On October 15th 2025 our composer Toma Otowa and I joined Erika Ishii to discuss and listen to some of the tracks from the soundtrack of Ghost of Yotei. It was really fun to get to discuss some of the tracks and listen to them with a small audience. Jason Connell, one of our creative directors was supposed to be there as well, but unfortunately was sick. Toma is such an easy guy to chat with that we easily could have spent another few hours talking about the music and sharing anecdotes. Hope folks will join and enjoy what I think has turned out to be an exceptional soundtrack.

I was asked to join Lacuna Observatory, an artist collective a while back and we just had our first show exploring the spaces between dreams and the waking state. While I showcased a couple sculptures I created for the show, Dreamcrusher I and Dreamcrusher II, my main contributions were naturally on the audio side.

I had created a phone number where people could call in and leave recordings of their dreams. I then put the dreams onto a small AdaFruit sound board and installed that into an old rotary phone. And thus, the dream phone was born. Pick it up, and hear people’s dreams. It sat on an oilcloth with the text of the dreams laid out so that the dreams ran into each other, forming new images, much like they do.

The first piece I did for the show, which is most relevant to audio, is called Vision through Sound. It examines the way our senses intermingle to create a perception of reality. Each scene begins with a soundscape, giving your brain time and space to create an image of what it hears. Text prompts appear on screen which will alter your brain’s perception in some way. Next, an image appears to cement or shift that reality. Finally, everything dissolves away, leaving just the audio to drift from your memory.

I recommend you give it a listen with headphones as several of the recordings were captured binaurally. Curious to hear how people perceive it and how they feel about the confluence of audio, word and image.

It was an exciting week for me and all of us at Sucker Punch, as we finally announced our new project. Ghost of Yotei to the world! I look forward to doing some deep dives into the new systems and sounds that we ‘ve built for this game. I’m so excited to share more soon!

I’ve long been a fan of Sam Hughes’ Sound Architect podcast. He always asks great questions and the results are informative discussions with very talented audio people. I was pleasantly surprised when he reached out asking if I’d like to chat with him about Ghost of Tsushima. It took a lot longer than either of us would have liked to set things up, but once we did, we had a really great chat. We went over the normal one hour time for his interviews and easily could have spoken for another hour or three. I hate the sound of my own voice and my penchant for interjections of “um,” “like,” and “you know,” but hopefully you’ll find it informative too.

More recently, I was asked by Alistair Hirst over at Dolby to talk with him about Ghost, so I got Adam Lidbetter, our supervising sound designer at Playstation, Andrew Buresh, our senior music editor, and Apoorva Bansal, who did most of the audio programming on Ghost to sit down and talk about the audio of Ghost and some of the fun challenges we dealt with. Here’s the result there:

Last one here, but worth a mention. I was contacted by Hamidreza Nikoofar, an Iranian sound designer, composer and podcaster. He has a podcast called Wassup Conversations and has hosted an impressive array of guests. We had a good chat about my career and Ghost and I highly recommend checking out Hamid’s other episodes.

[editor’s note: This was originally published here on June 9, 2021]. It’s hard to believe Ghost of Tsushima is almost a year old already! It came out on July 17, 2020. We started planning for the final mix in February of that same year. Do you remember February of 2020? The only people, at least in the U.S., that wore masks were superheroes, vaccines were for kids and traveling, and people felt totally comfortable crammed into enclosed spaces. With that mindset, we started planning. I would fly down to Sony San Mateo, other Sony sound folks would fly up from San Diego and Los Angeles and collectively we would spend a month packed into a studio mixing the game. I knew a month wouldn’t be enough to mix the game, but it’s all I could get. The thought of me being away from the office for that long was already daunting. The initial plan was for only 3 weeks, but I negotiated to 4. Because we weren’t going to have enough time, my strategy was to focus on what most players would experience: start with the core systemic gameplay, followed by the Golden Path missions, our main narrative, the special Legendary Item missions, and finish up with as many of the buddy chain Silver missions as we could get to. It was a solid plan.

As things got worse with the coronavirus, our mix plans became a bit more fluid. Maybe I could fly a small charter airline down to the Bay Area. Maybe we’d need to limit the number of people who came. Then the shelter-in-place orders came. Because the audio team needed special facilities to do our jobs we were initially given special consideration during this time. I kept working in the office with a skeleton crew of others, and there were a couple people at Sony doing the same. As the situation worsened, I was forced to move home, and our plans continued to change. We started floating every idea possible. Mixing at home was not ideal since I didn’t have a decent, quiet room. Would I need to seal myself off at work and mix alone in my non-calibrated studio? By early April things had solidified into what would promise to be the most unique mix experience I’d ever been a part of. I would drive down from Seattle to San Mateo (a 14 hour drive normally without traffic, yet only a 12 hour drive at peak pandemic time). I would stay in a hotel right across from the Sony campus. There would be one other member from each discipline joining me: Adam Lidbetter from sound design, Kyle Richards from dialogue, and Nick Mastroianni from the music team. Adam, Kyle, and myself would be situated a minimum of 10 feet apart from each other in Studio A, and Nick would be in the live room playing the game. It was not ideal, but it was a plan.

And surprisingly it worked exceptionally well. Part of the reason for that was that we asked the other folks who were supposed to be at the mix to play the game, and to play ahead of us. I maintained a google doc of mix notes, and every day as people played through they would add to the mix notes. The reason we had them play ahead of us was so we could address their notes as we made it through the game in the studio.

