Almost every element of is dripping with satire. The voice lines, story, and even individual armor pieces parody patriotism while telling a story of what could happen if corrupt governmental systems ran amuck. Well, everything except the music.
"It's jingoism, but it's amplified with uplifting modern synth productions, and without suggesting any nuance other than the valor of the soldiers' fight," said Helldivers 2 composer Wilbert Roget, II during a talk at Game Developers Conference 2025 in San Francisco. "The satire works because the music believes it's a pure patriotic love without irony or criticism."
Roget dove into the techniques and thought processes behind his musical work in Helldivers 2, breaking down how he created music for each alien race, the extraction theme, and other songs from throughout the game. He spoke on his approach to scoring Call of Duty: World War 2, where his [[link]] goals were to establish the World War 2 setting while conveying the emotion the protagonists felt as real people experiencing the [[link]] fear and adrenaline of war—a dichotomy he called the memory of war and the reality of war.
Roget is a veteran composer of videogames and more, having served as a staff composer at LucasAarts on projects like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: First Assault before going independent. Recently, he composed the music for Helldivers 2, Star Wars: Outlaws, Mortal Kombat 1, and Call of Duty: WW2.
The other half of Roget's approach, dubbed reality of war, communicates the horrors of actually being a Helldiver. He emphasized that the personal experience of each soldier was filled with unimaginable horrors—swarms of gigantic bug creatures, bloodthirsty robots, and squid-like humanoid aliens. The music had to reflect the intense emotions felt by soldiers while fighting those enemies.
"Combat against automatons is more strategic as their enemy architects all have guns of their own," Roget said, adding that he needed the music to sound completely different from the visceral horror inspired by the Termanid music. "Eventually, I just started stomping around my apartment while pretending to be a giant robot."
Roget's stomping, combined with metal clang percussion, pitched metals, granularized factory noise, prepared piano rhythm, and other elements became the musical backdrop for the
Roget's third priority was to represent the fun players are meant to be having while mowing down aliens—something he called the fun of war.He mentioned that the extraction theme, the game's way of communicating that players had earned the right to hear the superpatriotic music again. Players actually have to make it out alive to hear much of the extraction theme, and once they do the song reinforces the idea that these soldiers sincerely believe that the war they are fighting is good and necessary.
"While the story and dialogue are clearly satirical, the music of Helldivers 2 takes a sincere [[link]] stance," Roget said. "It depicts a terrifying war against some unfathomable alien enemies, and when paired with the ruthless difficulty of gameplay, the goal is for players to completely lose themselves in the fiction, becoming a part of something bigger than themselves. So the music attempts to be as authentic and sophisticated as possible without judging."