Atlantis: The Lost Tales Soundtrack

Atlantis: The Lost Tales Soundtrack, Pierre Estève / Stéphane Picq, 1997

By the second half of the 1990s, French developer Cryo Interactive had found its niche: lavishly produced, Myst-style adventure games. Critical responses to these titles remained somewhat ambivalent, but there is no denying that Cryo’s approach worked commercially. Its most significant success may well have been Atlantis: The Lost Tales. Reviewers praised the game’s visuals and intense atmosphere, bolstered by panoramic 360-degree first-person views of pre-rendered environments and substantial amounts of recorded speech. At the same time, perceived gameplay shortcomings once again often kept scores in the middling range. That did not prevent the game from selling more than 300,000 copies by late 1998, launching a franchise that would generate four further titles and outlast Cryo itself.

Scoring duties on the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack fell to Pierre Estève and Stéphane Picq. Picq had been Cryo’s principal composer from the company’s earliest days, writing the entrancing music for its breakthrough hit Dune. Estève was a more recent addition to Cryo’s musical team, having approached the developer in 1995 after working as a rock musician and a composer for French television and radio. His first project for Cryo was Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man. Over the following years, Estève would create music and sound effects for several other Cryo titles, even remaining with the Atlantis franchise after the developer closed its doors in 2002. His anthropological interest in a wide range of musical cultures, as heard on solo albums such as Bamboo and Metal, made him an ideal complement to Picq’s eclectic style.

Crucially, Estève founded his own label, Shooting Star, in 1996, making a commercial release of the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack possible. Better still, the game’s music eventually received a two-CD set, quite possibly the first multi-disc Western game music album. Unfortunately, that physical release included no information on the thinking behind one of game music’s most audacious scores; even a list of the many unfamiliar instruments heard across the soundtrack would have been welcome. A later Bandcamp release is more forthcoming, explaining that “the main concept behind this double album was to imagine what would have been the music of a pre-ancient age Atlantean civilisation – a culture from which all of the others would have originated after the Fall of Atlantis and the dispersion of its people.”

It is fair to say, then, that the creators of the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack set themselves lofty ambitions, and more remarkably still, realised them. What first strikes the listener is the sparseness of the orchestrations, and the immense expressive force the composers draw from so few ingredients. Compositions such as “Awakening” and “Dream of the Dolphin” sustain their generous runtimes with little more than a single woodwind instrument carrying sparse melodies, accompanied by faint synth pads and struck metal percussion ranging from chimes to gamelan-like sonorities. That may sound like the sort of formula favoured by any number of hackneyed new-age albums, but Estève and Picq make it work, and for two decisive reasons.

The first is the superlative recording quality. Solo instruments are placed within a vast open acoustic space where their pensive, moving melodies, often tinged with ritual, can unfold with full quiet majesty. At the same time, the enormous reverberation applied to these instruments never blurs the melodic line. Instead, listening to these cues feels almost like sitting beside the performers, every emotional inflection and every striking timbral detail of these often unfamiliar instruments captured with vivid clarity. The album recording is so finely realised that the instruments’ alternately earthy and otherworldly qualities can sustain whole compositions on their own.

The second great strength lies in the way the composers transform that minimalism into an expression of genuine awe and spellbinding spirituality. Central to this is their liberal use of dissonance and chromatic, unexpected movement, particularly in the chiming metal-percussion accompaniments. Every element in the music may remain clearly exposed and readily grasped, yet the score never relinquishes its mystery; it continues to hover just beyond complete understanding. That sense of withheld revelation is entirely appropriate for a soundtrack meant to evoke an ancient and foreign culture, something Atlantis achieves with rare authority.

That effect is heightened further by the pensive solo melodies, which at times seem to resonate across immense temporal distances, indeed taking on the character of music from before antiquity itself; one need only hear the flute solo in “Spitzberg”, calmly reaching towards the horizon and beyond. As Atlantis approaches a near Zen-like state of meditative stillness through its painstakingly assembled materials, it achieves a sense of transcendence rivalled by very few game soundtracks. The brief called for music of almost mystical stature, and that is precisely what the composers deliver.

None of this means that the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack is merely an extended exercise in serene asceticism. Estève and Picq vary their approach not only to suggest a musical culture broad enough for many others to have sprung from it, but also to sustain the album’s considerable length. “Rhéa” and “Stonehenge” are unexpectedly lush, building their textures around wordless, seductive female vocals that are now miked more closely, evoking a more enclosed environment. Around these voices, the composers weave a relatively intricate and hypnotic tapestry of hand percussion, warm woodwinds and metal timbres that verge on the foreboding. Far from static or merely repetitive, the music uses subtle harmonic and dynamic shifts to create satisfying dramatic arcs.

Towards the end of the album, the soundtrack grows sombre, becoming more monolithic through the use of fuller, menacing timbres. “La Tisseuse des Destins” places a ghostly female solo voice above a massive bass drone of unfathomable origin, somewhere between a synthesiser and a didgeridoo. The score’s pervasive mystery here reaches a climax, turning the listening experience into something more overtly unsettling. “Metamorphosis” deploys similarly inventive means that verge on sound design in the best possible way. Dissonant buzzing drones haunt the entire piece, their abrasive sharpness provoking visceral unease as vaguely Egyptian-sounding woodwind melodies struggle not to be swallowed by the encroaching darkness.

These troubled ambiences turn into outright agitation on “Sunriders”, the arresting album opener, and “Am Ma Eya”, both of which surprise with male warrior chants and pounding ceremonial percussion. In “Sunriders”, the martial bombast evokes the grandeur of the game’s historical backdrop, while “Am Ma Eya” is rougher and more furious. The same musical materials return in an entirely different emotional register on “Para Nua”, where the vocals become joyful African choral chants. That the Atlantis: The Lost Tales soundtrack can absorb such varied musical cultures and still shape them into a cohesive listening experience is further proof of the composers’ creative brilliance. Their improbable success secures the score’s place among game music’s most enrapturing achievements.