American McGee always knew that Alice needed to have a great soundtrack to accompany its dark brooding atmosphere.   McGee, who worked with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on Quake, found the perfect composer in Chris Vrenna, the one-time NIN drummer.  The recently-married Vrenna sat down for the following video interview to discuss his work on Alice. 

GameSlice: How did you go about creating the musical mood for the game? 

Chris: It took some experimentation at first because going along with American's vision, the music also needed to be otherworldly and creepy, but not at all modern sounding.  So, for me, coming from an electronic background, I am very comfortable with drum machines, samples and synthesizers, none of which I could use.  So, it was kind of trying to come up with instrumentations that could be from that time frame but were also creepy and bizarre and create a mood.
(download video clip of Chris' Answer)

GameSlice: You are using some very interesting instrumentations for the game.  How did you go about producing the music?

Chris:  I have collected six or seven or eight toy pianos, two toy accordions, penny whistles, autoharps, zithers, fifteen or sixteen wind-up musical boxes, and toy drums.  I augmented all that with some of the strings and creepy ambient background sounds.  [American] wanted rhythms to be built organically, something I like to do.  Alice has a lot of cogs and wheels and wood and doors and puzzles and things of that nature, so I'm building all the rhythms out of clock samples – just grandfather clocks or coo coo clocks or just the ticking, and everything, timing it so its a loop and creates a bit of a rhythm.  And I've been building them out of ratchet sounds and door thuds and thound sounds and timing them all so they create a rhythmic bed, so once again there is no modern electronic drum or modern rock element to it.
(download a video clip of Chris' answer)

GameSlice: What do you think of the actual game and its gameplay?

Chris: I think people are used to seeing Alice as a bright tale with the cute blonde hair Alice, [who is ] innocent, [and] falls down the hole -- and it's always been a little light. This one is the exact opposite – it's very dark and twisted.  The gameplay is better than anything I've ever seen on a PC game.  I think the combination of the gameplay and the actual look of what American has achieved is fantastic.
(download video clip of Chris' Answer)

Electronic Arts has also provided us with three MP3 tracks of Vrenna's music from the game, which you can download here.