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Isaac Schankler: A lot of it ends up being about relationships—bad relationships because those are always the most depressing. The Lyric Suite, by Alban Berg, is this early modernist piece, so it’s atonal, mellow, but it’s super harrowing. The third movement is extremely agitated, just devastatingly slow and bleak, and this was something that people wondered about for years: Why is it called the Lyric Suite?So they figured out what it was about?
They found in his notes that it was all about this affair he had with a married woman named Hannah Fuchs… Threaded throughout the score are their initials, A-B-H-F, and that was the motif for the whole piece. It’s a weirdly intellectual way of writing about this tragic thing, and even if you didn’t know, it’s still harrowing to listen to. I was fascinated by it for a while because it took this weirdly personal thing and coded it in a really impersonal way. Writing about depression is like that because it’s really personal and different for everybody, and, to talk about it, you have to sort of make it impersonal. [Depression Quest] is like that, too. Details are unspecific and vague, because in early testing, they found people could identify with the character when it was vague. [Note: At one point, the game gives you the option of getting a cat, but if you don’t get the cat, it all goes downhill from there, which is very true to real life.]
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That was the interesting thing. I sort of compared the decisions I made in the game to decisions I made at certain points in my life. The game does a good job of depicting [real-life decisions] to an extent because certain choices will be closed off. Some of the more rational choices you can’t even select, and some of that is dependent on your character’s level of depression. I thought when I first played it that I was going to select the rational choices, but sometimes in real life, you just won’t make the rational choice.Did you get depressed while composing the music?
I really only get down when I have difficulty on a project, but paradoxically, I didn’t have time to dwell on it too much with Depression Quest, so it came easy to me. The other game I was working on at the time I did struggle with more, and I felt like I wasn’t getting things right. That game is called Hate Plus. It’s a sequel to yet another depressing game, Analogue: A Hate Story. It’s about a space detective reading the logs of a derelict spaceship, but it’s mostly centered around a teenage girl who gets sick and frozen and wakes up in a future where things have regressed to a medieval society. The first game was so depressing, and so many bad things happened to the girl, that the developer said the girl should be eating cake through the whole next game. She said, “I don’t want her to do anything else, just eat cake.”
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