Gustavo Santaolalla is an Argentine composer born in 1951. He composed the soundtrack for the 2013 video game The Last of Us, his first foray into video game music. As someone who grew up under Argentina's harsh government, he related to the themes of traveling and moving in the game. Santaolalla has been musically active since age 5 and plays guitar, charango, and ronroco, though he never learned to read music. He enjoyed the creative freedom from Naughty Dog to incorporate his Latin American styles and create a diverse soundtrack that captures the post-apocalyptic atmosphere and emotional story of The Last of Us.

1. Gustavo
Santaolalla
Born on 19th August 1951 in the El Palomar community of Argentinaʼs
capital, Buenos Aires, Santaolalla had a difficult time growing up under the
harsh civil prejudices of the government. He connects this with Naughty
Dogʼs The Last of Us for whom he composed the soundtrack for in 2013,
in the way that he can relate to traveling “on the road” and constantly just
moving from one place to the next, much like the protagonists, Joel and
Ellie, do throughout the story. His contribution to the game was the 62 year
oldʼs first experience in the video game industry. He has been musically
active since the age of 5, when his grandmother gave him a guitar and has
formed and performed in multiple latin rock bands.
He mainly plays the Guitar and itʼs bolivian
cousins, the Charango and the Ronroco, on which
he actually composed the main theme for the
game. However, he has also been known to sing,
play piano and bass guitar as well as adapt to and
express skills in instruments in which he is not
trained. He never learnt to read or write music so
he performs so works purely by ear. He has a
strong ear, strong enough to force his guitar to
quit with him when aged 10!
The academy award winner jumped at the
opportunity to work with Naughty Dog on this
project as he loves “working from the script”. He
claims that one of the main reasons he was able
to create some really diverse and powerful sounds for this game was due to the freedom gifted to him by
creative director Neil Druckmann.
For this game, the music needed to hold a certain rusty tone and relate to the post apocalyptic
atmosphere of the game. Being a composer of traditionally latin music, Santaolalla incorporated the
melodies and scales of it into many of the tracks, using fingerpicking techniques on his acoustic guitar.
He very much enjoyed the idea of using a wide variety of different instruments to create range of
different sounds.
Many of his compositions for this game feature the mournful scales of string instruments and create a
heart wrenching sense of fictional nostalgia through that. The main theme, performed on the south
American Ronoroco combined with the backdrop of low orchestral tone, creates a hopeless yet epic vibe
and therefore incorporates many aspects of the gameʼs story into itʼs theme. The second track, The
Hour, features just a small guitar and the drone of a synth. The quiet, tinny major chords of the guitar
sound painfully humble and feeble and hint at memories of the gameʼs characters, memories of what life
used to be like. This causes the audience to feel a great sense of emotion as too does the heart
breaking sound of the string sections in the main theme, The Choice, Never Again and A New Dawn.
Santaolalla used a range of instruments that he
didnʼt necessarily hold much experience with
playing during the composition process. He extends
his knowledge from basic instruments such as the
organ/synth in Vanishing Grace to bowing a broken
violin and blowing through several sawn off
industrial pipes in The Quarrantine Zone.
Overall, he truly manages to grasp both the
environmental effects of the game on the player as
well as the emotional effects and convey them in
his music in both melody and texture.
- Composer for
Naughty Dogʼs The
Last of Us