Lena Raine’s Escape From Video Game Music Purgatory

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Lena Raine’s Escape From Video Game Music Purgatory

By

Lewis Gordon

·
June 12, 2025

When a video game is canceled, there is often no ceremonious send-off. These works, likely labored on exhaustively for years, simply cease to exist, fading into the ether atop a regretful press release or perhaps becoming a cautionary footnote in a quarterly financial report. Not all doomed games are dead, necessarily; one leaked screenshot or low-res clip can stir up a fan-led hype wave that renders NDAs useless, a bit of poetic justice for the developers who never got to see their work come to fruition. But the fact remains that composer Lena Raine has created many soundtracks that have never—and likely will never—make it into the world. “All that music is in purgatory,” she says with a heavy sigh from her Vancouver studio.

One of those axed titles is Earthblade, an expansive action-platformer from acclaimed indie studio Extremely OK Games, maker of 2D platformer Celeste (which also featured a soundtrack by Raine). Earthblade was revealed with a splashy trailer at the 2022 Game Awards, an extended pan right showing the breadth of its seamless 2D fantasy world. But in 2024, after some three years of active development, Earthblade’s production ground to a halt. A rift concerning the IP rights of Celeste emerged between the studio co-founders, art director Pedro Medeiros, director Maddy Thorson, and programmer Noel Berry. Raine stopped active work on the project in 2023, periodically checking back in with the team; the following year, the game was canceled. Though Raine was “sad” and “upset” that she was unable to “see through” her musical ideas for this lustrous pixel-art world, miraculously, her soundtrack is enjoying an afterlife. On March 7, the composer uploaded her game music to Bandcamp, collecting the nine tracks under the ominous and tantalizing title EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate.

The release, which Raine describes as more of a concept album than a traditional soundtrack, is a rare and precious thing: an aural artifact of a lost virtual world. With its pitter-patter ambience and swelling electronic crescendos, the album evokes the ebb and flow of the adventure that players would have embarked on playing as Névoa, the child of a people who were once custodians of Earth. For Raine, this fluid, emergent soundtrack was going to be her “big thesis statement” on a “career’s worth of working.” But, of course, she didn’t get that far. What is left, writes Raine on the Bandcamp page, is a document of aspiration: “30 minutes of music that paints the picture of what I hoped Earthblade might be.”

In some ways, the soundtrack finds Raine, who also composed lauded scores for Minecraft and Chicory: A Colorful Tale, returning to her first musical loves. As a teenager in 1990s Seattle, she listened to Nirvana and Soundgarden, but she was also a devoted otaku, aka a Westerner enamored with Japanese culture. The youngster was steeped in JRPGs and, by extension, their scores: Nobuo Uematsu’s seminal symphonic work on the Final Fantasy series; Yasunori Mitsuda’s rousing compositions for Chrono Trigger. When she wasn’t strategizing turn-based battles and ingesting many encyclopedias’ worth of game lore, the teenaged Raine frequented an import shop in Seattle’s University district, picking up bootleg CDs of prominent game and anime soundtracks. Her favorites were Yoko Kanno’s scores for Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and especially Cowboy Bebop.

“The way that Kanno wrote a lot of her soundtracks was by getting the most amazing session musicians into a studio and then having them just jam for hours,” says Raine. “[Kanno would] take those samples, the recorded stems, and arrange them into what became the soundtrack.” This approach fostered a “live improvisation feel” in music that was otherwise “very crafted” in the studio, says Raine. “It made the work feel almost more natural, an expression of the storytelling.”

Raine, like Kanno, worked with outside musicians for the Earthblade score. But these collaborations arrived through happenstance rather than any grand, pre-planned vision. The father of the game’s character artist, Amora Bettany, is prominent Brazilian jazz trumpet player Nahor Gomes. Struck by Raine’s crystalline compositions, he asked to collaborate; the composer obliged. Alongside soprano saxophone player Cesar Roversi, Gomes brings mournful, blue notes to “Poison in the Roots,” their complementary melodies rising sadly above plush New Age pads like gaseous blooms.

