In general you can approach making the trailer in two ways.
Either build it around the music or work the music into it. I guess the fact that we started with the visual part kind of betrays how we went about it.
Well, scratch that. We had some ideas for a song that we wanted to accompany the trailer and those were thrown around for quite a while. Some of more exotic ones were a hardcore punk, an old school rap, a pure piano and violin number, a 70s Polish song and contemporary rock hits. But nothing worked.
We listened to hundreds of songs. Proposed them, argued why they did or did not work, and moved in another direction. Quite a few at some point seemingly perfect stopped feeling so perfect for this or that reason. We felt we should go with a Polish song, but couldn’t find the right one. At some point we bounced in another direction and went for huge, anthemic hits. A long running one was David Bowie’s “Heroes” (no, not the more obvious but way less fitting “Warsaw”). Talking of obvious choices Muse’s “Uprising” also was considered for a while. There was the ambiguous “Wish you were here” by Pink Floyd that felt both right and wrong at the same time. But there was always something not working.
Enter Mariusz. The composer on WARSAW. Artist in a true meaning of the word. A musician. Game developer. And a close friend. It took him the better part of five minutes to come out with “Varsovie”.
Why was this the right choice you ask?
A Polish singer. A song about Warsaw. With contemporary sound. And an accordion.
It. Was. Perfect.
It took us around one month to get everyone on board for the project. The management of Monika Brodka and the two other co-credited authors: Bartosz Dziedzic and Quentin Carenzo went along. Mariusz remastered the track bringing out some of the instruments and our favourite - that purposefully out of tune accordion that you can hear at the beginning and the end of the announcement trailer.
That it required an extra pair of ears to introduce us to one of the largest contemporary Polish hits with Varsovie in the title is so painfully obvious it doesn't even require pointing out.
So, we locked down the deal. Had the terms negotiated. All we needed was the final green light. Which was due sometime over the next seven days.
All good right? Yes, only we had our exclusive reveal spot of WARSAW the following day. On the largest gaming website in the world. No biggie.