This time the marketing section from the creators of HITMAN (SQUARE ENIX / IO INTERACTIVE) had a very extraordinary idea to promote the latest game episode that plays in Thailand, Bangkok. Many of you probably have seen the music video of the Brooklyn-based alternative rock band “The Class” with their song “Are We Stars”. HITMAN fans don´t have to think twice to notice that something is wrong with the band. But you have to admit – the first time watching the video you weren´t sure if it´s a real new band or not.

The band has got a Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud account and on the Bandcamp website you can download their three songs for free. Well, three guesses who wrote the songs. We are very proud to announce that we were part of this great marketing strategy and promoted the new Thailand episode. Additionally to that we wrote the in-game music for the Bangkok episode that was also used in the trailer. The video shows the first impressions of the new levels in Bangkok and integrates some slight leads what players can expect about the mission of agent 47. The fictional lead singer of the band is Jordan Cross. His name appeared several times in different episodes but only in background dialogues. This time he is the target person for our agent. The mission “Club 27” takes the players into the opulent Himmapan Hotel and Resort at Chao Phyraya River outside Bangkok.

There are two things about HITMAN that distinguishes the game from others: On the one hand HITMAN occupies an enormous game depth. For example you can checkmate the subject in many different ways. The players feel “relieved” to discover another such crazy method to accomplish the mission. On the other hand you get agent 47 in an “appetizer format”. Each mission is characterized by great challenges, escalation contracts, exclusive subjects and a lot of opportunities to achieved one´s aim. Later in 2016 the final two episodes USA and Japan will be released.

The three songs for the latest episode in Thailand (“Are We Stars” • “Shine A Light” • “Gun Show”) were written by Felix Diekhake and produced by Christian Hartung. Felix gave us some insight into their work:

“Writing the songs for HITMAN was a real pleasure – after some stops in Italy and Marrakesh (more on that later), we were asked to create the music for the virtual band “The Class”. IOI gave us an elaborate briefing on the band’s backstory and character and some input on the desired style and we set to work – the first track we pitched was a pretty grungy number with rather psychedelic lyrics alluding to the events preceding the Bangkok episode (something along the lines of “I saw your pale hand wave goodbye as the crimson king got crowned….”) which ultimately didn’t fit what IOI were looking for, so we pushed the style to something more pop/electronic driven and the lyrics to something a little less oviously vague, which, after a few rounds of feedback, became “Are we stars?”. Once that one was done and approved, the other two tracks (“Gun Show” and “Shine A Light”) practically wrote themselves. Writing the songs was both a challenge (how much of the story can we reveal in the lyrics?) and a lot of fun. To see them come to life, first in the stellar production done by Christian Hartung, then in the game and the release through a “real” band, was really, really cool and something I’m very proud of. This is actually the first time ever that music I wrote came out on vinyl – I can’t wait to get my hands on that record :)”
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Felix Diekhake

Heroes of Incredible Tales (short: HIT) is an emerging Unreal Engine 4 mobile game published by NEXON, the worldwide leader in free to play mobile games in Korea. The developer NAT GAMES specializes in creating high quality mobile role-playing experiences. Yong-Hyun Park is the founder of NAT GAMES and renowned lead designer behind Lineage and TERA two of the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

The new HIT RPG coming this summer is already breaking records as the fastest growing game in Korea. Since the game was launched in November 2015 it achieved over 5 million downloads up until now, which means that a mind blowing ten percent of the whole Korean population are now playing the game. Chances are, you are not in Korea right now. We have good news for you: Heroes of Incredible Tales is now available in 140 countries and is playable in 10 different languages. The exciting and fascinating action-experience is augmented with innovative graphics for mobile devices.

The collaboration with NAT GAMES was especially great. Exciting projects are always an inspiration for our daily work. Lead composer Alex Röder gives us some insights:

“The cooperation with NAT GAMES was very easy-going. The developer knew what he wanted and we quickly reached the goal. Moreover the communication was very friendly! Heroes of Incredible Tales has a lot of players and the user-numbers continue to grow steadily, which means our music will be accessible to a wide public. My part was to compose the lobby music – the music you can hear when you click through the different menus. The menus change with the game process and this change is reflected in the music. There are four different times of day which have all their own music. I am very satisfied with the result. It was a lot of fun working for the HIT project and I guess the music fits perfectly.”
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Alex Röder (Lead Composer)

When you play you can choose from a class of four characters: Maybe you pick the guy with a giant sword or you decide in favor of the sexy lady with her scythe. 200 incredible and challenging levels await you to go through the simple but lightning fast attacks in gratifying battles. What makes Heroes of Incredible Tales unique and rewarding is the blend of intense action and deep customization.

Felix loves to scream – and this time he could run riot giving his full voice power to let the male character do the fight of his life!

