Return to Bird World is the true soundtrack of a fake sequel to a video game that doesn’t exist

In Back to the world of birds, players are brought back to the floating kingdom of Bird World thousands of years after the events of the original game to discover that the once shining island has fallen into disrepair. While the darker setting is a departure from the original Bird world, the new game still has one key trait in common: it doesn’t actually exist. But its soundtrack does.

Back to the world of birds comes from a musician and Twitter Personality Leon Chang, who has been publishing albums inspired by video games for a few years. His first major project, the 2017 Bird world, was apparently the soundtrack for an SNES-era game about a little bird going on an adventure. Even though you’ll never play it, the soundtrack offered a hint of what the non-existent game could be like. You would cross a playful island, help out the inhabitants of a small village, and face a world-changing battle before saying goodbye to all the original characters you met along the way.

Chang said that the idea of ​​creating a fake soundtrack came from the music he wrote and listened to already. “I love to write music that feels like a video game, so why not make an album based on a fake video game?” he said The edge.

For the rest, Bird world jumped to a new generation. The album has PlayStation-esque artwork and sprawling length – an hour and a half – to match the expansive soundtracks that would mark games like Final fantasy and Chrono Cross. It is also more varied and less cheerful than the original. “The Mushroom God” seems to portray a melancholy deity whose earth has fallen into ruin; “Sesame City” is worthy of a bustling city with a futuristic touch; and “A World Descends Into Chaos” sounds pretty much as the name suggests.

Chang said he had started planning a Bird world continued almost as soon as the original came out (it teased a follow up from November 2017). The reviews on the original were good enough to warrant the sequel, he said, but he also wanted to do a lot more. While writing the first album, Chang found he had ideas for more songs that, as an amateur musician, he was still looking to create.

“Sure Bird world, I wish I could have done more orchestral stuff and more soundtrack stuff, and now I have the ability to do that, ”Chang said. “This next album makes me feel like I’m taking all of that into as important a thing as possible.”

The album was created using a “long-standing Google document” in which Chang sketched out the plot, characters and settings for Back to the world of birds. While you won’t have the chance to read everything, you can get some of the details from a 28-page game manual that accompanies the album’s physical release – a double CD that’s also meant to emulate these PlayStation RPGs. classic.

Listeners won’t know the full story by the time they’re done, but Chang designed the album to have a storyline from start to finish. “I hope people can [the plot] off the beaten track, ”he said,“ but there is still a lot to imagine. “

Some tracks were created specifically to mark places or events Chang had in mind, while others started out as songs that he then incorporated into the plot. Chang hired artists to create the album cover and the illustrations for the game’s manual (Aliana Wong and Titas Antanas Vilkaitis), and he wrote the copy himself. “I put all the copy and design together, and it took forever to do,” Chang said.

The result is another album that should leave you wishing you could play the game it belongs to. The album is out today on Bandcamp and will be available on other streaming platforms from Saturday.