We had the wonderful opportunity to chat with RockIt Gaming, who is producing music for video games.
Hi, Vince Newsom (Vinny Noose) and Russell McKamey! Thank you for granting the interview. Your music is amazing and we’re excited to speak with you about. You formed Rockit Gaming, which creates commercial quality music with lyrics themed around video games. What inspired this decision?
It all started back in 2008 when Rockit found some pretty big success writing songs about COD World at War Zombies for fun with an old group called Borderline Disaster. Years later in 2015 he started Rockit Gaming with Vinny and had thought not only to make songs about one game but about every popular game and games we love! It’s a great way for us to make music for a living, about topics that we and so many other people love!
Thus far, you have garnered over 36.2 million YouTube view and over 1 million monthly streams on Spotify alone. Are you surprised by the success of your production?
To be honest, we wouldn’t have started doing this if we hadn’t predicted its success. We knew with the size of the video game industry and how big pop soundtracks already were for movies, that this industry was about to explode! We’re so happy to be a part of it, and we hope to redouble our numbers for the second year in a row!
Your latest single for the Rainbow Six: Outbreak Song, “Sick.” Is hot! We love it! Why did you choose to rap the lyrics?
Rainbow Six in the eyes of many musicians would absolutely be a new single but we actually release NEW SONGS EVERY FRIDAY on our YouTube channel as well as on Music streaming and purchasing services like Spotify and Apple Music so we’ve had a few since then! We chose to rap about that specific mode of the game because it was a brand new game type for Rainbow Six and our original Rainbow Six song is one of our most successful with more than 4 Million streams on Spotify! Plus writing songs about zombies, in general, is just one of the most fun topics!
Tell us about your songwriting process. How do you choose a topic to produce for a video game?
I would say Rockit and I are some of the best people at following trending topics online. Finding the right game is about finding a mix of a trending topic and something you love.
What has been your biggest challenge in creating music for video games?
I’d say it’s honestly more of a lack of challenges. As an artist a lot of times you will get sucked into writing in a single style and trying your hardest to follow up on that style with newer singles and albums. Since we write about video games, and since songs about things like Fortnite aren’t going to sound at all similar to a song about, say Rainbow Six Siege: Outbreak, we have a lot of breathing room and get to be extremely creative when it comes to writing music about different games. While Fortnite is going to be a happy 70’s disco sort of vibe, Rainbow Six Siege: Outbreak, as you heard, had a much darker and ominous tone to it with our own little dark pop twist chorus!
What’s the ultimate direction of your music?
The next goal would be to continue creating pop/rock/hip-hop style soundtracks that are sold alongside video games in stores. We had the opportunity to do this once with tinyBuild’s game Hello Neighbor and the album has proved to be wildly successful! We’d love to team up with other game publishers and developers to work on similar content! People have tried to do this before in the past with artists like Flo Rida, but that proved to come across to the gaming audience as not authentic. When musical content is created by nerds, FOR nerds and the production quality sounds like it could be on the radio, that’s when you can have success, AS we proved with tinyBuild!
How can fans-to-be gain access to your music?
You can find our music all over YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc. Essentially every music streaming and purchasing platform!
What are their musical icons/influences?
Rockit and I both have a love for artists like Blink 182, Twenty One Pilots, Panic! At the Disco all the way to Charlie Puth, or even the Weeknd! We stay eclectic with our tastes and influences, but focus heavily on production quality!
When looking back on the production of your music, what resonated with you the most and why?
What resonates with us most other than the production quality, is the melody. As writers of over 200 songs, melodies can get interesting, at the end of the day we try to make every single one unique but also memorable so you have the chorus stuck in your head hours after listening to the song!
In your opinion, how could a singer make an impact on the world?
At the end of the day, a singer is an influencer, and his/her voice or lyrics could change someone’s entire life, or impact a nation. Depending on what you are going for. You could also just influence a lot of people to a party, really… really hard. And that’s dope! Haha
If you had to do it all over again, would you still choose this career? Would you do anything differently?
110% Yes for both of us! How many people get to say they do what they love for a living? Neither of us would change it for the world!
Do you have anything else you would like to share about the music?
Even though our music is about video games, we encourage you to check it out if you aren’t a big gamer. Our specialty is writing songs with lyrics specific enough that the gamers will understand, but general enough that a non-gamer could still love it for the SUPER CATCHY chorus! Check out our YouTube Channel or Spotify for NEW MUSIC EVERY FRIDAY! All you have to do is search “Rockit Gaming”! Thanks again for the interview! #GameOn
Connect with RockIt Gaming:
Web: http://www.rockitgamingproductions.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8iW11Pk6HLELCH_mcaQNA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rockitmusicproductionsllc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RockitGamingYT
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rockitgamingrec/
Featured Image Credit: Maximus McKamey (Rockit Gaming).
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