Composer and designer Lena Raine explains how Pigstep altered Minecraft's approach to music: 'The prompt I keep hearing is "Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers"'

Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

Lena Raine's formative gaming experience was playing Myst on a Mac Quadra 610, exploring Cyan Worlds' enigmatic island in parallel with her father: "We each had our own playthrough, so we were sending each other notes in the little journal that it came with," she says. "I still have the little book that we wrote in."

Raine always aspired to be a composer for video games, but she initially joined the industry as a games tester for Nintendo America, working several other testing jobs before being hired by ArenaNet as a game designer. While working on Guild Wars 2, Raine designed a bell-choir minigame for the MMO's Winter's Day Christmas update, including writing the music for it. "It was a bizarre first-step into game music," she says. "But that eventually led to at last some visibility for the other music I was writing."

After leaving ArenaNet, Raine wrote the soundtrack for 2018's Celeste, and spent several years composing music for Minecraft, including several of its most popular 'Disc' tracks like Pigstep, Creator, and Otherside. Raine is currently writing music for the early access volleyball RPG Beastieball, while also returning to game design with her own project ANOTHEREAL, an RPG with schmup-style combat. "I have been working on [it] basically since the pandemic," she says. "I'm trying to aim to have something released within the decade."

Raine took a break from her various projects to show me around the digital concert hall of her steam library. We discussed Deadlock, sorted her schmup collection, and took a trip down MMO memory lane.

What game are you currently playing?

The current game that I'm playing is Deadlock. I've been playing it for a while now, basically since it was pretty early in that beta, alpha, whatever phase. I play with my wife and some other friends that we've got.

I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've never been a MOBA person and I've never been a competitive shooter person either. Usually, I get tremendously frustrated with online competitive shooters because I'm not very good. I'm not great at those sorts of games.

But I love the style and the world that Valve has made for Deadlock. I love spooky occult stuff. I just love that entire vibe. A lot of my personal online characters are like demon girl aesthetics, and so I'm just like "This is a game for me".

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I've been really committed to learning at least one character, so I've been focusing on Ivy, which is the gargoyle. She's awesome. She's from the first set of characters. I initially just laser-focussed on her. I was just like "Oh, she's really cool".

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed

The Mermaid Mask. I was playing it on the Steam Machine, so technically it's still installed. But it's a single-player, linear story game, so I will probably uninstall it at some point to save space.

It's still installed because I finished it yesterday, or two days ago. But I really loved that game. I played the previous game—Tangle Tower—in the Detective Grimoire series, and they just have such a playful way of designing characters and presenting them. The voice acting is really good. The mysteries are fun and interesting to figure out as you're playing through it. It's a detective point-and-click adventure, gathering clues and talking to all the suspects.

There's just [a] ridiculous amount of items in the game that you can ask everyone about. And it's all just voice dialogue about all of them. I'm just such a completionist about it. I just sit in front of the TV and I've been listening to the characters talk about 30 different items for an hour.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

The one that I really wanted to talk about is Final Fantasy 11, which is one of the first PC games that I got fully obsessed with when I was younger, at high school into college basically. It's got uninstalled and reinstalled over the years. But I have it installed. I've checked in on my character, who has been there since the initial release date … I played a little Tarutaru character and mostly was a red mage and monk.

The interesting piece of history with me and Final Fantasy 11 is that I initially imported it from Japan. It has since transferred over to English servers primarily. But when I initially started playing the game, it was not out in the US yet, and you had to import the game. You had to make a Japanese account with a Japanese address. But there were forums set up for people that wanted to import the game.

So I joined these forums, and these were people who also played like Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, so we were all buzzing about this new game Final Fantasy 11. So there were instructions of like "here's translated screenshots of every single setup thing to do."

I had taken one year of Japanese in high school. So I knew enough to navigate a menu. I didn't know how to converse very well in Japanese, but I knew what the characters for like black mage, red mage, warrior, attack, level up, those sorts of things.

[But] the thing about Final Fantasy 11 is it was such a deeply social game, because to level up past a certain point you needed to join a party. You could not solo past a certain point. So people would group in in levelling parties, and unless I was playing with friends, I would be in a group of Japanese players that I was trying to communicate with, and it really depended on the sophistication of the conversation that was going on that I could blend in or out myself as speaking English.

