Death Stranding

Death Stranding was the most anticipated release of Kojima Productions, the singular creator’s first title after a long, public career, and it was deep in development and heading for the finish line. A large sound team across the PlayStation group was working to complete the game’s audio, and Adam joined for the closing push. The job was specific: deliver finished sound for a set of in-game areas, working to the standard the title already held. It was a short, intense sprint, narrow in scope and close to the deadline. The brief was not to shape the game’s overall sound but to land a few defined areas cleanly and help get them over the line.

The areas Adam took on were self-contained, so the approach was to treat each on its own terms rather than reach for a single house style across them. The Odradek scanner was the clearest case of this. Its sounds had to fire off what was happening to the player, parcels arriving, the weather turning, so they behaved less like ambient texture and more like an interface responding in real time. The craft idea was to give that responsiveness a character of its own, so the device read as part of the world rather than a set of system beeps. The other two areas, the war-sequence planes and the whale and BT sequence, were a different kind of work, more about sourcing and shaping heavy physical sound at speed. Across all three the discipline was the same: deliver finished, shippable assets that sat correctly inside audio the rest of the team had already built, and do it inside a tight window.

The Odradek scanner needed responsive, event-driven sound design. Adam built the reactions for parcel receipt and for the device responding to the weather, so each sound fired off the relevant in-game event rather than playing on a fixed cue. The war-sequence planes were a library-sourcing job: finding the right material and fitting it to the sequence under a tight schedule. The whale and BT sequence called for fluid and destruction sound design, the most physical of the three areas. All three shipped in the released game.

The Odradek reactions, the war-sequence planes and the whale and BT sequence went out in Death Stranding, which launched on PlayStation 4 on 8 November 2019. It was a small, focused contribution to a large title, and Adam is glad to have made it. In his own words: “More an extension of how fortunate I was to be in that position. Twelve-year-old me playing Metal Gear Solid would never have predicted this would follow in life.” Shortly after the sprint, he was paid to attend Gamescom to record an interview with Hideo Kojima.