Squadron 42 Music: Geoff Zanelli’s Score and the Sound of Manchester

A great space battle needs more than a beautiful sky full of ships. The music has to carry the excitement without burying the warning that could save your life, and a quiet conversation needs room to breathe when the shooting stops. Squadron 42’s Manchester preview has brought that less photogenic part of the campaign into focus: what players heard.

In his third Manchester debrief, attendee GautSlayer describes the sound as a particular highlight of his five-hour session. His account of the developer panel gives us a closer look at the challenge behind that impression.

Geoff Zanelli’s score has a long history

Geoff Zanelli is Squadron 42’s composer. The June 2016 studio report already described adaptive music being introduced alongside specially composed music for major set pieces. The campaign was being built to accommodate both the player’s changing pace and moments with a more tightly directed dramatic shape.

By December 2018, the audio team was working with Zanelli on themes for different races and important characters, alongside another round of music implementation. They help explain why the score is more interesting than a collection of tracks assigned to individual missions.

A recurring theme gives a story something familiar to return to. You can recognise a person or a place through the music before anyone explains its significance. When that same musical idea returns in a different mood, it can colour a scene without another line of dialogue. That is the appeal of this approach to a long space adventure: the soundtrack can become part of how you remember the people in it.

The player sets the pace

From roughly 29:52 in his debrief, GautSlayer recalls a discussion of the difficulty of achieving a cinematic mix when the player can move and look around. He describes music shifting with the action and quieter exploration, with the mix prioritising the story and the player’s focus. At around 33:00, he also recalls Zanelli discussing recurring musical themes associated with characters and places.

For us, the interesting question is how gracefully those changes happen. A film editor knows exactly when a shot ends. A player might linger, turn back or spend another minute looking around. Music that changes too abruptly can make the machinery behind a scene obvious; music that stays at full intensity can exhaust the moment before the player reaches it.

The earlier official description of adaptive music alongside bespoke set-piece scoring suggests two complementary tools for that problem. Some passages can respond to changing play, while a carefully staged sequence can have music shaped specifically around its drama. That does not tell us every rule used by the finished game, but it makes the ambition easier to understand.

Hearing the crew through the battle

GautSlayer’s panel summary also describes the need to choose which sounds deserve attention when many things happen at once. The implication for a player is simple: impressive explosions are only half the job. If an important voice disappears beneath them, the spectacle has cost you part of the scene.

That balance is where we would want Squadron 42 to earn its praise. The thrill of a battle should survive alongside the human voices inside it. A quieter passage should feel deliberate, without needing constant musical insistence that something important is happening.

Manchester offers an encouraging eyewitness impression, not a verdict on the entire campaign. We have not played this build ourselves, and one attendee’s experience cannot establish how every scene will sound on every setup. The developer reports establish the foundations; the preview account suggests how those ideas felt to someone in the room.

For the wider range of attendee experiences, read our Manchester playtest reactions. The townhall overview covers the broader campaign discussion.