The majority of friendships that I had was with the English-speaking community, and it's funny because a number of those people have gone on to have some pretty illustrious careers. One of the people that I played with was Maximilian Dood, who's a fairly well-to-do YouTuber now. Another friend that I played PSO and Final Fantasy with was Jason Oestreicher who worked for Giant Bomb for a while. So I have these weird industry connections from playing this import Final Fantasy game years ago.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

The highest number of hours is Elden Ring at 282 hours. However, not on Steam, I looked this up also, Final Fantasy 14, I logged into my character and did the playtime conversion, and it's 1,308 hours.

I feel like I've talked a lot about Final Fantasy, [so] to talk a little bit about Elden Ring. I've played pretty much all of the Dark Souls games and mostly attempted to do co-op with them because my wife and I love to play the games together, and we always have a very rough experience when it comes to FromSoft online stuff, because it's very insistent on opening yourself up to adversity when you're playing together with friends.

But with Elden Ring, when that came out, this was right before we moved to Canada … [when] we were in this transit dead space where all our stuff is half-packed and we just need to find the right place. And so we were just calming our brains down by playing Elden Ring together.

That also includes the DLC up until the final boss, because the final boss of the DLC was too steep of a difficulty curve for the build that we were both running. This was also at the time the person that got famous for soloing Melania, they came back and they were Let Me Solo Them instead. And so my wife actually summoned that person, who beat the final boss for her. I was extremely jealous.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It's a tricky question for me because, with Steam existing as a service, it's very difficult to not uninstall something if you need to save space. But I was looking at what I did have installed and I saw a pattern, which is I basically leave all my favourite schmups installed.

I love going back to games like ZeroRanger, Adventures of Ten and Till, Deathsmiles, Mushihimesama, a number of classic and newer schmups that I love playing, because it's that kind of arcade experience [where] it never gets old. You can keep going back to it, keep improving on it. It's been good research also, because I'm working on a game that has schmup combat in it. But I'm making it because I have this experience with schmups of not being great at them.

A lot of times it has to do with the music too. A really good schmup soundtrack is basically an album.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

This one's easy because I'm a composer and I work on the computer, so it's my music software. My DAW of choice right now is Bitwig Studio. It's by ex-developers of Ableton. They split off and made this new DAW called Bitwig that is like if you took a bunch of chains off Ableton in a way where you an rewire everything under the hood.

There's just a really open approach to how it's designed, where you can use basically every version of VST, which is instrument software, that's out there. You can use Clap, which is an open-source plugin format. It can open files from Ableton. It can open files and import the settings and metadata and stuff.

It's the one that has won me over. I've been using Ableton since working on Celeste, because used to use Cakewalk Sonar. The very first piece of music that I wrote for Celeste, I wrote in Cakewalk Sonar, and then I switched to Ableton after that … I literally can't open the first level of Celeste anymore, because it's in software I don't have installed anymore.

The very first [Minecraft update] I worked on was the revitalisation of the Nether, which was the underworld space, and I was pulling from a bunch of survival horror vibes, writing this scary music that was really unsettling, which is funny that that was the first … because the existing tracks that Daniel, C418, did was very calming, soothing.

What most people know my Minecraft music as is the three discs that I wrote, as opposed to the tons of other tracks that I wrote … it's funny because, for [Pigstep] too it was just the developers saying to me, "For discs, you just write whatever you want" because the initial discs were just tunes that C418 wrote that wasn't necessarily related to anything.

One of the throwaway ideas was "What would music the Piglins listen to sound like?" And so I was just like "Dubstep for pigs!" That was the prompt that I made for myself, and I just made a funny little tune and people just love it.

It's created a funny effect. I think at Mojang now, because they've since worked with a couple other composers—I feel like my tenure has expired. I had some fun there, but I want to focus on other projects—but they've worked with other composers since then. But the prompt I keep hearing is 'Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers.' I started something there. It's gonna keep on getting discs that are bangers.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

Immaculate. I don't really believe in putting anything on my desktop. I have my wallpaper, and it's a cute piece of art, and if I have anything minimised, I look at the art, and I have a folder structure for everything else.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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