For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mushroom Men: Spore Wars, it’s a quirky little platformer coming out in the Wii next month. After a meteor crashes on Earth, four tribes of Mushroom Men gain consciousness and fight against each other (and other plants come to life) for the right to survive.

What’s cool about this game is that Les Claypool, bassist of Primus, had a heavy hand in both contributing to and influencing the game’s music. Working with audio company GL33k founded by Matt Piersall, a truly unique audio experience was born. You see, the noises and sound effects in Mushroom Men aren’t merely ambient sounds–all of the outdoor noises follow the same beat!

Matt and his team at Gl33k seem to have gone above and beyond the call of duty to put together the sounds for this game. To start off, all of the sounds in the game are set to the same BPM of 120. After getting 5 tracks composed by Les Claypool, they drew from his music the inspiration for the rest of the game’s varied soundtrack.

This wasn’t their only inspiration though. Some members of the team actually went camping to collect samples of genuine “outdoors” noises. These sounds were then given their own tempo and then placed in specific locations within the game. This means that the background noises and music of the game will differ depending on where you’re standing. An ever-changing soundtrack is a refreshing change from the more standard looped tracks in most other games.

Piersall had a lot to say about the music:

The music was a tough beast to tackle. We had Les Claypool create five tracks for the game. The tracks included four tracks for the races and one title track. His music was really cool and really helped drive a lot of interest in the project. He delivered his tracks as well as multi-tracked sessions (individual elements) that we used as world sounds, pickup sounds, and base elements for other tracks. Bob Arlauskas and myself composed a good majority of the music. The whole game has somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 tracks because constant looping music is one of my biggest pet peeves. For our approach we wanted to go with a sort of weirdo psychedelic dub feel. There is a slight reggae feel and Jimi Barkers original basslines gave us a cohesive palette from which to work.

I remember when I was able to play the demo I thought there was something different about the background noises. I guess it got kind of stowed in the back of my mind, since I was a bit busy gleefully smacking glowing rat carcasses with a stick.

Unfortunately it looks like the date for this one, along with Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi, has been pushed back a bit to December 2nd. Not a terribly long time to wait, and seeing how much work on the audio alone gives me hope that the rest of the game got just as much attention.

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