“Working on Project Hit was great – NATGames’ Chief Sound Director Brian Ahn was an absolute pleasure to work for! First and foremost he had a very clear musical vision for the project which made working on HIT very inspiring for us.
The icing on the cake for me were the vocals we recorded: it turns out I had just the voice they wanted for the male character, so on top of writing emails and briefing composers I got to scream my heart out in front of a microphone for a few hours – and that is something I always enjoy.”
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Felix Diekhake (Project Manager)

Working with HIT was another experience that simply showed us how great it is to work with international teams. If you are about to embark on your own adventure and could use our services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Dynamedion contributed music compositions (Alex Röder), sound design (Stefan Kemler) and voice recordings (Marvin Hartmann) by order of Virgin Lands, who among other things develop fantastic high-end 3D animations. Rail Nation (BRIGHT FUTURE / TRAVIAN GAMES) is a railway strategy game where all players from all over the world can go around to 50 realistic European cities. The new Rail Nation edition “Steam over Europe” contains authentic maps of Europe and shows the most beautiful settings with the most famous sights.

The new update shakes a leg! Enter to the fascination on rails and compete at the fight of regions against other players. Cities have to be supplied with goods and passengers have to be transported. But there’s more you have to do – the new mission is to plan the logistic of harbors and ships. Here, a good working relationship with other players is needed. The new Rail Nation update “Steam over Europe” puts an emphasis on great interaction and community features.

“An enjoyable challenge by music compositions was to react to the different European countries shown in quick succession.”
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Felix Diekhake (Project Manager)

It is a tribute to the legendary Dead Island trailer which originally debuted 5 years ago. The official announcement trailer was published in 2011 and won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival in the category “Best Internet Film”. Down to the present day the video has been watched about 15 million times. Dynamedion worked on the new reveal trailer with music arrangement, music production and organized a wonderful team of professional musicians. The classical piano quintet charms its listeners with calm, melancholy and gently sounds. The tangent and sensitive melody is in the foreground and lends a distinctive character to the new trailer.

DEAD ISLAND developed by TECHLAND (Poland) and published by DEEP SILVER (Germany) is an action role-playing survival horror video game. The game’s atmosphere is remarkable – on a beautiful island called Banoi with white sand and a fabulous beach, the four main characters have to survive a plague that turned the other residents of the island into flesh-eating zombies. You have to fight your way through this horde of undead creatures and search for missing relatives, medication and foodstuff. You have only one aim: to survive!

The award-winning trailer and its extremely moving music, composed by Giles Lamb, have been reinterpreted in a wonderful video production by Eins Medien where the five musicians and their instruments serve as the canvas by projecting the video on them. The interaction between the projection, the instruments and the musicians is truly exciting. The musicians and the video were recorded in the studio Tonmeister in Mainz (Germany).

The musicians Kai Schumacher (Piano), Beril Sun (Violin 1), Tonja Demianenco (Violin 2), Amélie Legrande (Viola), Emanuel Wehse (Cello) and the seven–headed video team under the direction of Lukas Rinker did an amazing job bringing that awesome trailer to live. The new Dead Island Definite Collection contains enhanced editions of Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide together with all previously published DLC and patches for the two games, as well as the newly introduced retro game Dead Island Retro Revenge. It is playable for PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4. The collection comes with many great features as for example an enhanced resolution with 30 frames per second and an overworked user interface for a consistent look between Dead Island and Dead Island: Riptide – and many more.

We don´t want to withhold the new Dead Island Reveal Trailer– Tribute anymore. Welcome to the holiday of your life. The dead never looked so alive:

If you want to learn more about Dead Island click here.

We want to say thank you to everybody who was involved in this great project. The collaboration was just wonderful.

Our team had the pleasure to work on this great project with additional music compositions. The AAA video game HITMAN (SQUARE ENIX / IO INTERACTIVE) is one of the best-known games currently on the market. It is an action-packed third-person stealth game that provokes your brainpower. We are also made the sound design for the incredible “HITMAN – World Exclusive Gameplay” trailer. Take a look:

We contributed the music and SFX for several storymode cutscenes.

Felix Diekhake, Senior Sound Designer and Project Manager, summarises:
“Working for the Mortal Kombat franchise was an incredible honor and privilege – and, not least, great fun. Creating and finding the right sounds for the incredibly detailed, gripping cutscenes was definitely a challenge out of the ordinary. While the NetherRealm team was kind enough to share their sound design efforts with us to create a unified soundscape, we nonetheless enjoyed great creative freedom. To have been a small part of the team that created the sound of the masterpiece that is MKX is something I won’t soon forget.”

Mortal Kombat X is a fighting video game available for PlayStation 3 + 4, Xbox 360 + One and Windows PC; plus mobile versions for iOS and Android devices.

UBISOFT has released ANNO 2205, the next episode of its very successful economic simulation game. Dynamedion contributed a wide spectrum of services to it.

For the soundtrack, Tilman Sillescu and his team of composers (Alex Röder, Jochen Flach, Matthias Wolf, Armin Haas) mixed classical scoring with modern electronic and minimalistic styles to capture the grand futuristic setting of the game. The orchestra recordings took place in Frankfurt/Oder with the Brandenburg State Orchestra and conductor Bernd Ruf. Singer Conny Kollet was recorded for the main theme. Furthermore our sound design team did the in-game sound design and audio integration / management.

ANNO 2205 is available for Windows PC.