'One of the things we wanted to avoid with Failure's music is the 80s synth pop style that's a staple of Cyberpunk games, it's been done to death. The idea here was to make a modern take on Cyberpunk, a re-imagination if you will, so the music had to avoid a lot of those cliche elements, sounds, textures, arp driven and snare, kick, snare, kick drums.

Much of the influence has been taken from more glitch type music from artists such as Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Amon Tobin, etc. The issue, however, with the music from these artists is, at times, not very approachable to normal listeners and so we wanted to tone things down a bit and create something a bit more ambient that tied into how the world had become a desolate place filled only with the hackers and their machinations fighting over the data of the network.

Most of the in-level music is very ambient with many of the elements actually being triggered by the buildings you place on the board - this creates an ever evolving soundscape that grows in intensity as you and your opponents build more.

I thought this was an interesting way of approaching the in-level music as it meant that the layers of music are always a bit different, the musical experience is somewhat unique to each player but also from a narrative standpoint this ties quite nicely into what the network was and what it has become. Players are invading a network that was once dormant, well, it wasn't quite dormant, but if was performing a task that I imagine would have given off a very repetitive ambiance, here we have a player interacting with a world and bringing chaos (controlled) to this ambiance through their interaction with the world. It reminds me of a book I read a while ago which unfortunately I can't remember the name of, but within the book it discusses how back before cities and man there was a purity to the sound of nature, a clarity and resonance to the flow of frequencies and over time this sound has been lost in our modern world and been replaced by the sound of controlled chaos, the sounds of engines, car horns, drilling, people talking; through human interaction we've replaced the sounds of nature with our own chaotic symphony of sound. But there are places where these two still converge and at times it can be quite beautiful.

In a way this is what we're trying to do with Failure, create a convergence between the old and the new, the analogue and the digital. There is a constant battle between these two, in the music, in the narrative, in everything within the game.'

How important do you think the music is in games generally?