Need For Speed composer Saki Kaskas' final work to be released posthumously

Saki Kaskas, who composed the scores for the first five Need For Speed games as well contributing music to Mass Effect 2 (the Afterlife club theme was his), tragically died of an overdose in 2016. At the time he was working on an album of his own called Theodosius, described as "covering musical styles from pop, funk, classical and jazz to the heavy rock guitar he was famous for on many EA Sports titles". Now, a fellow videogame composer is about to complete that project.

Jeff van Dyck, who composed the scores for the early Total War games and was audio lead on Alien: Isolation, brought together a team of musicians to complete Kaskas' work.

"It has been an emotional journey working on the album," van Dyck says, "somewhat confronting listening to recordings of him playing, as if he's still here. I guess this is how I've chosen to process his passing."

The posthumous album will be released on June 28, with a launch event in Vancouver, after which it will be available via various digital music services.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.