StickSkills.com is a gaming website with gaming news, reviews and discussion forums! They contacted me and asked me if I wanted to provide intro music to their podcast, which I gladly did. So without further ado, I present to you the latest episode of the StickSkills podcast, featuring intro music by yours truly.

In the middle of this week I was contacted and asked if I wanted to provide a piece of intro music for a charity stream that would run this weekend. Despite the short notice I agreed and made them a brand new 30 second stinger to use.

If you want to hear it, and give a little money to charity - go here. It starts at 1PM GMT+1 today.

TheGameDrunkard is a YouTube user who puts up some funny game related clips - and he's made a top ten list with the best video game music that (quote) "you would probably hear in a club, or at a rave." (end quote)

BCR made the top spot, and the man behind the movie lets me know that my remixes "can shatter realities, destroy religions, and wipe out continents with the most perfect blend of OONTZ (he's) ever encountered".

Not surprisingly, I am flattered.

VIDEO HERE!

The annual Awesome Games Done Quick speedrun marathon, raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, starts this week on Sunday the 6th of January and goes on for one week - day and night - and is streamed from here.

Donators can win prizes during the marathon, and originally I was supposed to help out by giving donors the chance to choose what VG song I should make a remix of as a prize - but unfortunately that fell through due to some miscommunication. I'll be participating in one of the future events though.

Go to the Awesome Games Done Quick live stream on Sunday and watch videogame athletes with mad skills beat games in minutes that would take you hours to complete, and donate money to help fight cancer! Spread the word about this to everyone you know who is interested in videogames, fighting cancer, or both!

Hi everybody! The long awaited Payday - The Heist soundtrack is finally out. On the 20th of October (two days from now) it was one year since the game was released - so we just made it out the door in time for the anniversery!

Anyway, the soundtrack is available on Bandcamp.com and on top of the 17 tracks (amounting 58 minutes of music) the download also consists of remix material and Payday themed ringtones! All for only $5! All tracks can be previewed by streaming them in their entirety on Bandcamp.

A slightly different version of the soundtrack release (without the ringtones but with in-game mask unlocks instead) will be released on Steam later today - I'll make a post about that too when it's out!

I hope that one day I will be able to produce a soundtrack that can top or even the popularity of the BCR soundtrack, but right now it feels pretty unlikely. Even now, four years after its release, it's still getting a lot of love and attention. Here's another article that - quite in-depth - analyses and praises the BCR soundtrack.

My computer got infected recently. I could save my music projects but before I had the time to wipe the harddrive and reinstall everything, the entire laptop was stolen (I do all my music on my laptop).

So, now I haven't done any new music in months - which is sorta draining me. I gotta get me a new computer and get started on all these musical ideas that are circling around in my head.

Anyway, the British gaming website Reaction Time has a new section called VGMonday where they list the best videogame music soundtracks - and right out of the gate it's the BCR soundtrack!

I realize that the BCR soundtrack is becoming my magnum opus - but I gotta at least try to show the world that I can do other things than just remix Gondamin's Bionic Commando tracks... ;-)

I think the BCR2 soundtrack was overlooked, I really do. I worked my ass off to compose new melodies that would be on par with the awesome, catchy melodies of the old game.

In the end I might have proven that I don't have the melody writing skills to match Yunko Tamiya, but I also think it's a proof of how much the nostalgia of the listeners played into the popularity of the BCR soundtrack. Also, the soundtrack wasn't released for download or even used in the trailers for the game.

Anyway, what I want to say is I think fans of retro style electronica have a whole bunch of overlooked gems to discover amongst the BCR2 tracks! Previosly, the BCR2 tracks available on YouTube were very few and if you wanted to find certain tracks from later in the game you'd have to listen to ten minute rips of the entire music sound bank where all intros and loops were all junbled up.

Now, a broader selection of tracks have started popping - so while there still is no official release of the BCR2 soundtrack (contact Capcom if you want one), you can at least find most of the tracks on YouTube. Here is a selection:

Main menu theme

Prolog theme

Papagayan anthem

Fascility theme

Jungle theme (I call this one "Flutes of Ektanadu")

Mountain theme (this C64 oozing original track is my personal favorite)

Mini boss theme

Boss theme

Final boss theme

Thanks to YouTube users RickDanto, RarelyHardcoreGamer and jordak92 for ripping and putting this stuff up.

GamesRadar had an article two days ago that listed twelve videogame soundtracks available in iTunes that you "cannot afford to be without". I'm very honored that the Bionic Commando Rearmed made the list!

In the motivation for Bionic Commando Rearmed making the list, article author David Houghton says that the remake is "pitch-perfect" (something I also take some credit for) and that its music is "fun, imaginative" and "pulse-poundingly exciting".

Today is my birthday, and if you remember I put up a new track on my birtday last year - so I think I'd put up one this year too.

