SO. After countless Red Bulls and a very agonizing Christmas Eve, the first section of Merry Gear Solid is complete. The current playtime (skipping all the codec conversations) is around 1 hour. There is about 1 hour’s worth of recorded dialogue, which puts the game well over 2 hours to complete. I feel like I should apologize in advance for all the backtracking that’s involved in the game — what started as an innocent way of letting players try old levels with new items kind of ended up being a tiny bit tedious. Whoops!

I’m just putting that out there to cover my own butt when people come storming to my front door, upset that I’ve ruined their Christmases and their lives forever.

With that said, I just wanted to share with you a little bit of the making of one of the game’s theme songs, a song entitled If You’re Nice. The original idea of the song was to make something that sounded a bit like The Zombie‘s She’s Not There. I started off by making a really basic midi version of the song by putting down the bass line, and then adding the guitar, and what would be the vocal melody.

When I was satisfied with the result, I tried recording it live with guitar and vocals. I also ripped off the drums from She’s Not There. I learned how to steal them by playing the song in Rockband 2 a thousand times.

The problem then was: A) my voice. it suck. it sound bad. i am bad. wa wa we wo. and B) the song was kind of too long considering how short the credits list was. Which is why I decided to A) Find a singer and B) Get rid of the parts of the song that were kind of unnecessary.

I also didn’t like how artificial the bass sounded, so I got a friend of mine to record the bass. I’M SORRY IF I SOUND CRYPTIC AND MYSTERIOUS but I think the finished track turned out pretty well. I’m not posting it online because I want it to be a surprise, but hopefully you enjoy the finished track as well!