At the start of the game, Issue encouraged you to do certain things – like build a house or ride the subway – that required permits and identification papers. To obtain them, you had to visit a beige room called the Bureaucratic Room. “It was just a waiting room, a purgatory with these lizard bureaucrats walking around,” Simmons says. “They’re walking back and forth with stacks of paper and, you know, they look busy behind their desk.”
And this, dear reader, is the phantom context of the Slack Huddles’ sustaining music; he was playing in the bureaucratic room. To get out of this void, we had to do something very specific: nothing. A countdown began and if you moved your avatar, the counter started again. It was the “quest”. All you had to do was sit there, watch the lizards work, and—can you hear that slow fade in?—listen to the music.
For the Waiting Room soundtrack, Simmons played guitar and synths himself, although he was primarily a banjo player. Thanks to the bluegrass scene in Toronto, he met a “very good left-handed guitarist” who was learning the saxophone. So one day in 2012, Simmons invited the guy to record a bunch of improvised sax fills, with instructions to make them “as cheesy as possible.”
In October 2012, Ali Rayl joined the Issue team as a quality engineer. Just six weeks later, an executive sidelined her. He said they were going to stop the game and he asked Rayl if she wanted to stay and “help build our next thing.” When asked what the next step would be, the director said it would likely have something to do with workplace communications.
As had happened before with Endless game, there were some pretty cool spare parts underneath all of the ethereal ambitions of Issue– like the internal messaging system the team had built. Rayl was one of eight core people who kept their jobs during the transition to Slack. During the conference call where everyone else was fired, Rayl felt overcome with survivor’s guilt. “I decided to do everything I could to support these people, to preserve their legacy and bring their work into the public sphere,” she says. And Rayl wasn’t the only one who wanted to preserve Slack’s flawed DNA.
That’s why the company came to use not only waiting room muzak, but also the “bloops, beeps and alerts” that Simmons created to Issue. In fact, Simmons almost won all the sounds heard by Slack’s 32 million active daily users. That snick popopop a noise that gives you a cortisol spike every time? It’s Simmons running his thumb over a toothbrush and making “that sound where you kind of separate your tongue from the roof of your mouth,” he says. There is a ghost context to all of this.
So the next time you hear Slack Huddles music, remember what you need to do: stay seated. Observe the lizards. The countdown is underway.
