5 of the most terrifying video game sounds ever, according to Alan Wake's composer

Ever jumped out of your skin at a noise in a game? That’s not by accident - that’s sound design doing its job.

Few people understand that better than Alan Wake composer Petri Alanko. The three-time BAFTA-nominated Finnish composer’s work on Alan Wake and its 2023 sequel has helped shape one of gaming’s most iconic horror series. The original game remains on multiple ‘most terrifying games’ lists, while Alan Wake 2 was named Time magazine’s Game of the Year, too.

Alan Wake 2 - Gameplay Reveal Trailer | PS5 Games - YouTube

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Alanko has truly mastered the art of manipulating unsuspecting gamers through noise, he tells us when we sit down to go behind the scenes of making seriously spooky games.

“It’s manipulation, more or less,” he explains, “Either brain manipulation or instrument manipulation - that’s the core of it all.”

So good is he at scaring the crap out of players, in fact, that the Alan Wake soundtracks have been known to do that quite literally, he reveals to us. But more on that later...

In fact, when it comes to composing scary soundscapes for our favourite games, the accomplished sound designer studies psychology to create real terror. Alanko tells Shortlist that he studies how sound “can make you do something - or prevent you from doing something.”

Still, despite being one of the world’s leading experts in scary game sounds, some game noises still get under Alanko’s skin, as well. In honour of Halloween and all things Really Damn Scary, here the prolific video game music composer reveals the game sounds that still give him nightmares.

Want to dive in and get spooked too? Grab a controller, turn off the lights and turn up the volume...

1. ‘Alien: Isolation’ (2014): The footsteps of the alien

For the Alan Wake composer, there’s one game that stands above all others when it comes to properly scary sounds - and it’s got nothing to with sudden jumpscare stabs of sound or typical musical cues.

“Number one is easily Alien: Isolation, because silence in there speaks louder than any music, any sound effects,” he says.

“That’s easily number one - and the music in that one is actually quite spot on.”

But it’s not just the absence of sound that gets under the audio pro’s skin. Alanko singles out one specific detail - something so simple it borders on cruel: “It has to be either the footsteps of the alien in Alien: Isolation, or the clacking sound it makes just before your head is split into two,” he explains.

Alien: Isolation Official Announcement Gameplay Trailer - "Transmission" - YouTube

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“When you hear the footsteps, that’s more scary, because you still have a marginal possibility of escaping. You may be happy… but when you hear the clackings, you’re lost. You’ve lost it, and you’re going to die, and you have to load in the game again.”

That, he says, is the genius of the game’s sound design - finding horror in the player’s imagination even more so than in the soundtrack itself.

“Even that simple thing can be horrible, horrendous, scary.”

2. Silent Hill (1999): The sound of humans… gone wrong

If there’s one sound that truly haunts Petri Alanko, it’s not a jump scare or a screeching violin - it’s the way Silent Hill made humanity itself sound so wrong.

“A good number two is Silent Hill,” he says, recalling the PlayStation 1 and 2 era, “That series had quite a few really, really lovely cases of spooky things.”

It wasn’t the monsters themselves that got him, of course: it was how they sounded.

“Usually when there was a monster that resembled a human being, and they made some kind of a noise… combining a human-like posture or human-like body with something inhuman coming out of where there used to be a mouth - well, that’s kind of unnerving, to say the least.”

As a sound designer, he’s highly aware of how these noises were made, and the sheer physical toll they must have taken on whoever created them.

“It’s kind of funny what people can do with their voice chords,” he tells Shortlist, “I imagine it would be rather painful to try to replicate any of those without any special skills or extra equipment.”

The sound designer knows this from experience. On another project, Alanko once had to record the sound of someone being strangled - and ended up playing the victim himself. “I once lost my voice totally for two weeks because I had to be the one who got strangled,” he shares, “I had to speak at the same time I strangled myself. I had bruises all over my throat.”

He adds: “My philosophy is, if you do something, do it properly.”

Silent Hill, he admits, hit him so hard he couldn’t play it at night. “It really kicked my ass,” he tells us, “I avoided playing it during evenings or nights - I had to do it when there was light outside.”

3. ‘Impossible Mission’ (1984): The Commodore 64’s mangled robot voice

Long before Alan Wake or even Silent Hill, a much simpler sound gave Petri Alanko the chills… and it came from an 8-bit classic on the Commodore 64.

“There was a game called ‘Impossible Mission’ on the Commodore 64,” he recalls, “You know the graphics and you know the sounds, but there was this boomy, very early sampled sound saying something along the lines of… ‘Impossible Mission!’”

Impossible Mission Longplay (C64) [QHD] - YouTube

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It wasn’t the visuals that unsettled him. Heck, the platform adventure isn’t even a ‘horror game’ by genre - but its digitised, barely-human voice coming out of a little speaker was creepy as hell to young Alanko.

“When you changed the room, you could suddenly run into a robot or something, and there was this very bad quality human voice saying that line,” he says.

“But for some reason, maybe because it was so mangled and beyond recognition, maybe that was the reason why it felt so spooky.”

Plus, he wasn’t a small child at the time. “I wasn’t that young,” he confesses, “I wasn’t three or four - I was almost in middle school!”

4. ‘Resident Evil: Village VR’ (2023): ‘Disgusting’ noises and a creepy Granny

Even a veteran horror composer like Petri can be caught off guard - and when it comes to modern sound design, Resident Evil Village in VR did it like no other.

“When Sony released their VR set, there was this horror game, Resident Evil Village,” he recalls, “That had a rather nice score, and it had really lovable sound effects.”

What made Resident Evil stand out to him was its unsettling combo of ordinary noises mixed in with the truly grotesque.

“Especially when you start playing the game, there are quite a few almost normal sounds that have this kind of really disgusting layer,” he explains, “For instance, somebody creeping at you - the creepy Granny - that’s horrible.”

It wasn’t just the horror itself, it was how completely it surrounded him.

Resident Evil Village VR Mode - Gameplay Trailer | PS VR2 - YouTube

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“Although I tried to remind myself constantly that I was only playing a game, I got lured in because of the sound effects, and they were so spot on.”

“There were quite a lot of delicious, delicate details all over the place. I really love that it was so rich - when you had the VR goggles on and your headphones, it surrounded you and kind of hugged you, but in a very wrong way. A totally wrong way!”

5. Alan Wake 2 (2023): The noise that made someone ‘sh*t their pants’

For Alan Wake’s composer, some of the game’s most disturbing sounds weren’t synthetic or digital - they came from actual, IRL aggression with instruments. One in particular has haunted players for years.

“Somebody once told me that they literally had sh*t their pants when they heard one of the stingers that were taken from a piece I did for the game,” Alanko laughs, “And the thing was, the guy in question was an adult when he played it!”

And what created such a guttural response (literally)?

“It was basically me scraping a piano string with a saw as viciously and aggressively as I could,” he explains, “When you’re dealing with such a large thing as a handsaw, it’s almost impossible to hit just one string. It usually means that if you scrape one string, you also scrape the neighbouring string and so forth.”

“The result was quite an aggressive one,” he says, “Later on, I tried tuning all those neighbouring strings so that they slowly bent towards the main string - their tuning was corrected so they gathered together, so to speak.”

Alan Wake 2 - Launch Trailer | PS5 Games - YouTube

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It made a kind of ultimate horror sound device - the type that creates a physical reaction in those it spooks.

“It worked pretty well,” Alanko says, “That provided quite a playground for scary stuff in the game.”

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