The unsung heroes of the entire pandemic were our IT department. They and a few programmers figured out how to get the entire studio and our proprietary toolchain working remotely in a matter of days. It was remarkable. Using this tech, I was able to download package builds from a devkit at the hotel I brought with me everyday and play them each night while I was in my hotel room ordering takeout and wearing a combination of N95 masks, bandannas and boxer shorts as facemasks (how far we’ve come).

About halfway through the mix we found out that our ship date was getting pushed slightly which gave us an extra week for mixing, which was a godsend. Somehow we managed to cover everything we’d planned in the initial 4 weeks, but that extra week gave us more time to polish and cover more of the game. We were so fortunate and that time really paid off.

I shot a ton of video while I was down there (though often not at the most opportune times), because I knew this was going to be a weird experience and such a strange mix process. The fact that it worked, and worked so well, is a testament to the entire team. The support I had from Sucker Punch and Sony was incredible and I still am in a daze over how lucky I’ve been to work with such a phenomenal team. So here’s a video showing some of the “highlights” of the mix. It’s long. It’s often boring. It’s sometimes funny. But it shows what the process of the mix really looked like, and I get honest about a lot of my personal and professional concerns, learnings and shortcomings. I don’t know that I would recommend watching it because it really is over a half hour of watching me talk with underwear covering my face or clicking a mouse in Wwise, but hopefully there will be some nuggets of interest to people getting a glimpse behind the curtain of a strange mix in a strange time.

No five year long project would be complete without at least a few goofy bloopers. There were so many more that we just didn’t capture, but I hope this brings a smile to your face. For me, it is just a reminder of how lucky we are to do what we do day to day and that we’re able to be creative and have fun for a living is one of the treasures of my life. I feel exceptionally fortunate every day even when (or maybe especially because) I do stupid stuff like some of what you’ll see here:

To be honest, when we first started making Ghost of Tsushima, I was probably most excited about the possibility of traveling to Japan to capture ambience. We sent two teams over to Tsushima and throughout Japan but I didn’t get to go. It kinda made sense. These were more sight-seeing tours for environment artists, character modelers, and some of the other creative leads to get a sense what Japan was like. If I was going to go I needed isolation, not driving around in a van with 10 other people.

On the first trip, I gave Billy Harper, our character and animation lead one of my recorders and a brief tutorial on how to use it in hopes he could maybe get away and record some interesting stuff. I wasn’t expecting anything useful but Billy surprised me. He got some usable recordings of birds including some black kites, songbirds, and of course, the ubiquitous jungle crows. The team went to Tsushima and attended the Komodohama festival which commemorates the Mongol invasion landing on Tsushima in 1274. Our team was invited to the junior high school on Tsushima and Billy and our cinematics team recorded several instruments including various taiko drums and a horagai, a conch shell horn that was used by samurai to communicate in battle.

Being part of Sony, we have a great team at Japan Studio, so we reached out to them and ask if they would be willing to record some ambience for us and they did a great job. The team there drove out near Mount Fuji to capture all sorts of birds in the wild as well as some rivers and wind. They also went to the Kachoen Wild Bird Refuge and got tons of species isolated. One of the sound designers, Ito-san went on vacation to visit family over in Akita prefecture on the Northeastern side of Honshu, the main island of Japan, and got some fantastic recordings of songbirds at dawn and during the say in some rice paddies.

All of these recordings were great and totally usable, but we were still missing a few specific species of animals we knew were going to be in the game, so I decided fairly last minute to spend my Christmas and New Years traveling around Japan on a whirlwind trip chasing after more specific species. My partner, Bonnie, joined me as travel partner and documentarian. I had planned a 10 day trip for us. We would land in Tokyo one evening, then fly out to Hokkaido the following morning, record the tancho (the red-crowned cranes), travel to Lake Kasharro to record the Whooper Swans, then back to Honshu. We’d spend New Years in Tokyo, then head up to Nikko, followed by a trip into Nagano prefecture to try and record the snow monkeys.

The entire trip was absolutely incredible. Japan is insanely beautiful, the people exceptionally friendly, even when there’s a language barrier, and the food was always fresh and amazing. The entire trip was a highlight, but also included some fun surprises. When we were in Nikko, we checked out the temples as you do, but then hiked up a mountain near the Kirifuri Ice Arena. I set up my recorder to capture some ambience and walk a little ways away. A short while later we were startled by what sounded like a piercing alarm chip. It happened again and then once more. Bonnie and I looked at each other and mouthed “What the fuck was that?” Suddenly we saw two huge sika deer run by in the valley below us. The continue to chirp their alert calls for the next 10 minutes. Those recordings feature prominently in Ghost of Tsushima.

There were some other cool moments that didn’t make it into the game as well. In Kushiro on Hokkaido, the Kushiro River was half frozen with large sheets of ice flowing down the river and crashing into each other. One night I threw my hydrophone into the river, hoping to get some interesting underwater sounds of ice creaking, crunching and colliding, but there was nothing quite so interesting.

After compiling all this great content from so many people, I made a movie to share with the team as part of one of our team meetings. My attempt to evoke David Attenborough is pathetic, but the video was a fun glimpse into just how global the effort was to capture realistic and accurate ambience for the game.