This is a crazy experiment... I was aiming to do a David Guetta style house track with some semi repetitive vocals, but it's frickin' difficult to stray away from that distorte 8-bit sound of mine - so the track became something of an exciting crossover. Anyway - for anyone who's been wondering - this is what it sounds like if Simon Viklund tries to do a David Guetta radio hit:

I recently did an interview with Swedish national radio (SR), and it aired this past Friday. All SR programs are put up on the internet so anyone who speaks Swedish can go to SR's website and liste to it - I talk a little about working as a video game music composer and how that is different from composing to other media.

The interview - in both audio and text  can be found here.

At the very end of the audio interview you get to hear some music from "Payday: The Heist", and I think it's the first time music from the game appears in media outside of video captures of gameplay - so that's a treat that anyone can enjoy whether they speak Swedish or not!

Anyone who has seen the movie Heat will hear resemblance to the music heard in the famous bank robbery scene - and yes, you guessed right: This is the music for the bank robbery heist in Payday.

The website Square Enix Music Online recently contacted me and wanted to do an interview with me. I tried by best to disregard of the issue I had with the fact that the site has taken its name from the corporation that brought my former company down (ok, that was a joke - but I leave it up to you to figure out what part of the sentence was the joke) and agreed to answer their questions.

The guy doing the interview, Chris Greening, sent over his questions and I was very impressed with how in-depth they were and how they projected such a genuine interest in me and my projects. As always I set quite a lot of time aside to answer the questions thoroughly and in my eyes it became a very good piece ...If you're interested in Simon Viklund and prepared to plow through an ocean of text, that is.

Anyway, the interview can be read right here.

Aftonbladet is a Swedish newspaper, and they have a videogame section called "Spela" (the word means "Play" in Swedish). They recently did an interview with me and Adam Tensta regarding our involvement in Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Online Edition, which is now up and can be read right here.

It's come to my attention that not everyone is entirely happy with my SF3 remixes - but I won't defend the creative liberties I took in reinterpreting the songs. After all, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

However, I do want to bring out a specific email that I received a while back - so full of emotion that there was no room for punctuation. You can read the email below, and my response below it in the green box - sent through iTunes.

I hope my gift finds Mr. "Urien" well and I trust that I can now count him as a fully satisfied fighting game customer. Spread love, not hate.

I'm not saying this because my music is in the game, but because I think game projects as ambitious as this deserve to do well: Get Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Online Edition!

Use your power as a consumer (your money, that is) to tell Capcom and other companies that if they put as much effort into a remake (or any production for that matter) as they have done with SFIII3rdS:OE, you embrace it.

Apart from the remixed soundtrack done by yours truly you get high-quality visual filters, tons of challenges and unlockable content, great training modes, GGPO online functionality, YouTube sharing and more!

Show your support and let ambitious game development prevail - get the game for only $15 on PSN and XBLA right away!

Last week I did an interview with Level 3, a weekly television show/website based in Melbourne, Austrailia. With the little free time I currently have in my schedule these days all we could do was a text interview for their website, so we did. I talk about how little I actually play fighting games, the remix process as well as other topics. You can read it right here.

I was at GamesCom in Cologne, Germany last week, showcasing Payday: The Heist to the media. PlayStation blog did a video interview with me where I talk about some of the many fine points of Payday.

On Friday, my colleague Ulf Andersson and Beefy Media's Adam Boyes attended Joystiq's "GamesCom 2011 day 3" podcast. We had a fun and interesting discussion about Grin, our new projects and the business in general!

Finally, G4TV has put up a short video interview I did when I was over in LA a month ago, and you can look at that one right here.

In other news, I'm working hard on the music for Payday - hopefully I can put up some sample clips on the site pretty soon!

Damn, that's a long title - even abbreviated it's super long! I'm talking about Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Online Edition of course!

I just wanted to drop by my blog and wipe off the cobwebs in here (I know, I know, but development of Payday: The Heist is taking all my time) and post some news: A new trailer has been released for SFIII3rdS:OE - edited to my music - and you can look at it (and listen to it) RIGHT HERE!

In other news, there's a new trailer for Payday: The Heist out (and no, I did not make the highspeed ska-punk music used in that trailer). Also, there's an interview with me up on the official PlayStation blog, where I give some thorough descriptions of what makes Payday: The Heist tick as well as it does (because believe me, this game is ticking!)

Now, I gotta get back to work... ;-)

Those who follow me on Twitter will know that I recently inherited a banjo from my late grandpa'. I now have the means to make a great interpretaion of the music from Gun.Smoke (NES)! I don't know about you, but I've always interpreted the instrument that starts off that song as a banjo...

I haven't had much time to work on my remix/interpretation, and I don't know when I'll get the opportunity to continue working on it, but I have the first few seconds at sketch quality. It's total Ennio Morricone style, complete with a rhythmical whip lash! Let me know if you like it!

We got a Twitter account for Overkill (which several people on the team is "tweeting" through) so I figured I'd get a Twitter account for my solo projects as well. So after launching this blog, the YouTube channel, the Facebook page and Twitter, I guess there's only MySpace left? Or do I need to be on Soundcloud as well!? One thing at a time now, I'm not good at multitasking...

...and to those who were sent to this blog post from my Twitter account, you just got caught in an endless loop! Moh-huh-hah-haa!