Few words can do justice to Minecraft's score. The soundtrack – an ambient electronic cloud that's equal parts vast, lonely, and melancholic – is deeply synonymous with the game itself, in much the same way you can't visualise Tetris or Mario without hearing their own themes.
Scoring Minecraft was the first breakout project of composer Daniel 'C418' Rosenfeld, and it remains his most iconic work. That's as much a blessing as a curse – chatting to Rosenfeld, I suggest trying to work beneath Minecraft's shadow must have been scary. He laughs. "My therapist could tell you a lot."
Building blocks
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In the years since Minecraft, Rosenfeld has worked on very few projects. By his own admission, he's a picky composer – something afforded to him by Minecraft. "It's definitely a pickiness born out of privilege," he says. "I'm very lucky in this industry – I have to admit that every day – that I'm allowed to be picky. I have a lot of friends who have to take whatever lands in their mailbox, and it's often grueling. So I'm very lucky that I get to choose the projects I want to partake in, and can take my time [with them]."
By that attitude alone, his mere involvement in Wanderstop – a cozy sim about running a fantasy tea shop while healing from burnout – is something of an endorsement. It's his most ambitious project to date, featuring a "stupidly complex music system" that pairs a traditional score with in-world music and sound effects. Besides the score, Rosenfeld is "basically the entire audio team," handling Wanderstop's SFX alongside implementation of its sounds – a level of involvement he didn't plan for.
"I just wanted to do the music and walk away," he admits. "But after a lot of soul-searching, I decided to join Ivy Road full-time. Because I chose that, it's actually quite humbling. It dragged me back down to Earth. I feel like a normal person who talks to my co-workers. At the beginning, the first year or so, I needed to remind myself that people know I'm a person of renown, and I'm supposed to be the big smart composer dude. That took a little bit of an adjustment. Now I'm just a dude – a part of the team – and it's actually very relaxing."
"If we truly want to make a studio, we need to compromise on personal ideas"
Daniel 'C418' Rosenfeld
Throughout our chat, Rosenfeld is quick to praise the rest of Ivy Road. His collaborators include The Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden and Gone Home co-creator Karla Zimonja, who all brought their own experiences to Wanderstop. The game is about a once-unbeaten warrior who, after suffering several shock defeats, reluctantly helps to run a cozy tea shop while recuperating. The themes of burnout are obvious – though Rosenfeld's own contributions came from "trauma more than anything" – and Wanderstop's broader ideation has been heavily collaborative between the trio.
"David proposes the idea, gives me the script, and I'll put my personality on top of it," says Rosenfeld. "That can sometimes be a compromise, but I do think that if we truly want to make a studio, we need to compromise on personal ideas. Sometimes I put out something wildly different from what David expected, and David's like 'Why did you do that?', and you have a heart-to-heart as to what we're trying to achieve here. That's collaboration. David tries to be bold, I try to be bold, Karla tries to be bold, then we see how that actually makes sense."
Moving on
Having played Wanderstop, Rosenfeld's involvement is unmistakable. There's a mix of the familiar – a signature twist of melancholy, of introspectiveness – and new, with snatches of near-cinematic music that sound almost brazen given the composer's dreamier past work. Occasionally, Rosenfeld felt his work was "too Hollywood," and forced himself to pull back and consciously lean more into his own style. C418 is unmistakably a part of Wanderstop, and even within the game's opening hour, fans will immediately feel the Minecraft heritage.
"It's just who I am," says Rosenfeld. "I'll always gravitate toward piano, I'll always be a little bit melancholic. It's in my DNA, at the end of the day. By the end of it, I was just like… let's just be who I am."
Though there's a clear throughline from Minecraft's score to Wanderstop's, Rosenfeld has changed along the way. With Minecraft's momentum, many creatives in his position would have leapt from one high-profile project to the next. Instead, Rosenfeld remained deliberately low-profile, but now seems more comfortable with the spotlight on him.
"Honestly, the Minecraft years for me were blur, and secretly, I'm kind of happy that it has been chosen for me that it's done so that I can focus on a normal musician career life," he says. "It's been weird. It's been hard. It took me a long time to figure out where I want to be with this career. It took a lot of experimentation, a lot of failed projects. I'm glad that I am at a spot now that seems pretty comfortable."
When I ask if he'd ever work on Minecraft again, Rosenfeld seems comfortable with the distance he now has from the project. "It's not something I've talked about publicly, because [...] There's always a lot of ruminations going on," he explains. "I feel like, potentially, perhaps it's OK for me to move on. I think I've done my story, and if I'm no longer part of it, that's OK. I'm OK with that."
Rosenfeld is less comfortable with other aspects of the industry. While he's retained a uniquely large amount of control over his contributions to Minecraft, he's one of many musicians reckoning with AI. "Right now, what we're seeing is Silicon Valley ass hats making as much money as they can by getting investment funds and wasting money on stealing everyone's music – literally everyone's – which obviously just looks really bad," says Rosenfeld. "I don't know. There might be merit to AI in music, but what we're doing right now, is the worst version of it. It's horrible. It's quite depressing. I do think AI has merits. I don't know what they are yet, because I haven't seen good examples."
Elsewhere, Rosenfeld has a lot to be optimistic about. Wanderstop launched earlier in the month, cementing itself as a critical darling – our own Wanderstop review scored it four stars – and he's keen to continue working with Ivy Road. On what, Rosenfeld admits, he doesn't know – though after five years of working on the same tea shop, he's "itching" for something new – but the composer is reluctant to let go of his newfound camaraderie. "We have absolute superstars at Ivy Road. It's a crack team, and I hope we get to make something new," he says. "Together."
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