Soundtrack: 7 Billion Humans — hire more workers, and the band grows too

What plays the moment you open 7 Billion Humans?

7 Billion Humans is a programming-and-instruction-writing puzzle game Tomorrow Corporation released in 2018 (see Komugi's review; difficulty "Hard," roughly 13 hours to finish). Its predecessor, Human Resource Machine, put you in charge of a single new hire. The sequel runs that same one program across dozens of workers at once — one person's worth of instructions, suddenly parallelized.

The title screen opens with a soft, welcoming tune called "Welcome, All 7 Billion Humans!" The composer is the same Kyle Gabler behind the first game's weary jazz-lounge loop (which I wrote about last time). The BPM sits around 110, I'd guess — it opens warm, then settles quickly into a businesslike lightness.7 Billion Humans (Steam store page)

The workforce parallelized — so what did the band add?

As I wrote in the piece on the first game, almost every sound in Human Resource Machine came out of a single software synth called Synth1. Sound effects, even the boss's spoken lines, were handled by that one instrument. Locking the palette to one source was exactly what gave that game its unity.

7 Billion Humans loosens that lock a little. The official soundtrack credits a real guitarist, Shalin Shodhan, and a real cellist, Jordan Price (per tomorrowcorporation.com, as of September 2026). The guitar shows up on "The Data Is Wranglin' Itself." Both names carry over from the first game's credits into the sequel's.

The number of people making the sound grew right alongside the number of workers on screen — one hire became a crowd, one synth became a small band. That match is the most interesting thing about how the sequel's music was built.7 Billion Humans (Steam store page)

How does the composer himself describe this soundtrack's job?

On the official soundtrack page, Kyle Gabler follows a brief thank-you to listeners with this line: "happy multi-threaded programming" (per tomorrowcorporation.com, as of September 2026). It reads like a wish — may this album help your multi-threaded programming go happily. A term straight out of computer science, repurposed as a blessing for the music itself.

That's the heart of what 7 Billion Humans is about: "parallel processing," running one instruction stream across many workers who are each in a different state at any given moment. It's rare to hear a game's own design vocabulary come out of the composer's mouth as a description of the music.

Track two, "Stressed Out Bossa Nova," is a good example. It rides an actual bossa nova groove while refusing to hide the "stressed out" in its title. Dressing a cornered, anxious mood in a cool genre's mask — that's office-satire humor doing its job.

Track eight is titled "You Will Be Evaluated Later." It's a direct sequel joke aimed at the first game's "You Will Be Evaluated." Even at the level of track titles, you can feel the series talking to itself.

How does handing one instruction to a crowd resemble how the music plays?

The trick to solving 7 Billion Humans is never to give each worker separate instructions. You hand the same program to everyone and let branching conditions sort out the roles. Underneath movement that looks chaotic, there's really just one shared score.

I wrote before, in the piece on Minit, about a hidden jukebox that dresses one theme in nine different costumes. That game recycled a single melody. 7 Billion Humans instead re-costumes the genre itself — office muzak — track by track. Keeping one underlying blueprint while multiplying only the face it shows: the two games land on a very similar idea from opposite directions.

Human Resource Machine was complete with one worker, one loop, one synth. The sequel added people, added instruments, added genres. And it still found room to plant a joke in a track title — "evaluated later." Scale changed; the personality didn't. That's how you recognize the same composer's hand.

Tracks worth hearing

The official release, 7 Billion Humans (Original Game Soundtrack) (14 tracks), is available on Kyle Gabler's own YouTube channel (Kyle Gabler - Topic, provided to YouTube by RouteNote) and on Tomorrow Corporation's official site.

Start with the title-screen track. You can hear the welcoming opening settle almost immediately into businesslike lightness.

・Stressed Out Bossa Nova ↗ — a cornered mood wearing a cool bossa nova mask. ・You Will Be Evaluated Later ↗ — a sequel joke aimed at the first game's "You Will Be Evaluated," playing the tension of a performance review with a shrug.

Closing — what I'd steal

Here's what I'd steal. Writing a sequel in a series, you're allowed exactly one joke in a track title aimed at the last game. "Evaluated later" only needs to land for the people who notice it — that's enough.

One more thing. After a first game that held its constraint perfectly, it's worth remembering the choice to loosen it and bring in real instruments. Expand only when you have a reason to — that's its own kind of honesty. Tonight, over a pour of coffee, I think I'll go get stressed out by that bossa nova again.

References

・Steam: 7 Billion Humans (official store page, Tomorrow Corporation)

・Tomorrow Corporation: 7 Billion Humans Soundtrack (official, composer's note and credits)

・Kyle Gabler - Topic (official YouTube, 7 Billion Humans Original Soundtrack)

・Wikipedia: 7 Billion Humans (development, release date, parallel-processing mechanic)