'Dubstep for Pigs': How Lena Raine's Pigstep Disc Pushed Mojang to Demand More Bangers in Minecraft
When Lena Raine joined Mojang Studios to score the 1.16 Nether Update for Minecraft in 2020, she stepped into one of gaming's most delicate musical legacies: following the minimalist, contemplative piano soundscapes of Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. Six years later, after crafting fan-favorite tracks like Pigstep, otherside, and Creator, the American composer and game designer has reflected on the ripple effect triggered by her very first collectible music disc. Born from an offhand studio joke about making "dubstep for pigs," that single track hidden inside Nether Bastion Remnants permanently reshaped what Mojang's audio directors ask from guest composers.
From C418's Calming Minimalism to Survival Horror in the Nether
Before turning player jukeboxes into dance floors, Lena Raine approached the blocky sandbox through its darkest dimension. Having started her industry career in QA testing at Nintendo of America before working as a game designer at ArenaNet on Guild Wars 2 (where she designed and scored the Winter's Day bell-choir minigame prior to her breakout 2018 soundtrack for Celeste), Raine tackled the revitalized Nether by pulling directly from survival horror influences.
Where C418's original compositions wrapped the Overworld in soothing, introspective calm, Raine wrote deliberately unsettling ambient pieces like Chrysopoeia, Rubedo, and So Below to match the subterranean danger. Yet despite composing dozens of atmospheric tracks for the game over several updates, she notes that most players primarily know her Minecraft work through the three collectible music discs she wrote.
'Dubstep for Pigs!': The Improvised Birth of Pigstep
Originally, Mojang's creative brief for the 1.16 music disc was completely open-ended. The developers simply told Raine: "For discs, you just write whatever you want," echoing the way C418's earliest discs (such as Cat, Blocks, Chirp, and Stal) were standalone electronic tunes detached from specific biomes.
While brainstorming around the new porcine faction inhabiting the Nether's Bastion Remnants, a throwaway question surfaced: "What would music the Piglins listen to sound like?" Raine immediately gave herself a three-word prompt: "Dubstep for pigs!" Blending heavy hip-hop percussion, chiptune synths, and syncopated brass leads, she put together what she thought was a funny little tune tucked away in Piglin treasure chests.
The Pigstep Effect at Mojang: 'They Want More Bangers'
The explosive viral popularity of Pigstep across YouTube, TikTok, and streaming platforms caught everyone by surprise, turning collectible discs into headline attractions for subsequent updates. Just as the sandbox continues to evolve on the rendering side, as seen in our technical comparison of Minecraft on Nintendo Switch 2 vs PS5 running the Vibrant Visuals update, Mojang's musical direction for jukebox rewards has taken a permanent turn. As the studio brought in fellow composers like Kumi Tanioka, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, one recurring request kept echoing behind the scenes.
"It's created a funny effect. I think at Mojang now, because they've since worked with a couple other composers, the prompt I keep hearing is 'Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers.' I started something there. It's gonna keep on getting discs that are bangers."
Lena Raine, Composer and Game Designer
After following up with the upbeat synth-pop anthem otherside (in 1.18 Caves & Cliffs: Part II) and the clockwork music-box metal crescendo of Creator (in 1.21 Tricky Trials), Raine feels her tenure on Minecraft has naturally run its course: "I had some fun there, but I want to focus on other projects."
From Bitwig Studio to ANOTHEREAL: Returning to Game Design
Behind the scenes, Raine has also overhauled her PC production workflow. Having written the very first level of Celeste in Cakewalk Sonar (a project file she admits she can no longer even open because she no longer has the software installed) before switching to Ableton Live, her DAW of choice is now Bitwig Studio. Built by former Ableton developers, Bitwig won her over with its modular under-the-hood routing, seamless Ableton project importing, and broad support for every generation of VST plugins alongside the open-source CLAP plugin format.
Much like her former collaborator Noel Berry, who is currently building City of None, the new Metroidvania from Celeste's co-creator, Raine is channeling her post-Minecraft momentum back into game design. Alongside scoring the turn-based volleyball RPG Beastieball, she has spent the years since the pandemic developing her own indie project, ANOTHEREAL, an RPG featuring shoot 'em up (shmup) combat. Inspired by her permanent Steam library of arcade shmups including ZeroRanger, Adventures of Ten and Till, Deathsmiles, and Mushihimesama (when she isn't playing Ivy the gargoyle in Valve's Deadlock or checking in on her 1,308-hour Final Fantasy XIV character), she aims to release ANOTHEREAL before the end of the decade.
My Perspective
Anyone who has ever tiptoed through a Bastion Remnant at two in the morning while dodging Piglin Brutes remembers the first time they dropped Pigstep into a jukebox. For a full decade, Minecraft trained us to expect the quiet, lonely melancholy of C418's Sweden or Wet Hands,music designed to fade gently behind the rhythm of a pickaxe. By dropping a brass-heavy dubstep groove straight into the Nether, Lena Raine turned music discs into genuine status symbols you immediately blast for your entire server back at base. If her "dubstep for pigs" experiment means Mojang keeps demanding high-energy bangers like otherside and Creator in every dungeon chest, our jukeboxes are all the better for it.
Based on the outskirts of New York City, Chaya 'Chayane' spent five years studying software engineering in Montreal before returning to her home state. A Full-Stack developer and Deep Learning AI architecture researcher, she explores neural networks and algorithmic optimization while engineering data pipelines for Retrocharting and Gamescharting alongside Grimtag. A gamer for over 20 years and an avid collector of Nintendo history and The Legend of Zelda, she explored World of Warcraft's Azeroth before bringing her deep technical background to video game analysis.
