Una captura de pantalla de GTA Online: After Hours
© Rockstar Games
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This is how Rockstar hit the club with GTA Online: After Hours
With GTA Online: After Hours introducing the club scene to the Grand Theft Auto series, we speak with Rockstar's director of music to find out more about bringing the nightclub to life.
Written by Jamie Stevenson
6 min readPublished on
Music has always played a huge part in the Grand Theft Auto series. Anyone of a certain age will remember cruising across Liberty City with She's On Fire blasting out of the speakers of your Sentinel in GTA III, while Vice City, San Andreas and GTA V all had incredible soundtracks to accompany these epic games.
One of the driving forces behind these iconic musical choices is Ivan Pavlovich, Director of Music and Audio at Rockstar Games. Pavlovich joined the developers around 15 years ago, and beforehand was a Chicago house DJ and producer who worked with Green Velvet on influential house and techno labels Cajual Records and Relief Records, before forming Guidance Recordings in 1996. Put simply, his music creds check out.
Now, the latest update to GTA Online, After Hours, is currently lighting up the screens of the series' devoted army of followers, and if there's been a strong emphasis on tunes so far, After Hours takes this focus and turns it up. Your goal is to run the hottest nightclub in town, and this means bringing in cash and patrons, dancing and socialising in the club, chilling in the VIP area, sharing a drink at the bar or watching the show from security cameras in the club's management offices. In order to make your club a success you'll need to make decisions on sound systems, staff and, most importantly, music.
We spoke with Pavlovich to find out more about how Rockstar approached the club scene. First, what was the goal when creating After Hours, and why the choice of setting?
"It started with our overall goal for After Hours, which was to bring the music, atmosphere and vibe of modern underground club culture to the world of Grand Theft Auto Online," Pavlovich says. "We try to bring something fresh to the game with every new update. After Hours was a way to combine our love of dance music and club culture with fun gameplay in the form of a social space where players can gather and hear world class DJs play amazing club music."
And After Hours can certainly promise that. In a bid to create a truly authentic club experience, Pavlovich snagged some of clubland's hottest artists, including Solomun, Dixon and The Black Madonna, who actually appear as characters in the game. Now, you may notice that Rockstar opted for DJs and producers, rather than EDM superstars. So how did this come about?
"We love dance music and it's been part of the fabric of Rockstar Games from the very beginning, and so we wanted the music in Grand Theft Auto Online: After Hours to reflect the underground as much as possible," Pavlovich continues. "We started with some of our own personal favorite DJs from different corners of the house and techno spectrum. Solomun, Tale Of Us, Dixon and The Black Madonna fit that bill, bringing us everything from deep, melodic techno to modern house, eclectic electro right through to uplifting classic house and disco. Each DJ brings something unique and fresh to the mix."
A promo shot of GTA Online: After Hours, featuring DJ Solomun.
Solomun's added to the mix in After Hours© Rockstar Games
And how did the DJs react to the prospect of being involved in one of gaming’s biggest franchises? Pavlovich says, “The DJs were really excited. At the high level that these DJs operate, they get requests for DJ mixes all the time but the Grand Theft Auto Online opportunity was something truly special, combining the chance to have their music be experienced by millions of people who may have never heard their work before with the opportunity to become characters that people interact with in the GTA universe. It’s been great to see the looks on their faces when they see themselves in the game for the first time.”
With the DJs in place and the nightclub theme offering a vast canvas to work on, Pavlovich's challenge was to then establish which music would actually be used. Thankfully, this is where the skill of these DJs came into play.
"It took a few months of working with the DJs to get a sense of what they wanted to do with their sets in the club, then we trusted them to do what they do best. Everybody delivered something amazing and unique to their own personal style," Pavlovich explains.
"Dixon's set contains everything from cool electro beats from Egyptian Lover to a bumping Deetron remix of Romanthony; Solomun debuts his own new single Customer Is King, as well as an extremely rare remix he did of Leonard Cohen; The Black Madonna brings together house and disco and features a new track of hers called We Still Believe with Jamie Principle; and Tale Of Us created an entirely new set of their own songs and mixed them exclusively for After Hours, which will become an album, called Afterlight, that we'll release soon. We couldn't be prouder of the music these DJs put together for this."
The firm emphasis on music in After Hours required a somewhat different approach to that usually taken when pulling together the soundtrack for a GTA title however. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the key difference was that for After Hours, Rockstar focused on music that you could potentially hear at a set by any one of their resident DJs.
"Rather than focusing on individual tracks, it was about making the mixes perfect for the club," Pavlovich says. "Then you get to relive each mix in the car on an online-exclusive radio station, Los Santos Underground Radio, one week after each resident DJ debuts in the club."
As huge fans of the radio stations in GTA, from Flashback to The Beat, we were also fascinated to learn just how Pavlovich, and Rockstar, deliver such memorable frequencies.
"We curate the radio stations to each GTA to paint a musical picture of the time and place in which each game is set," he says. "Hopefully, as a player, you’re going to be spending a long time in each city, changing stations in your car and being exposed to new music so we make sure to not only accurately reflect the sounds of each location, but also to do more than just put together a string of well-known songs."
This approach has resulted in some huge artists appearing in GTA, before they blew up. "Turning people on to new music is definitely a part of it," Pavlovich adds. "We want to surface artists that have a meaningful connection to the city, but also artists that we love and that we feel other people will love too, whether it's Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean, Dixon, Tale Of Us, Solomun and the Black Madonna."
With such a remarkable track record of memorable soundtracks, it seems Rockstar's streak is going to continue, with clubgoers already hitting the floor with GTA Online: After Hours. This success should come as no surprise. After all, according to Pavlovich, this love of music runs right through the company. "Everyone on the team, from the company founders down, cares deeply about the music that makes the cut so the conversations can be pretty passionate."
GTA Online: After Hours is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
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