When 2017 DigiPen BA in Music and Sound Design graduate Evan Alderete is out and about in Seattle, he sometimes spots strangers wearing shirts repping two of the internet’s most popular animated shows, The Amazing Digital Circus and Hazbin Hotel. “Whenever I do see fans out in the wild, I go, ‘I love your shirt! I’m actually on the production team,’” Alderete says. “Sometimes people are starstruck, and other times they just go, ‘Oh yeah… for sure.’”
With a combined 479 million YouTube views on each series’ pilot episodes, success that turned into Netflix and Prime Video streaming deals respectively, those strangers could be forgiven for their incredulity. But Alderete is indeed the co-composer and orchestrator for the scores to both smash-hit series, with featured songs boasting millions upon millions of streams and vocal, diehard fanbases online. “Some of the comments on these songs are so unexpected. People will write confessionals and almost have therapy sessions in reaction to them,” Alderete says. “I think it’s beautiful how music can bring that out in someone, even if it’s just made by two people who threw it together in their bedroom for an internet show.”
Alderete’s journey to viral musical stardom started small. A middle school saxophonist, he grew up tinkering with his father’s digital Roland piano, recording and sequencing “several hundred little musical things” on it. An avid Nintendo 64 fan, many of his early tunes were written for imaginary games. “I’d picture a fictional setting, like a forest level, and make a short jingle for it,” Alderete says. After discovering the free GameMaker engine online, he began collaborating with his cousin and lifelong friend, best known today by her alias Gooseworx, on creating simple video games. “It was like, ‘Oh! Now we can also make music for our games because I have this keyboard!” Alderete says. With their similar interest in absurdist art, as well as shared tastes in music and games, the two were a natural creative pair.
Alderete and Gooseworx’s collaborative partnership continued to grow when they took over the video announcements for their high school news class together. “We decided to make a serialized cartoon within the school news called the ‘Weather’ segment, where we had two characters, the cloud and the sun, who just fight each other,” Alderete laughs. “It was a joke, but it was also a serialized, hardcore collaboration between us with a real media production pipeline! From there, I never wanted to sever myself from her because it felt like there was some magic there — just a true creative mesh.”
For four years starting in 2013, the two temporarily did part ways when Alderete decided to enroll in DigiPen’s BA in Music and Sound Design program, attracted by the promise of collaborating on game team projects throughout his college education. Alderete didn’t just develop his studio engineering, performance, and orchestration skills at DigiPen — he also surprised himself by becoming a formidable programmer outside the scope of his degree. It helped, he says, that his prior experience with GameMaker had already boosted his confidence in scripting. So when a fellow programmer on one of his DigiPen game teams repeatedly had problems implementing his sound effects in the Unity engine, Alderete decided to look into it himself.
“I figured, ‘How hard could it be?’” Alderete says. “From there the ball really started rolling for me with programming, and I kept taking on more and more responsibility on my game teams by coding things myself. I learned programming at DigiPen just from the environment really, getting thrown into the deep end on game projects and going, ‘OK, let’s see what I can do.’”
Alderete capped his DigiPen career as the audio lead on his 2017 senior game team project, Night of the Living Bread: Dough Rising, a Left 4 Dead-styled VR shooter featuring hordes of undead gingerbread men and bread-based weaponry. “I attribute that game to all the good fortune that has ever come to me since,” Alderete says. “It’s interesting looking back and seeing all of the doors that unlocked for me.”
With his audio and programming skills on full display in the professional-quality VR project, Alderete landed a year-long VR sound design contract through the DigiPen Career Fair, which later led to a technical sound designer role at Seattle startup BigBox VR. When that studio was acquired by Meta, he grew into his current position there as an engineer, shifting from audio to a full-on game programming role on the hit VR battle royale title, POPULATION: ONE.
