Hello again everyone!

You’ll be hearing from us more regularly now and we’re excited to share more behind-the-scenes content with you as we get closer to the release of The Last Taxi.

What would you say is one of the most important things that any video game has? 

That’s right, music and sound design! 

We sat down with the composer of The Last Taxi’s soundtrack and the sound design engineer of almost everything you hear in the game, Julian Beutel, and asked him a bit about what it was like working on our game!

Q: What were your influences when writing the soundtrack for The Last Taxi?

Julian: Given the size of the world in the Last Taxi and the different places the music goes, the influences were kind of all over the place. At its core, a lot of the synthesizer sounds and soundscapes were inspired from the soundtracks of the Bladerunner movies, but also from some of my favourite game composers: Disasterpeace, Lena Raine, and Ben Prunty. There is some John Williams, Béla Bartok, Keith Jarrett, Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and Simon and Garfunkel in there… a pretty eclectic list!

Q: What’s your favourite soundtrack of all time?

Julian: Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings soundtrack is one of my all-time favourites. There are just so many iconic themes and moments. The soundtrack is a big part of what makes those movies special for me.

Q: Is this the first game soundtrack that you've done?

Julian: This is not, although it is the most amount of music I’ve composed for a game so far! I’ve done several smaller games that are available on Steam, and itch.io . Having more music to compose for The Last Taxi gave an opportunity to create more musical themes and have them tie into each other across tracks, which was a lot of fun to play around with.

Q: What was your favourite theme that you created for The Last Taxi?

Julian: In general, I’m happy with how the musical motifs and instruments tie the different regions and characters of the world together. The Government Theme, however, has a special place in my heart. It’s a twisted, haunting track that tries to make you uncomfortable. I’d say it’s one of the more distinct tracks in the game.

Q: What's your favourite area of the game?

Julian: My favourite area of the game is the Sub City. There’s so many distinct areas on this one section of Progress Point, it makes me wonder what else is hiding in the city…

Q: What's your favourite video game soundtrack?

Julian: Fez, Chicory, FTL, and HyperLight Drifter, with an honourable mention to Super Smash Bros Ultimate (I just love all the rearrangements of iconic game music). I find that I can keep coming back to these soundtracks and always find something new.

Q: Are there any funny stories that come to mind from working on the general sound design and/or the soundtrack for The Last Taxi?

Julian: I can’t think of a particular funny story, but recording foley for the sound design lead to some interesting situations such as recording my nephew/niece’s toys, the heat register in my hotel room, my mop and vacuum, the washing machine and coffee machine, or buying tools from the hardware store not because I needed them, but because they’d make cool sounds for robots in the game.

We’d like to thank Julian for all his amazing hard work on The Last Taxi and we hope you all love the sound design and music as much as we do! Please enjoy this snippet of Julian performing Progress, What's the Point, from The Last Taxi!

Check out our discord for the full version of this and other Last Taxi soundtrack performances by Julian!