‘We were only slightly influenced by the Cantina music’: the underworld sounds of Star Wars Outlaws

Cody Matthew Johnson explains how he has scoured every sonic corner, from spider monkeys’ chatter to gamelan, to write tunes a space travelling street thief would hear

Have you ever thought what walking into a sweaty, dusty club on one of Star Wars’ desert planets would sound like? About what plays on the radios in the casinos on those Las Vegas-like planets? What do the merchants and miscreants of Tatooine listen to when they’re not working the moisture farms or fending off Tusken Raiders? Pondering questions like that has been Cody Matthew Johnson’s life for the past few years. The composer and artist has flirted with video game music before, with credits on Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Bayonetta, and the cult indie Kurosawa-inspired side-scroller, Trek to Yomi. But for Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, he was tasked with making music for its seedy criminal underbelly.

“There is a limited scope of in-world musical expression in the original trilogy, and this was our opportunity to explore music canonically during that time in a much wider scope,” said Johnson, when I asked how much of a guideline the original trilogy provided for his work on Outlaws. “There are some ‘rules’, per se, to creating cantina music in the style of the original trilogy, and while this game does take place during that time period, we were encouraged to only be slightly influenced by the original trilogy cantina music.”