Craig's Korg Mono/Poly formed the backbone of the Manhunt soundtrack. For Rockstar's horror-themed stealth/action game Manhunt, Craig was called on to create a more traditional movie-style soundtrack, while Allan oversaw the game's range of alternately gory and unnerving sound effects. "Basically," Craig explains, "we sat and watched every horror film we could find so that we could get a feel for the format and see what made horror movies scary. Because it's not the man who's sneaking up behind you or hiding in the bushes or whatever else, it's the music that tells you how to feel. So we just separated out all of the different elements of soundtracks and then thought 'Right, how can we put this into a game?'"

The idea they hit upon in the end was to design four pieces of music for each level which could be looped and layered one on top of the other to incrementally raise the levels of tension and excitement according to the action. Allan explains: "Once we'd broken down the elements of the music that we needed for the game, we were listening to horror soundtracks on their own, and you can tell what's going on just from the music — you know, now they're hiding, now they're being chased, that's the fight bit. So we had these four different moods for the soundtrack that are dictated by what's happening in the game, five if you include the times when you're hiding in the shadows, when the music drops out entirely and you just hear a heartbeat. There was this sort of mellow wandering-around music, then when you've been spotted it goes up another notch, then again when you're being chased and finally when it turns into the final fight the whole tune comes together, and all four stereo loops are streaming at the same time. The crossfades going from one piece of music to next were all done in code and the timing of them was something that we really had to work on, checking if this bit was going to work with that bit and setting up the volume fades, but somehow whenever it went into code and we could test it in the game it just worked so much better."

The music itself was created almost exclusively on a battered old Korg Mono/Poly analogue synth which was passed through some distortion and lo-fi effects, combined with some similarly grimy drum samples, and sometimes truncated to eight-bit for good measure. The soundtrack's unrelentingly dark and sinister mood perfectly reflects the content of the game, and also struck a chord with a number of drum & bass and electronica producers — an entire album of Manhunt remixes from up-and-coming producers was released on Aphex Twin's Rephlex label. As pleased as Craig is to see his music recognised, he wasn't sorry to move on from the project: "I loved doing the Manhunt stuff but I'm glad that I've finished it now — I got to a very dark place by the end!"

decoded the Manhunt music

This forum is almost as logical as religion itself.

This sounds like a great idea. I live in a rural area, I will have to give this a try!

Please do this for Manhunt 2.

This is my favorite track in the game