The music of Cuphead

Kris Maddigan, a Canadian orchestral musician, grew up playing video games with his childhood friends — brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. Years later, those friends would go on to create one of the most successful indie video games: Cuphead.

Inspired by the animation style of early Disney and Fleischer cartoons, the Moldenhauer brothers wanted the game to sound like it came out of the 1930s, too. As a first time video game composer, Maddigan reveals how he managed to write over three hours of big band and ragtime tunes — and apply them to the context of Cuphead.

“I really wanted to approach it as if the golden age of big band and the golden age of videogames maybe coexisted simultaneously,” Maddigan says. “Like, how would a big band composer write for that?”