Getting Into Gaming Music

Incubus came from Calabasas, a California suburb no one would have ever guessed a band would ever break out of. Yet a good band can overcome any environment, and in spite of the music industry's current state of free fall, with free downloading being blamed, they're still selling albums and still going strong (their latest album, "Light Grenades," debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts).

Alex Katunich - better known to fans by his stage named "Dirk Lance" - was the band's bassist for more than a decade, contributing to such platinum-selling albums as "Make Yourself" and "Morning View." Katunich left the band in 2003, but it didn't take him long to find his next venture. He quickly founded Stickman Entertainment and got into video game music.

Stickman created original music for THQ Wireless titles such as Red Faction, MotoGP, and WWE SuperStars. But Stickman and Katunich are also trying something a little different with Traction, a new project that aims to combine a traditional radio experience with the gaming experience. Traction Radio is an Internet radio software client that allows gamers to play the music they want in the background of their favorite PC games. The product, currently in Beta and available to download, offers five stations: rock, hip-hop, electronic, remixes and classics.

As gaming has matured as an entertainment industry and as an art form, music has played a greater role, whether it's with elaborate, original scores or the use of popular rock and rap tunes within the games. But as Katunich describes, bringing music to games can still be an uphill battle. Still, Stickman is forging ahead with Traction and an impressive lineup of musicians, such as 311 bassist P-Nut, to create original music. Katunich talks with Tom's Games about the future of music and gaming.

Alex Katunich, a.k.a. Dirk Lance, left Incubus in 2003 to start Stickman Entertainment.

David Konow: When you left Incubus, did you know what you wanted to do next?

ALEX KATUNICH: I knew that I didn't want to start another band. I just spend the better part of 10 years or however long it was in Incubus, [which was] a good six years at least on the road. I was in a bar and a guy introduced me to a mutual friend of his who worked at a video game company and said he was looking for somebody to score some games. I'd been thinking about getting into that space, and it struck me as being really interesting, to be able to stay in music and stay creative without having to tour.

And having had a few cocktails in me I was like, "Well sure, I'm your guy, I can do that." Within the next couple of weeks, I had gone and scored a few games, and I enjoyed the process quite a bit, so I decided that I could create a business around this. I had all these friends who were musicians that were looking for things to do in their downtime, and I said, "Wouldn't it be great if I put together this collective of really talented producers, engineers and musicians; we start going out to game publishers, and sell them on the idea that these successful artists can do the music for their games that can probably sell more units?" Because if 311's not putting out another record for another 18 months, the bass player wants to do something, and those fans - at least a portion of them - are going to check it out.

Everyone liked the idea. The musicians were on board; publishers kind of dug it but they weren't willing to pay for it because they were getting music from kids out of their garage, basically for free. They just didn't put enough importance on the audio quality. There's some games that have really high budgets, and they go out and get an orchestra and a composer, but the majority of them, they literally will take anything and everything and just slap it in there. I just think it's one of those missed business opportunities.

So when that didn't really take off we decided, "Okay, publishers aren't going pay, we can cut publishers out of this entirely and we'll create a radio station. We'll stream to gamers and anybody who plays games, and skip the middle man. Without trying to work on getting into one game, we'll suddenly be in every game."

And that's what we did over the course of a couple years. We built a player, started marketing it and built up music libraries. And now we stream to 50,000 plus gamers around the world.

David Konow: How did you learn about the gaming industry?

ALEX KATUNICH: Well, we researched it because before we were going to go out, spend the money, time and trouble to create this thing; we wanted to make sure that there was an audience for it. In polling a couple thousand gamers, we discovered that a lot of them were really unhappy with their current in-game audio options. If you're playing a game, you're playing up to 80 hours a month. After a couple of days you're turning the music off because it's just too repetitive. One of the things that we had initially proposed doing with Sony Online [Entertainment] and a few other publishers was, "Hey, why don't you just allow us on a monthly or quarterly basis to update your audio in games." Once again, they loved the idea, but they weren't willing to pay for it.

So that's really how this whole thing kind of got put together. People play games so much, and the audio's repetitive. Well, what if you could pick and choose what you wanted to listen to based on genre and the kind of intensity? That's what we did. We built the player, and you can choose by genre. If you're playing a really action-packed first-person shooter, you might want to listen to death metal. If you're playing another type of game, like Tetris, you might want to listen to trance or something else. So it gives a lot of flexibility to people.

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