Soundtrack for the game Fossil Hunters, by Reptoid Games, an action-adventure game about digging for fossils and building your own dinosaurs. Featuring live percussion, a 60-piece orchestra, and solo piano versions of the game themes.

"When I started working on the music for Fossil Hunters, I actually had a few influences in mind. I was thinking a lot about Super Mario World, Indiana Jones, Monster Hunter, and Saint Saens' Danse Macabre. Mario World has this fantastic main melody, and almost every song in the soundtrack uses it, but in different styles, times, keys, etc - and I wanted to take this approach here. The goal was to make the melody familiar and “always nearby” but without it getting annoying or repetitive.

To figure out what that main theme would sound like, I thought about the adventurous opening fanfares from Indiana Jones and Monster Hunter. I think those influences are pretty obvious when you hear the intro of the first track. I play brass instruments, so even before we got the Budapest Scoring Symphonic Orchestra involved I was going to perform all the parts myself.

The last piece of the puzzle was to reinforce the percussive nature of the digging and sweeping of the gameplay, so I used a lot of percussion in the score. Danse Macabre has this fantastic “dancing bones” sound in the xylophone, and it just felt right to do something similar in a game about connecting fossils. I’ve always imagined stalactites and stalagmites to sound like a marimba, so when we’re playing music in the Mushroom Ruins, I am imagining that it’s the level itself that is making this music." - Robby Duguay