“I called up a lot of my vocalist friends, and I got them to just record a voice memo,” Brown says. He also leaned on his vocalist friends for some of the monster sound effects. But Brown leaned on his metal roots for more than just making intense, upbeat battle music. “I think those come the most naturally as like a metal guy,” Brown says. The combat theme might be the most pervasive music in the game, but Brown’s favorite themes to create are for the bosses. “ Not yet, but I feel like that would be a pretty good opportunity.” I suggested a different 80s hit song that has been similarly involved in many memes: Toto’s Africa. One type of song Brown says isn’t in Sea of Stars yet, but was in Chrono Trigger, is a legally distinct but remarkably similar song to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. None of that would work on a Super Nintendo, necessarily. It's the same thing that we're doing with the visuals. But ultimately, what we landed on was something that doesn't take you out of the moment, in a retro sense. “I definitely could have done that, and that's what we did with The Messenger,” Brown says when asked if the music could conceivably come from a Super Nintendo.“For this, during the pre-production phase, I was experimenting, and I think initially, I wanted to do a more hi-fi type of thing.

Like the game's visuals, it is undeniably inspired by 16-bit RPGs, but Sea of Stars is not a game that could exist on a Super Nintendo, and the same can be said of the music.

With that said, though, Brown is not placing many self-imposed restrictions on himself for Sea of Stars’ soundtrack. Composers like Brown use it to track down specific sound modules and even specific keyboards used to make the music of the past. Brown enjoys working within the confines of the 16-bit era, and even takes advantage of an online database various musicians have coordinated over the years to figure out exactly what sorts of samples and tools video game composers used back in the day.

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