Key Takeaways
- Control Resonant audio lead Lucas Pierrot has confirmed that The Board’s dialogue is deliberately crafted gibberish with no affiliation to any real language.
- The design goal was to make The Board’s speech interpretable by the player — you hear whatever your brain wants to hear.
- Remedy wanted The Board to feel “scary, unsettling, or even funny” depending on context, with the audio shifting between all three.
- The team added a “pulse” sound and a “low, soft kick” to certain words to give speech rhythm, punctuation, and weight — a subtle audio trick most players will never notice.
- Subtitles in the game offer an “interpretation” of The Board’s words rather than a definitive translation, and even they alternate between different words for the same concepts.
- Control Resonant launched September 24, 2026, and hit 1 million sales in just 3 weeks — the fastest-selling game in Remedy’s 31-year history.
If you’ve been playing Control Resonant and found yourself absolutely convinced you understood exactly what The Board was saying in a given moment — only to reread the subtitles and find yourself even more confused — you weren’t experiencing a technical issue or misreading the game’s intentions. That confusion was entirely intentional. And the reason why is a genuinely clever piece of audio design.
The Board Is Speaking Nothing — And Everything
Control Resonant audio lead Lucas Pierrot has opened up to GameSpot about the thinking behind The Board’s distinctive and deeply unsettling mode of communication. The short version: what you’re hearing isn’t a real language, a reversed language, a pitch-shifted language, or a distorted version of anything that means anything. It is, by deliberate design, gibberish.
“An important part of the design is that The Board is basically gibberish, not affiliated to any language,” Pierrot confirmed. “So, when you hear a word, you tend to hear what you want to hear… and that’s pretty neat in terms of audio design, as players can fulfill their fantasies.”
This is why communities have spent years confidently arguing about what The Board said in a specific moment, with multiple camps producing wildly different “transcriptions” and all of them convinced they’re right. They are all, simultaneously, right and wrong. The Board is a Rorschach test in audio form — an entity whose true nature, morals, and motivations are never made clear, communicated in a way that reflects that ambiguity back at the player through the very sounds they hear.
The Emotional Range of Gibberish
Pierrot gave a brilliantly illustrative example of how this plays out in practice. Imagine The Board responding to you performing an Execution — one of the game’s signature kill moves. “You want to hear The Board praising you for performing an Execution? You can!” Pierrot said. “Maybe you hear them saying ‘Absolute cinema, Combo!’ etc., but if you prefer to think they’re arrogant and only feel disdain for slaying a weak enemy… you can hear that too!”
This flexibility wasn’t accidental — it was the entire point. Remedy wanted The Board to be able to feel “scary, unsettling, or even funny sometimes“, and the open-ended audio is what makes all three possible within the same game without the tone ever collapsing into inconsistency. The Board isn’t one thing. It’s whatever the moment and the player’s imagination make it.
The subtitles reinforce this rather than resolving it. Rather than providing a definitive “translation” of what The Board says, they function as an interpretation — and even then, they deliberately alternate between different words for similar concepts to prevent any fixed meaning from taking hold. The Board doesn’t have a dictionary. Neither do you.
The Hidden Audio Trick You Never Noticed
Beyond the gibberish approach itself, Pierrot also revealed a more technical trick the audio team used to give The Board’s speech structure and flow. To make the dialogue feel rhythmically coherent rather than truly random, they added a “pulse” sound and a “low, soft kick” to certain emphasized words.
“I used this to give weight when necessary to have a nice flow,” Pierrot explained. “You can see it as some sort of trick to articulate sentences. It gives rhythm and punctuation.”
It’s a subtle technique that most players will never consciously notice — but it’s precisely the kind of detail that keeps The Board from feeling like noise. Without some internal structure, the gibberish would be incoherent in a way that becomes quickly irritating rather than unsettling. By giving it rhythm and emphasis, Remedy gave the gibberish the feeling of speech without any of the meaning. The brain does the rest.
Why It Works as Game Design
The Board is one of the most conceptually interesting NPCs in recent memory, and a big part of that is how it communicates. In most games, mysterious alien or supernatural entities are made mysterious through vague writing, cryptic dialogue that can be parsed if you read carefully enough, or through an in-universe translator that flattens the strangeness into something comprehensible. Remedy went a different route entirely.
By making The Board’s speech genuinely undecodable — not just obscure but actually, structurally impossible to definitively interpret — the team created an NPC that functions differently for every player. Your relationship with The Board is partly a projection of your own assumptions, fears, and desires. When it speaks, you fill in the blanks. And what you fill them with says something about you, not necessarily about The Board.
That’s a remarkable trick for a supporting character to pull off. The fact that it’s done primarily through audio design rather than writing makes it all the more impressive.
Control Resonant Is Doing Very Well, By The Way
The Board’s mysterious audio design is one of the more talked-about elements of a game that has clearly connected with players in a meaningful way. Control Resonant launched on September 24, 2026, and hit one million sales in just three weeks — making it the fastest-selling game in Remedy’s 31-year history, surpassing Alan Wake 2 which had previously held that record. Remedy had previously said the game would need to sell 3–4 million copies to recover its investment twice over, so there’s a long road ahead, but the start has been strong.
For players working through the game, the audio team’s design philosophy is worth keeping in mind the next time The Board pipes up. Don’t try to decode it. Just listen to what your instincts tell you it’s saying. That’s exactly what Remedy intended.
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