Troy Baker and Austin Wintory talk becoming Indiana Jones and writing death metal polkas for Counter-Strike

You almost certainly know actor Troy Baker for at least one of his game roles over the past decade. Joel in The Last of Us. Indiana Jones in the Great Circle. The Joker. And if you follow games you’re nearly as likely to know the work of composer Austin Wintory, who’s behind the award-winning music for games like Journey, Abzu, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and Sword of the Sea.

What you might not know is that the two are also good friends, and will egg each other on regardless of whether the cameras are rolling or not.

“He just says yes to shit,” Wintory exclaimed when we sat the two down for an interview at the recent Game Developers Conference. “I have yet to find the limits. There’s only three or four people I’ve ever worked with where it has become a sport for me to go ‘what’s something I can throw at them, that I know they’ll rise to the occasion.'”

The two have hosted a podcast about music together called You Gotta Hear This, and when they collaborated on an orchestral concert, Wintory challenged Baker to dress up as “a British guy in a bunny suit” and walk through the audience during the performance.

“I want it known, I didn’t have to be British. I chose to be British,” Baker interjected.

In our interview we talked to the creators about what they learned from careers working in both games and film and the distinct challenges of each. Baker dug into the pressure of becoming Harrison Ford for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, while Wintory told us how one of his strangest-ever projects came to be—a music pack for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive mashing up metal and… a polka? (He followed it up with an even weirder genre blend in The Devil Went Clubbing in Georgia).

Check out the full, banter-heavy chat above.

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