The video game "Lair" was developed by Factor 5 and published by Sony for the PS3 in fall of 2007. The action-adventure game tells the story of a fantasy world on the brink of collapse due to the threat of emerging volcanoes. Society is divided into two factions, the Mokai, the poor who struggle to survive in the desert, and the Asylians, the ruling class that control the few still-habitable territories. The Asylian religious leader, the Diviner, declares the Mokai as savages and launches a war against them. Caught in the middle is the protagonist, Rohn, an Asylian Air Guard (dragon-rider) who comes to learn that there is more to the Mokai than his people know, and soon joins forces with the rebels to defend against the Asylian assault. Despite initial hype and a promising concept, the game went on to have a very troubled release (for more on that, read this article), and ultimately was considered a massive flop, and might largely be ignored today were it not for the music.
Joining the adventure was American composer John Debney, no stranger to epic scoring assignments, but tackling here his first video game. Despite the game's shortcomings, Debney clearly jumped at the chance to score this giant musical canvas. Debney assembled a 90-piece orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, with assistance from Kevin Kaska as orchestrator and additional music composer, and vocalist Lisbeth Scott and Tanya Tzarovska. The end result is a towering achievement, one of the most epic video game compositions (especially for its time) and one that stands alongside some of the best fantasy/adventure scores across films and television as well. Clearly inspired by the likes of Basil Poledouris, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, this score tells an old-fashioned, thematic narrative, full or big emotions and thunderous action. Centered around a bold hero theme for Rohn, villainous marches for the Diviner and his henchmen, as well as a culture/love theme for the Mokai, and a darkness theme. Though at times the music's inspirations are very apparent, Debney and team still created a stunning score that is a thrill ride from beginning to end.
At the time of the game's release, there was a digital promotional album released by Sony Computer Entertainment, containing around seventy minutes of the score. It wasn't until 2014 that La-La Land Records released a proper album, containing the full score, totaling almost two hours in length (which also just recently was released on streaming platforms). There were various fan covers floating for years, most in relatively poor quality. The LLL album's cover was nice, though a bit minimalist. There wasn't a lot of official artwork to work with, other than the same few pieces that have mostly been used elsewhere. But I did want to revisit these works in higher quality. As a result, this project is far smaller than most of the my typical collections, in large part probably due to the failure of the game, but it was nonetheless fun to revisit this material and give it a bit of a glow-up.
All three overs use official promotional artwork, ran through enhancers to up-rez the images, and various edits as needed. Though I am not a gamer, and thus don't have hands-on experience with the game, for a fantasy nerd like me, these images still bring a nostalgic thrill, and speak to the ambition of the concept.
Cover 1 just needed to be adapted to fit the square edit, requiring my usual vertical condensing. I start by cloning the bottom half of the image (Rohn in the foreground and the knights behind him), then sliding that up above the background to fit the desired composition. I then matted around the edges of those elements (using custom shape masking for the hard edges at the top, and them manual masking to blend the new layers together). I also slightly shifted two of the smaller dragons in the top left of the image, just to fit better around the added text.
Cover 2 is a sort of composite between the older promo covers and the newer LLL album, using the central game cover art. One of my unspoken rules is never to cheat and stretch characters faces (an easy hack to try to compress a busy image), often you see this on amateur fan covers, but with faces this becomes instantly noticeable and ugly. In this case I actually cheated in the opposite direction, stretching the image ever so slightly taller, as the original image felt a bit too scrunched, despite obviously going for the low-angle view (it helped that he's wearing a helmet. The effect is minimal, and probably no one will notice or care, but just some designer confessions. The bottom of the image (dragon) attack needed to shift up, but unfortunately I couldn't find a clean version of the bottom artwork (as the actual cover art has several labels burned into the image that block parts of it). So I had to use an alternate image and then paint and blend in bits that had been cut out. If you look close, parts of that bottom don't look great, but I think at a distance (and with the addition of the dark gradient), it gets the job done.
Finally, Cover 3 uses epic battle teaser art. I uprezzed and combined various poster and wallpaper versions to try to get the widest, most complete version to work with. Slight grads complete the effect to help the text pop.
Overall, this was a fairly quick project. Nothing horribly complicated or mind-blowing, but hopefully just giving the original artwork the respect that it was originally due, and giving the excellent score some fitting covers to match! Let me know your favorites below.
Awesome! I'm using these :)
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