Chris Christodoulou’s Risk of Rain 2 track
“The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky”

I apologize in advance if any of this seems off-topic at first. I promise it all ultimately relates back to this mas­ter­piece.

For over two decades, I said Nobuo Uematsu’s “Dancing Mad” was my favorite game track of all time, and nothing would ever top or even match it. For over two decades, I was wrong on the latter count.

I’m in the midst of an existential crisis that’s causing me to feel much like Chris’ description in the album commentary leads me to suspect he felt while writing this song. Since roughly November 2022, one of my friends has been tutoring me in programming with the explicit goal of me contributing to an open-source game engine I’ve been designing levels for since 1997. On 2024-01-04, I began submitting pull requests to the engine repository that my friend/tutor (himself a regular contributor to said engine since 2005) coauthored. In June, they were all rejected, not due to code quality concerns – the project leader explicitly admitted he didn’t even look at my code – but because of “unresolvable personality conflicts”. He also explicitly said he’ll reject every future code submission that has my name anywhere in it.

I still don’t understand what he means by “unresolvable personality conflicts”, and I’ve legitimately tried, but I’ve carried a slow-burning fury inside me ever since – not on my behalf, but on my friend’s, who’s poured something like 300 hours into tutoring me. He’s also dealing with horrible and very likely incurable health problems, to the extent that I’m legitimately worried about how long he has left to live. As he put it, he was hoping to train another person who was as passionate about the game as he was to work on its engine, and he spent eighteen months attempting to do exactly that before finally being passively-aggressively informed that this option was never even available. (The project leader has known why my friend has been tutoring me for at least six months, if not longer; it took until June for him to clarify.) This strikes me as a staggering insult to my friend’s dedication and skill that I’m sure will never cease to anger me. I’ve ceased speaking to several people as a direct result; I expect we’ll never be on speaking terms again.

I at least have other creative outlets – while all of this was going on, I wrote, arranged, mixed, and mastered a track that felt like an exact expression of my emotional state at the time, which I named “Ambiēns aquātica”.⁽¹⁾ (It can be found on my album of recent compositions as track four – I’ll address my musical efforts again later.) I’m also involved in several other game development projects, and we’re now forking the engine (or at least attempting to). But I doubt my anger over this will ever fully fade.

Siren’s Call is probably my favorite stage, but I have a love/hate relationship with it, because I can never, ever activate the teleporter until this song plays all the way through. Of course, the old “you should only spend five minutes on each stage” RoR2 meta is by now roundly debunked: the optimal strategy is full looting each stage, as stage transitions ramp the difficulty up much more than the passage of time within stages does, and Siren’s Call usually takes at least ten minutes to full loot, especially with [its optional boss Alloy Worship Unit, which drops a powerful, rare item if defeated] in the equation. (I’ve typically spent about ten minutes per stage on successful Eclipse runs, if not even more. [Eclipse is effectively the hardest challenge mode in the base game.]) But nonetheless, I become acutely aware of the passage of time.

“The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” has been my clear favorite song in the series for months. It took almost a year to emerge as the clear frontrunner over several other tracks, including but not limited to “The Rain For­mer­ly Known as Purple”, “A Glacier Eventually Farts”, “Petrichor V”, “They Might as Well Be Dead”, “Once in a Lullaby”, “Arctic Oscillation”, and “Coalescence”, but even after playing literally more than 3,000 hours of RoR2 (not jok­ing), I always have to listen to this song all the way through whenever it comes on. Half of why I play so much RoR2 is that I just enjoy vibing out to the soundtrack; it genuinely makes me feel like I’m exploring an alien world. This track alone is probably responsible for 300 of my hours in the game. My preferences, then, are by now quite clear.

Recently, though, it’s hit harder than ever, enough to give me an epiphany early this month: “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” is now tied with “Dancing Mad” at the top of my “favorite game music” list. (Their atmosphere and mood differ completely that ranking them against each other feels sacrilegious, though at this specific moment, “The Raindrop…” brings me levels of comfort few other works of art in any medium give me.) Furthermore, RoR2’s OST ties Final Fantasy VI’s atop my “favorite game OSTs” list: any OST I can listen to for over 3,000 hours without ever once getting sick of it is nothing short of miraculous. (Not to mention its immaculate production, mixing, and mastering – Chris doing all of this himself has been a huge inspiration to me as an aspiring composer.)

RoR2’s OST has felt like it was composed specifically for me ever since I first heard it (I believe the first observation I voiced about it was either along the lines of “This game’s composer must’ve listened to a ton of Pink Floyd growing up”⁽²⁾ or “This soundtrack is really, really good”) – and this track feels more like it was composed specifically for me than any other piece on the soundtrack.

About a week ago, I sent Chris a track I’d collaborated with another arranger on [Collaborations & Covers track 7 with wowbobwow] that mashes up Marathon’s “Landing” with “The Rain Formerly Known as Purple” and “A Gla­cier Eventually Farts”. Chris responded, which was cool enough – what made my entire year is that he liked it and provided some constructive suggestions that I’m sure will make it even better once I resume work on it.

I didn’t actually get back to working on it immediately, though, because he also encouraged me to write original songs based on his stems, an idea I’d considered in the past but been too intimidated to ever attempt. But now I felt I owed it to both of us to try, so I loaded the drums, synth solo, and bass guitar from this track into Logic and started writing. Writing new original segments that meshed with Chris’ melodies proved surprisingly easy, at least until I got to 4:02 (I still don’t fully understand the harmonic progression of that part). From 5:41 on, I created a mash-up of stems from this song, “They Might as Well Be Dead”, “Moisture Deficit”, and “Once in a Lullaby”, a few of my favorite songs from their respective games/DLCs that I correctly suspected would go well together once I’d pitch-shifted and time-stretched them.

I’m still working on it, but the result proved far stronger than I could’ve ever anticipated when I began; it’s one of the most powerful tracks I’ve ever worked on. It’s also a perfect expression of my emotional state in a way I could never hope to put into words. It may surprise people that I often struggle to put my emotions into words in a way that other people will understand, given how expressive my vocabulary can be – it’s a product of being neurodivergent. But music is a universal language: everyone feels it. I’ve struggled to express the wonder developing games has brought me and the disappointment recent events have caused me in words. Music allows me to express emotions directly, without words – and using Chris’ stems to aid my self-expression has been one of the most rewarding privileges I’ve experienced in recent years.

The track in question is track 11 on my album of recent compositions. Its two-part name is comprised of my amateurish attempt to translate the phrases “The whirring grows loud” and “You dream of violent growth” into Koine Greek (partly because I made it for a mod for a series with a Greek name [Marathon]; partly as a tribute to Vangelis, a major influence on both Chris and me; partly as a tribute to Chris himself).