How Composer Lena Raine Plays: Deadlock, Myst and Her Steam Library

For Lena Raine, game music started with a family project. She and her father each played Myst on a Mac Quadra 610, then passed notes back and forth in the game’s journal as they explored Cyan Worlds’ strange island. She still has that handwritten book.

Composing for games was always the ambition, but Raine entered the industry through testing: first at Nintendo America, then at other testing jobs. ArenaNet eventually hired her as a game designer. On Guild Wars 2, she built a bell-choir minigame for the Winter’s Day holiday update and wrote its music, too. It was an unusual route into game composition, she says, but it gave the rest of her music some visibility.

That opening led to the soundtrack for 2018’s Celeste and, later, years of work on Minecraft. Among the best-known results are the records Pigstep, Creator, and Otherside. Now she’s composing for the early access volleyball RPG Beastieball, while returning to design with ANOTHEREAL, her RPG with shoot-’em-up-style combat. She’s been at work on it since around the pandemic and is aiming to release something “within the decade.”

We took a tour through Raine’s Steam library, from Deadlock to her shoot-’em-up collection, with a detour through the MMOs that shaped her.

What game are you currently playing?

Deadlock has been in Raine’s rotation since its early, hard-to-pin-down testing phase. She plays with her wife and friends, even though MOBAs and competitive shooters usually aren’t her kind of game. Online matches can be frustrating when you’re not especially good at them. The game’s mood, though, keeps pulling her back.

Valve’s occult, spooky world is a natural fit for her tastes. “This is a game for me,” she says. She’s also made a point of learning one character well: Ivy, the gargoyle from the initial roster. The character’s design caught her immediately.

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

Raine had just finished The Mermaid Mask, a single-player story adventure she’d played on the Steam Machine. It’s technically still installed; she’d completed it the day before, or perhaps two days earlier, and expects she’ll eventually remove it to free up space.

That can wait. She loved the game’s playful character design, strong voice performances, and mysteries, much as she did in Tangle Tower, the previous Detective Grimoire game. It’s a point-and-click investigation built around clues and conversations with suspects. The sheer volume of objects you can ask about is part of the appeal: Raine’s completionist streak had her listening to characters discuss dozens of items for an hour at a time.

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

The game Raine most wanted to talk about was Final Fantasy 11, one of her first deep PC gaming obsessions. She started playing in high school and continued into college. The game has come and gone from her drive over the years, but it’s installed now, with her original character still there: a Tarutaru who mostly played red mage and monk.

Raine first played by importing the Japanese version before the game was available in the US. That meant finding a Japanese address to create an account, then relying on online forums where other importers shared translated screenshots and setup instructions. Many of those players had also spent time with Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast, and the community was excited to get into a new MMO together.

One year of high-school Japanese gave Raine enough vocabulary to navigate menus and recognize terms such as black mage, red mage, warrior, attack, and level up. Conversation was another matter. Final Fantasy 11 required parties to progress past a certain point, so she often had to join Japanese-speaking groups. Depending on how complex the chat became, she could sometimes pass as an English speaker and sometimes had to make that clear.

Most of her lasting friendships came from the English-speaking community. Some familiar names eventually built public careers: one was YouTuber Maximilian Dood; another friend from both Phantasy Star Online and Final Fantasy was Jason Oestreicher, who later worked at Giant Bomb. An imported MMO from years ago turned into an unexpected source of industry connections.

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

Steam puts Elden Ring at 282 hours. That number looks modest next to Raine’s total in Final Fantasy 14: she checked her character’s playtime and converted it to 1,308 hours.

Elden Ring still has its own story. Raine and her wife have tried co-op in most of the Dark Souls games, though FromSoftware’s online systems can make playing together feel like volunteering for extra trouble. When Elden Ring arrived, they were in the unsettled stretch before a move to Canada, living among half-packed belongings and waiting to find the right place. Playing together gave them a way to quiet their brains.

They made it through the DLC to its final boss, where the difficulty spike proved too much for their builds. Raine’s wife summoned the player known for soloing Malenia, who had returned under the name “Let Me Solo Them,” and watched them beat the boss. Raine admits she was jealous.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Raine doesn’t think any single game is immune to the uninstall button when disk space runs low. But her installed library reveals a pattern: she tends to keep her favorite shoot-’em-ups around. The arcade loop stays fresh because there’s always room to improve a run, and the games make useful reference material for the shoot-’em-up combat in her own project.

Her regulars include ZeroRanger, Adventures of Ten and Till, Deathsmiles, and Mushihimesama, alongside other classics and newer releases. She’s drawn to the genre partly because she isn’t especially good at it. The music helps, too: a great shoot-’em-up soundtrack can stand on its own as an album.

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

For a composer who works at a computer, the answer is straightforward: her digital audio workstation is Bitwig Studio. The program comes from former Ableton developers, and Raine likes how open it is. She describes it as Ableton with more of the internal connections exposed, giving her room to rewire things under the hood.

Bitwig supports a wide range of VST instruments, the open-source plugin format Clap, and Ableton files, including their settings and metadata. That flexibility won her over after years of using Ableton. Before that, she worked in Cakewalk Sonar; the first music she wrote for Celeste came from that software. She can’t open the game’s first level anymore because she no longer has Sonar installed.

Raine’s Minecraft work also began with a sharp change in mood. Her first update was the Nether’s revival, and she drew on survival-horror sounds to make unsettling music for the underworld. That was a striking assignment given how calming Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld’s existing tracks were.

Most listeners know Raine’s Minecraft music through the three discs she wrote, though she also composed many other tracks. The developers told her she could write whatever she wanted for the records, following C418’s earlier approach of making tunes that weren’t tied to specific game events. One disposable idea became the prompt “What would music the Piglins listen to sound like?” Raine’s answer to herself: “Dubstep for pigs!” She made a playful track, and people loved it.

That success seems to have shaped what the studio asks for now. Raine says Mojang has since worked with other composers, and she’s ready to focus on other projects after a good run there. But Pigstep set a high bar: the request she keeps hearing is for more “bangers.” It may have started a lasting run of punchy Minecraft discs.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

Immaculate, by design. Raine keeps only artwork as her wallpaper; when her windows are minimized, that’s what she sees. Everything else lives in folders.