time, 2017 Good Time is an American crime thriller film directed by Josh and Benny Safdie and written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. It stars Robert Pattinson as a bank robber desperately trying to get enough money to pay for bail for his developmentally disabled brother (Benny Safdie); Barkhad Abdi, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Buddy Duress co-star. The film received critical praise and was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Oneohtrix Point Never provided the film’s score, which won the Soundtrack Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. His work for the film included a collaboration with singer Iggy Pop, “The Pure and the Damned”. The score was released as Oneohtrix Point Never’s eighth studio album in August 2017.
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Uncut Gems, 2019 Uncut Gems is a 2019 American crime thriller film directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein. The film stars Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a Jewish-American jeweler and gambling addict in New York City’s Diamond District, who must retrieve an expensive gem he purchased to pay off his debts. The film also stars Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, and Eric Bogosian. Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) composed the original soundtrack. He also recorded several songs with the Weeknd for the film, which went unused; however, he has production credits on the Weeknd’s most recent album, After Hours. The score was released on December 13, 2019, on CD and vinyl, and digital streaming services.
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Videog
games
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Tron, 1982 Tron is a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in 1982. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the Walt Disney Productions motion picture Tron released in the same year. The lead programmer was Bill Adams. In general, the player controls Tron, either in human form or piloting a vehicle, using an eight-way joystick for movement, a trigger button on the stick to fire, and a rotary dial for aiming. The goal of the game is to score points and advance through the game’s twelve levels by completing each of the sub-games. Most of the 12 levels are named after programming languages: RPG, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, SNOBOL, PL1, PASCAL, ALGOL, ASSEMBLY, OS, JCL, USER. The game supports two players alternating.
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Doom, 1993-2020 Doom (stylized as DooM, and later DOOM) is a video game series and media franchise created by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall. The series focuses on the exploits of an unnamed space marine operating under the auspices of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), who fights hordes of demons and the undead. Doom is considered one of the pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing to IBM-compatible computers features such as 3D graphics, third-dimension spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created modifications with the Doom WAD format. Since its debut in 1993, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and films adaptations. All of Doom’s music was composed by Robert Prince. The fourth episode added in The Ultimate Doom did not include any new tracks and only used songs from the first three episodes. Many of the songs were inspired by or closely mirror popular rock and metal songs of that era, from groups such as Alice in Chains, D.R.I, Metallica, Pantera and Slayer.
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Silent Hill franchise, 1999-2012 Silent Hill (サイレントヒル Sairento Hiru?) é uma série de jogos eletrônicos produzida pela Konami. É classificada como um survival horror psicológico. Desenvolvido pela Konami, foi lançado originalmente para a PlayStation, possuindo também versões para Xbox, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation 3, PlayStation Portable, Game Boy Advance, arcade e computador. A série compreende oito jogos principais que não seguem uma cronologia fixa, dois filmes e sete jogos de estilos que fogem ao gênero de survival horror. Silent Hill 2 Original Soundtrack is the soundtrack to the survival horror game, Silent Hill 2. The album contains tracks from the game, composed by Akira Yamaoka. The soundtrack was released in Japan on October 3, 2001 and is known commonly for containing strong melancholy tones usually identified with dark, industrial and trip hop environments.
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Guitar Hero franchise, 2005-2017 The Guitar Hero series (sometimes referred to as the Hero series) is a series of music rhythm games first published in 2005 by RedOctane and Harmonix, and distributed by Activision, in which players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing lead, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar across numerous rock songs. Players match notes that scroll on-screen to colored fret buttons on the controller, strumming the controller in time to the music in order to score points, and keep the virtual audience excited. The series currently has twelve major releases on gaming consoles, three on handheld game consoles, and four on mobile phones, besides two spin-offs, the DJ Hero series and Band Hero. DJ Hero being released on October 2009 is based on turntablism, the act of creating a new musical work from one or more previously recorded songs using record players and sound effect generators, and features 94 remixes of two different songs from a selection of over 100 different songs across numerous genres including the band Daft Punk.
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Minecraft – Volume Alpha, 2011 On 4 March 2011, German musician Daniel Rosenfeld (known as C418) released Minecraft – Volume Alpha, the first Minecraft soundtrack album, and his eighth album overall. The album comprises most of the music featured in the game, as well as other music included in trailers, and instrumentals that were not included in the game’s final release. On TIGSource, Rosenfeld began collaborating with Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. Rosenfeld was responsible for the sound effects and music in Persson’s work-in-progress video game Minecraft. The sound engine in the still young Java game was not very powerful, so Rosenfeld had to be creative in his approach to creating sound effects and music.
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Random Access Memories, 2013 Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Cardboard Computer and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was first revealed in 2011 via the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and is separated into five acts that were released sporadically throughout its development; the first releasing in January 2013 and the last releasing in January 2020. The game was originally developed for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and OS X, with console ports for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One under the subtitle of “TV Edition”, coinciding with the release of the final act. Kentucky Route Zero follows the narrative of a truck driver named Conway and the strange people he meets as he tries to cross the fictitious Route Zero in Kentucky to make a final delivery for the antiques company for which he works. The game received acclaim for its visual art, narrative, characterization, atmosphere and themes, appearing on several best-of-the-decade lists. It has won multiple “Game of the Year” Awards and is known for its music scored by Ben Babbitt being dubbed “best musical of 2014”. 61