Announcing Two Video Games with Dreamhaven

In collaboration with video game publisher Dreamhaven we worked on the trailer music for TWO original game titles! In both cases we were provided the score files from the games to interpolate in the soundscape of the announcements.

We love this trend of incorporating the score themes into the trailers. Often marketing music involves licensed songs, or covers, or is otherwise separate sonically to the palette of the game world. As gamers, fans, and music producers - we love the continuity and respect this shows to the creatives who worked on these franchises for years before we came along and made our small contribution!

Trailers do have a specific purpose and directly lifting score cues doesn’t necessarily work for the medium. At a base level a classic trailer is ~90sec with cutdowns and many score cues are just too long, or narratively winding. For Lynked, the game has an upbeat, quirky, synthy score and we built on that with a remix-style track that incorporates harmonica, woodwinds, and vocals for the organics and new cozy synth work and electronic production for the robots. For Wildgate the team wanted to keep some of the late 70s/early 80s rock and orchestral inspirations while matching the pacing of the story beats. A focus here was touching on the game’s deep lore while swinging it back to the fun of team-based multiplayer PVP gameplay. We were able to incorporate a few stems from the game’s live-record in Nashville, which was sweet (the game studio put up an article about the music of the game which you can read & listen to here to see how it inspired the trailer).

We really loved working on these! Check out the finished products below!

Wildgate Reveal Trailer

Developer: Moonshot Games
Publisher: DreamHaven
Game Composer (themes by): Maclaine Diemer

Musicians: Stevie Blacke (violin, viola, cello), Chris Ott (trombone, bass trombone), Meredith Moore (french horn), Dan Hill (drums) and Ryan Lofty (guitar, bass, synths)

Lynked Announcement Trailer

Developer: FuzzyBot Games
Publisher: DreamHaven
Game Composer (themes by): Zach Abramson

Musicians: Will Wilde (harmonica), Jonathan J. Golko (flute), Keeley Bumford (vocal samples) and Ryan Lofty (guitar, bass, synths)

This was our original demo for the Lynked trailer, still one of our favorite things ever:

A Year in Albums

It was a fantastic 2024. In the fall we welcomed our first child, a baby boy named Nickolai. While he was a newborn we were commissioned by DreamWorks and Republic Records to create a Gabby’s Dollhouse Christmas album - taking some of the most popular songs from the series and re-lyricing for the holidays with new live recorded production. What an intense but special time. We’ll never forget it!!

Shoutout to the amazing exec team Alex Nickson, Vivian Buff, Lauren Vogel and Bree Bowles. And to the best band out there Keeley Bumford (vocals), Stevie Blacke (strings), Dan Hill (drums), Jonathan J Golko (woodwinds), Isamu McGregor (piano), and Nathan Tanouye (trombone) for laying down the holiday vibes!

We are so fortunate to work with so many wonderful people supportive of our growing family. Below are some of the albums we produced and contributed to in 2024 (click to listen on Spotify). Cheers to 2025!

Music development for VeeFriends with Gary Vee

The first three episodes of VeeFriends are out now! Produced by Moonbug Entertainment, the characters from the NFT project by Gary Vee are here reimagined into a series of animated short stories for 6-11 year old kids. Here’s the official blurb:

VeeFriends dives into the everyday challenges kids face and shows how to tackle them with confidence. Each episode follows characters as they identify obstacles and work through them, offering valuable lessons that children can apply in their own lives.

We were so stoked to be contracted to develop the music for the series and co-write the theme song with Gary himself. Back when we started Future Vega almost ten years ago we read Gary’s book “Crush It” which talks about personal branding and turning your passion into a business… so we felt right at home adapting these themes into a family format.

The team was looking to develop a sound of show - for the VeeWorld and VeeDome - and palettes for some of the 268 characters that make up the VeeFriends. Inspirations included classic theme songs from the 80s & 90s like Pokemon, Power Rangers, and Voltron in the style of modern popular music. Each of the characters is associated with a human trait that Gary believes “will lead to happiness and success, both personally and professionally” and our goal was to translate these traits into music genres. These sounds can be heard in the score for each character, and eventually, character theme songs that will serve as their walkout songs as they battle in the VeeDome.

