The Creative Process Behind Online Slot Game Music

NetEnt's sound design lead, Joel, credited by first name only on the studio's blog, starts a slot soundtrack the way a lot of composers start anything: he sits at the keys and plays until he finds "something small and simple to catch on to that sets the right mode."

The brief he's working from is a theme and a mood before it's anything musical, which is the brief trailer composers get too. Gregory Tan, whose cues for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Jurassic World: Dominion this site has covered, gets a cut of someone else's picture and a couple of minutes to make it feel like something.

Start With the Theme

Joel's first game music assignment was a Western, Wild Wild West: The Great Train Heist, and the team crowded into the studio's small recording space to sing the choir parts themselves. He keeps several mics up so he can add live piano, guitars, vocals, drums, or a melodica, and the live parts are what stop a slot loop sounding like a preset.

Push Gaming works differently. Its lead composer, Alex Dopierala, describes a first phase that's mostly getting a feel for what he's written until he's happy with it, then rewrites as the animation develops. The animators finish last, so the composer rewrites last.

Different Games, Different Sounds

Dopierala is blunt about the cost of getting the style wrong: a soundtrack in the wrong idiom "can subconsciously make players feel as if something isn't quite right." He's talking about genre, the choice before any melody exists, and his own DJ Cat leans on what he calls "a throwback Hip-Hop sound" because the game's whole look asked for it. The Western asked for a choir and got one.

Both studios publish demos, free slot games with the soundtrack intact and nothing at stake, so the beat and the choir can be heard in the same sitting without an account. The demo loop is also the version most people will ever hear; the paid game is a much smaller room.

Make It Work in Play

The sound effects are a separate job from the score and usually a bigger one by count. Thunderkick's own account of how it builds a game admits the team gets "weirdly intense about things like button sounds and spin animations," and the hours go there, into the click of a spin and the tick of reels stopping one at a time. Greg Dugan, senior audio designer at Push Gaming, draws the line this way: the music is written for the special moments, and the sound design sharpens them.

The tools are a problem of their own. Play'n GO built its own audio middleware, SoundStage, announced in 2022, because the software made for console and PC games didn't suit online slots, and Mega Don was the first game to ship on it.

Dugan's division of labor is the clearest way to listen to any slot. The composer writes for the handful of moments a session might reach, and the sound designer covers every spin in between, which is where the player spends nearly all of the time.