As Alderete’s star was rising in the game development world, Gooseworx was concurrently hard at work making a name for herself as an online artist and indie YouTube creator, amassing a growing following with her quirky webcomics, animation, and blend of original music and game soundtrack covers. Through the online DeviantArt community, she befriended a fellow web artist named VivziePop working in a similar sphere with a growing audience as well. A fan of Gooseworx’s music, VivziePop asked if she would be willing to do the background score for the upcoming pilot episode of her new Patreon-funded animated series, Hazbin Hotel. The adult musical comedy starred the princess of Hell on a quest to rehab demons’ sin-filled souls so they might, just maybe, “check out” of Hell and enter Heaven one day.
“Goose had never been a composer for anything beyond her own stuff at that point. She has really sophisticated musical ideas and taste, but wasn’t formally trained,” Alderete says. “She reached out and said, ‘Hey! I know you have professional experience doing this kind of thing. Can you help?” Eager to resume their creative collaboration after graduating, Alderete jumped in as a self-described “orchestrator and admin” for the pilot’s score, working with Gooseworx on every song for the show that didn’t feature lyrics. “She would give me a rough outline of an original song, and then using my knowledge of composition, I would extrapolate on that and flesh it out, rendering it in a full, fancy-sounding virtual orchestra. I did the final song delivery and managed the emails back and forth, making sure we hit production deadlines,” Alderete says.
When the half-hour long Hazbin Hotel pilot premiered on YouTube a few days before Halloween in 2019, it exploded in popularity. Sitting at over 114 million views today, the episode ignited a fervent fan community online that fell head over heels for its hellish hijinks and kooky, crimson-hued characters. Based on its success, celebrated indie production company A24 picked up the show, funding a full first season that immediately put Alderete and Gooseworx back to work as co-composers on the new score.
One month after the pilot’s premiere, Gooseworx premiered an animation of her own, debuting Little Runmo on her YouTube channel that November. The surreal 16-minute short follows the eponymous hero of a 2D platformer game as they discover what truly happens when they fall into a pit and “lose a life.” One of her greatest successes up to that point, the short was a viral sensation of its own, sitting at 33 million views today. That success came at a steep price however — an intense two years of effort undertaken completely by herself, save for a few sound effects from Alderete, as they both concurrently worked on Hazbin Hotel.
“I had this thought. I told her, ‘You’ve found success on YouTube. You have great metrics there. But I know you want to make more stuff! You’re bottlenecked being a one-man army,’” Alderete says. “I wanted to help her get past this cap she was hitting.” With his experience working on teams to produce creative projects at DigiPen and game studios like Meta, Alderete proposed that Gooseworx set aside a budget to hire additional production help, taking a more business-like approach to her increasingly ambitious projects. “Then almost miraculously as we’re getting that started up, she gets an email from Glitch Productions,” Alderete laughs.
I owe so much of where I am now to DigiPen. It really forces you to be scrappy!
Now a massive name in animation, Glitch Productions was, at that point, still a small upstart company from Australia trying to make a dent in the new niche Hazbin Hotel had just begun to open — indie YouTube productions with the power to pull viewership rivaling those of major networks. Based on the success of Little Runmo, Glitch saw a potential showrunner in Gooseworx. “I read through the email and it was so generous I almost thought it was a scam,” Alderete grins. “We jumped on a call and it just kind of took off from there. She joined Glitch, and I joined as the composer for whatever project was going to manifest.”
Right as production ended in 2022 on season one of Hazbin Hotel and A24’s search for a distributor began, production started up on what would become Glitch’s flagship series and biggest runaway success, The Amazing Digital Circus. Inspired by 90s-era 3D graphics and Harlan Ellison’s classic sci-fi short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the Gooseworx original stars a cast of humans trapped in a circus-themed VR game run by an AI ringmaster, all of whom forget their original names and assume a variety of bizarre in-game avatars. The show’s protagonist Pomni, the latest trapped human who assumes the form of a clown, instantly became a viral sensation, launching thousands of memes, countless TikToks, and helping the first episode surpass Hazbin Hotel as YouTube’s most watched animated pilot of all time when it launched in 2023, reaching 366 million views.
