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Actually walking around Red Creek Valley with Mikolai’s music in the background was an astonishing, otherworldly experience. It turned out that what Mikolai has done was incredible – it’s just that we evaluated his work in the wrong way. Make sure you actually play the game and play the tracks as if they’re already implemented as the background music.” Mikolai was a bit surprised but agreed to give it another go.īut then one of the team piped up, “Gentlemen, this music is incredible, but don’t just listen to it. We listened to the tracks again and then called Mikolai, telling him that we didn’t like the direction he’d gone in but would like him to try again. It’s just not what we imagined the score would be, the tracks were too engaging, too cinematic, too fantastical. We listened to them all and I wish I could tell you “and then there was silence”, but the truth is we were very vocal about our disappointment. We liked it, so a few months later we asked him to be the first guy to try creating an actual game score.Ī few days later, Mikolai sent us three tracks. He expressed his interest in making music for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter by sending us his own version of the score to the game’s teaser. The composer, Mikolai Stroinski, is known for his smaller (Dark Souls trailer) and bigger works (The Witcher 3). Okay, we didn’t hate the music the entire time, just for the first three hours. We hated the game’s music, but then it won multiple awards…
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We chose Wisconsin due to its striking similarity to the vegetation and landscapes of our fictional Red Creek Valley that was based on an actual valley in the Polish Karkonosze mountains. So that forced us to look for a specific place that would fit the story and the name. Ethan Carter is a very British/American name. It was only when we started marketing the game and telling everyone that the game doesn’t take place in any specific location that we realised that no, it’s not “a story that can happen almost anywhere” when your main character is named Ethan Carter, and not, say, Kajetan Woznica. It’s a story that can happen almost anywhere, be it the United States or here in Poland.Īt least that’s what we thought.
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But that game title got us into a spot of trouble…Īn ancient evil ruling a remote valley tries to stop a private detective from finding a missing boy. “No, but we love this idea, and from now we’re going to stick with it” – and that is why we tell everyone that it was Randolph Carter who inspired Ethan’s last name. But then one day a fan asked us if “Carter” was a nod to another story from the Weird Tales magazine: Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter. There’s no clear inspiration behind it – it just came to us, subconsciously, and felt right. It’s the same with the name of Ethan Carter. “No, it’s not what’s about”, answered the poet, “But your interpretation is much better, so from now on I’m going to stick with it.” There is this great anecdote about a poet who met a fan at a party, and that fan passionately analysed one of the poet’s works. There’s both poetry and mystery to the “vanishing” word, and that is exactly the message we wanted the title to express. The title is inspired by The Vanishing of Simmons, the story by August Derleth, a writer best known for being the first publisher of Lovecraft.