// PC GAMER — GAMING
Composer and designer Lena Raine explains how Pigstep altered Minecraft's approach to music: 'The prompt I keep hearing is "Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers"'
The composer for Celeste and Minecraft guides us through the games on her PC.
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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"
Lena Raine's formative gaming experience was playing Myst on a Mac Quadra 610, exploring Cyan Worlds' enigmatic island in parallel with her father: "We each had our own playthrough, so we were sending each other notes in the little journal that it came with," she says. "I still have the little book that we wrote in."
Raine always aspired to be a composer for video games, but she initially joined the industry as a games tester for Nintendo America, working several other testing jobs before being hired by ArenaNet as a game designer. While working on Guild Wars 2, Raine designed a bell-choir minigame for the MMO's Winter's Day Christmas update, including writing the music for it. "It was a bizarre first-step into game music," she says. "But that eventually led to at last some visibility for the other music I was writing."
After leaving ArenaNet, Raine wrote the soundtrack for 2018's Celeste, and spent several years composing music for Minecraft, including several of its most popular 'Disc' tracks like Pigstep, Creator, and Otherside. Raine is currently writing music for the early access volleyball RPG Beastieball, while also returning to game design with her own project ANOTHEREAL, an RPG with schmup-style combat. "I have been working on [it] basically since the pandemic," she says. "I'm trying to aim to have something released within the decade."
Raine took a break from her various projects to show me around the digital concert hall of her steam library. We discussed Deadlock, sorted her schmup collection, and took a trip down MMO memory lane.
The current game that I'm playing is Deadlock. I've been playing it for a while now, basically since it was pretty early in that beta, alpha, whatever phase. I play with my wife and some other friends that we've got.
I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've never been a MOBA person and I've never been a competitive shooter person either. Usually, I get tremendously frustrated with online competitive shooters because I'm not very good. I'm not great at those sorts of games.
But I love the style and the world that Valve has made for Deadlock. I love spooky occult stuff. I just love that entire vibe. A lot of my personal online characters are like demon girl aesthetics, and so I'm just like "This is a game for me".