As with Hazbin Hotel, Alderete became The Amazing Digital Circus’ co-composer and orchestrator. The score features a blend of pure originals by Alderete and Gooseworx, as well as collaborative pieces by the two — with Alderete taking Gooseworx’s simple musical sketches for the show, embellishing them, and building them out into complex, fully fledged songs. “The way I’ve always seen it is I’m squeezing out the maximum potential of this very expressive artist,” Alderete says of their unique dual songwriting process. “I can see in her sketches the sound or the tone she’s going for, the artists it harkens to, and then picking up from her inspirations, I can go, ‘Ah, what you really want is this!’”
Early in production, the two decided on a distinct musical direction for The Amazing Digital Circus — split between two main pillars — that has guided them ever since. “The first is hardline Nintendo music. We’re talking Koji Kondo and everyone who has been inspired by him,” Alderete says. According to Alderete, the famed Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda composer’s work is defined by surprisingly sophisticated takes on fairly common jazz, Latin, and blues themes, all rendered through “quirky, cutesy instruments.” “Even though he uses those common musical themes, there’s a rich, genuine artistry to it that very much inspired our musical philosophy for the show,” Alderete says.
The other pillar, “orchestral and somber piano pieces,” was born from Alderete’s adoration for classical music and Gooseworx’s love for dramatic, dialogue-free scenes that foreground music, which she makes sure to build into each episode at least once. “I had the opportunity to do this very big, grandiose musical moment like that in the pilot when Pomni opens a hallway door and floats out into the void,” Alderete says. “On the YouTube soundtrack release, if you hover over the most watched moments, you see a huge spike when it hits! I was very proud of that, especially reading all the comments on it going, ‘This is crazy. I’ve never heard anything like it.’”
Now on episode four (which also marked the series debut for fellow DigiPen alumni and Glitch senior storyboard artist A.D. Taeza), The Amazing Digital Circus has become a breakaway hit over the last year and a half, airing to hundreds of millions of viewers not only on YouTube, but more recently, Netflix as well. Despite wrapping before production on The Amazing Digital Circus began, the first season of Hazbin Hotel aired shortly afterwards, hitting Prime Video in early 2024 due to A24’s prolonged hunt for the right distributor. Suddenly, Alderete’s scores were at the center of the two biggest shows emblematic of a new emerging model in the animation industry — scrappy, independent YouTube productions viral enough to turn heads at major streaming services. “I owe so much of where I am now to DigiPen,” Alderete says. “It really forces you to be scrappy!”
Being at the forefront of this new industry paradigm shift marked by VivziePop and Gooseworx’s success has been an intriguing position for Alderete to occupy. “It’s incredibly interesting that I have insight into this at all. I find it fascinating as a prospect for the future,” Alderete says. “The ability for these smaller creators just to be seen is really powerful, and YouTube is such a fundamental part of the model because anyone can watch the whole thing for free immediately. I’ll see TikToks or Reddit posts using GIFs, memes, and clips from The Amazing Digital Circus, and someone will inevitably ask ‘What is this?’ in the comments. And then everyone just links to the entire show for them right there.”
The viral success of The Amazing Digital Circus has launched official Hot Topic merch and clothing collaborations, legions of wildly popular plushies, and even two full TADC-themed cafes in Japan that serve “Pomni Burgers.” “I love seeing the merch out in the wild. It’s always such a cool little human moment,” Alderete says. “On the Glitch Productions Discord, they actually have a whole channel devoted to cheap rip off merch they find and post there. I think it’s a great marker for success when you’re popular enough that there are bootleg factories trying to capitalize on your stolen IP!”
Of course, Alderete doesn’t actually need to go roaming the streets of Seattle to find genuine fans of his work. Even among his fellow coworkers at Meta, most of whom are very aware of his double life as a VR game programmer by day and hit-animated-series composer by night, there are those who follow the two shows closely. “Oh yeah, there are absolutely people on my team that are fans of both TADC and Hazbin. They bring it up,” he laughs. “And they have definitely bought merchandise.”