Here’s our original pitch:

And the final episodes are below! You can see some of the ideas in the pitch deck come to life and hear a little snippet of the theme song over the main title animation. Full release of the theme song is coming soon!

Watch all the shorts on the VeeFriends YouTube channel here.

CREDITS!! A big thank you to Kathryn Power from Moonbug Entertainment for bringing us onto the show and introducing us to the Vayner team. Kathy was our executive at DreamWorks for many years and it’s awesome to be reunited again. Some of the other talented execs we get to work with include EP Stuart Evans, Creative Exec Lucas Garbera, Producer Michelle Rodda, and Production Coordinator Sarah Gibney from Moonbug, in addition to the VeeFriends team Gary Vee, Andy Krainak, Kerry Kastin and DJ Coffman.

Get Up And Get It (VeeFriends Theme Song) was written over Zoom by Gary Vee, Ryan Lofty and Courtney Lofty
Produced by Ryan Lofty & Courtney Lofty
Vocals performed by Satomaa & Ryan Lofty

Series music by us!

Pics from the VeeFriends preview at VeeCon 2024.

Fairly OddParents: A New Wish and All-New Original Songs

Fairly OddParents: A New Wish is out now!! Our first song “New Yorkity York” is in episode seven and it's a live Broadway Big Band-style musical number!

If you grew up in the early 2000s you may be familiar with the original Nickelodeon series. Fairly OddParents features a kid with fairy godparents (or in this case FAIRLY ODDPARENTS: specifically Cosmo and Wanda) who have the ability to use magic and grant wishes. However, the wishes are often poorly stated or misconstrued - and this leads to hijinks. In this episode, Hazel wishes for 15 minutes of fame and ends up with 1500 minutes of fame. Which is way too much fame. So to burn through the minutes, she turns them into New York Minutes - in the style of a broadway musical.

Click below to watch!

I was a Nick Kid. The OG series was one of my fave shows and OG songs like “Icky Vicky” and “Shiny Teeth” still intrusively enter my brain (also “Log Song” from Ren & Stimpy (which is a re-lyric of the slinky theme song (but that’s another story))). So going into this we knew we wanted to pay respect to some of the tenets of the OG show - namely the big band palette set up by composer Guy Moon, include a list like is featured in the theme song, and also write parts for Cosmo and Wanda who weren’t originally scripted to sing. Some other inspos were this John Oliver NY street musical, particularly how it changes tempo often, and this song that also talks about mysterious street gasses.

After the v1 demo New Yorkity York didn’t change too much! The biggest change was the lyric “bodega cat and pizza rat”became “bodega rat and pizza cat”. Did you know pizza rat is trademarked?

“Bodega Rat”

“Pizza Cat”

Some credits! “New Yorkity York” was written and produced by Ryan Lofty & Courtney Lofty, performed by Ashleigh Crystal Hairston (Hazel), Daran Norris (Cosmo), Susanne Blakeslee (Wanda) and Ryan Lofty (BGVs/Harmonies). Musicians: Jeremy Lappitt (Saxophone), Isamu McGregor (Piano), Craig Akin (Bass), Dennis Holt (Drums), and Ryan Lofty (Trumpets/Trombone). The cast was engineered by Ryan Greene at Nickelodeon Studios. Music Supervision by Ellie Vainshtok and Hannah Bredberg. You can hear composers Caleb Chan & Brian Chan’s lush score on the way into the clip. Advantage Audio did the mix!

Our exec team on the show included EPs Ashleigh Crystal Hairston, Lindsay Katai, and Dave Stone; and Line Producer Vandana Pulijaal.

Aaand some happy snaps live from Nickelodeon Studios:

Catch new episodes on Nickelodeon all summer long 🧚🧚‍♀️