Players would have heard Gomes’s and Roversi’s horn contributions in a subterranean labyrinth populated by reptilian creatures who have built a twinkling, awe-inspiring cathedral which seems to refract light from above through magnificent stained glass windows. Above ground is a fetid swamp, populated by scorpions who fling globules of poison and spiders who leap unannounced from gnarled trees. “It was sort of inspired by the swamps in the Dark Souls series, just a place that sucks to be in,” jokes Raine.

The fact that players might find themselves in this odious, hostile place so early in the game was also something of a joke. At Earthblade’s outset, the player can either go east or west. Go west, explains Raine, and they encounter a bucolic, mysterious forest, the intended first area, where the lush “Verdant Mysteries” plays. Go east, and they’re confronted with the poisoned swamp. “If you do that,” laughs Raine, “you’re just like, ‘Oh no, I’m not going this way.’”

The composer conceived of the soundtrack as overlapping rings placed atop the game’s unbroken landscape. When the player enters a “ring” (broadly corresponding to one in-game area) the score begins—albeit as little more than whooshing or gurgling ambience. Venture further into the ring, and a motif drifts into the mix, with new elements added as you explore deeper still. With every step towards the ring’s center, the music develops in complexity and rises in intensity. For “Poison in the Roots,” combat introduces specific aural wrinkles: syncopated strings and percussion run through a screeching high-pass filter until, finally, the player begins their exit. As they do so, each musical component slowly, serenely, fades away. Eventually, all that is left is the starting ambience, and perhaps the trickling tones of the new zone the player is about to enter.

It should feel, says Raine, gesticulating and recounting melodies while relaying this ambitious plan, as if an “entire piece is starting and finishing by the time you’ve entered and left an area.” She sees it as perhaps the “strongest form of this kind of dynamic music.”

The reactive soundtrack would double as a critique of scores for 3D open games whose expansive, freeform structure Earthblade was attempting to evoke. In these open-world games, says Raine, there tends to be background music that “washes over you” versus dynamic, high-drama symphonies that accompany big story moments. But later, she says, when you return to the area where a bombastic plot beat has occurred, the accompanying music, often the most exciting in a game, is gone, replaced by a kind of wallpaper ambience.

Earthblade’s score wouldn’t be tied to such story beats. It would be tethered to space, so even in lieu of tightly authored story moments, the player still would be able to enjoy precisely what Raine loved about playing her beloved Japanese games as a youth: “Listening to a jam.”

This complicated, reactive soundtrack—undulating, rising, and dissipating according to the player’s action (who becomes an inadvertent conductor)—is a different beast compared to that composed for movies. How does Raine actually write what cannot be recorded as a conventional score? “I mean, it’s fairly chaotic,” she admits, “because when you’re writing music, your first instinct is to make a linear piece of music, like, ‘This is how it develops. This is how everything works together.”

When constructing music made up of layers, she continues, “it really becomes this experiment of stripping everything down to its base elements.” Even if the album does, as Raine suggests, take a “temporally constrained” form, the images it creates are no less vivid. Divorced from a game for which scant details exist online, the music’s ability to transport listeners may increase—one fan wrote on Bandcamp: “I almost feel like I can see [the game].”

For composers of video game music, opportunities to flex as hard as Raine intended are limited. Usually, briefs are strictly defined, their scope smaller; the music is not so integrated into moment-to-moment gameplay. “What I was doing with the game only happened because I was so close with the team,” says Raine. “They put so much trust in me to get crazy with it.”

It was precisely this closeness that meant Raine also had the team’s blessing to let her music live on in a different form. “I think it was necessary for me [to produce the album],” says Raine. “It was almost like a wake or something.” The composer linked up with the label Infloresce to release it, arranging that 50% of all proceeds are donated to Trans Lifeline. “I didn’t want to just be like, ‘Oh, this is my payday,’” she says, “especially with the way the world is right now.” As such, EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate can be thought of as one last transmission from a strange, unknowable world, yet which, through its association with Trans Lifeline, will have material effects on the real one. Fans duly showed up: if you click “more” on the Bandcamp page to see who has purchased the album, you must click “more” many, many times before you eventually reveal everyone. As you do so, the tiny thumbnails of each user stretch down the page, causing the scroll bar on the right-hand side to extend.

“To see that sort of outpouring of support for a canceled game, you know, it’s very atypical,” says Raine. “You don’t get opportunities very often to celebrate something that never existed.”