Video games
In the last decade, video games have become sophisticated enough to require full orchestral soundtracks. Nick Shave meets some of the composers scoring the music for big-budget titles
Computer games are so sophisticated that they require their own large-scale orchestral score, says Nick Shave
Richard Jacques was 11 years old when his parents gave him a ZX Spectrum for his birthday. As well as using it to play games, he would get up at 5am to get in an hour of music programming before school. In his teens he upgraded to an Atari, and set up a studio with synthesizers in his bedroom. He was awarded a scholarship to study trombone and piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London; within a week of starting there, he had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive console.
Fast forward three decades and Jacques is now known for the many orchestral scores he has written for blockbuster game franchises such as James Bond 007, Mass Effect and Headhunter.
It seems almost inevitable that his first job after completing his music studies would be as an in-house composer for Sega Europe and that his score for 2001’s Headhunter – a role-playing game featuring motorbiking hero Jack Wade – would become one of the first of many game scores to be recorded with a professional orchestra at Abbey Road. But when Jacques entered the industry in the mid-1990s, video games were only just beginning to reveal their musical potential.
‘Technology was evolving quickly across all consoles and the graphics were getting more advanced and giving gameplay a much greater depth,’ he recalls. Crucially for orchestral score writers, it was the era in which the video console role-playing game established itself, with the Final Fantasy series and Dragon Quest offering players a more immersive experience. And as
‘All over the world there was a shift to create cinematic games with strong narrative’
computers became more powerful, so music no longer had to take a back seat to the graphics and animation. ‘All over the world there was a shift to create cinematic games with strong narrative and strong characters. It was about looking at the big screen experience and thinking, how do we bring that into the players’ homes?’
The story of Jacques’s entry into the gaming industry highlights the way in which many composers who grew up with the perky eightbit chip tunes of Super Mario Bros now find themselves in a booming industry writing large-scale Hollywood-style scores. Last year, the global games market generated $152.1 billion from 2.5 billion gamers and is now larger than both the film and the music industries combined. And as the size of the industry has grown, so has the size and scope of its soundtracks, with bigger budgets allowing composers to look to lavish film scores for inspiration.
Filtering down through those scores are the tried-and-tested styles of classical repertoire. In recent years, gamers have been treated to the Vaughan Williams-ish pastoral themes of
English composer Jessica Curry’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), in which players explore a post-apocalyptic English village whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. Echoes of Orff’s Carmina Burana have found their way into Bear Mccreary’s soundtrack for the action-adventure God of War (2018) as the saga shifted from Greek to Norse mythology. Meanwhile, Martin O’donnell and Michael Salvatori’s haunting main theme for the 65 million copy-selling Halo combat franchise has brought about something of a plainchant revival.
Responding to growing demand, composers have brought their soundtracks to major concert halls, with live performances offering a way for gamers to relive their favourite moments. For more than a decade, Nobuo Uematsu’s music for the Final Fantasy series has been performed around the world on The Distant Worlds concert tour. Ensembles from the LSO to the Pittsburgh Symphony have breathed new life into music from The Legend of Zelda – a game that has inspired suites, symphonies and a Straussian symphonic poem. And ever since Japanese composer Koichi Sugiyama became the first video game composer to record his video game music with a live orchestra, collaborating with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on his Dragon Quest Symphonic Suite back in 1986, there have been no shortage of recordings too.
Christopher Tin is among those composers writing for video games who have found wider music industry success. His choral work
Baba Yetu, first heard in the strategy game Civilization IV, became the first track for video game to win a Grammy – and nearly a decade on, it is still being regularly performed. In addition to a virtual choir performance of Baba Yetu, this September saw the release of the recording of his latest choral work, To Shiver the Sky, a full-scale oratorio about the history of flight that grew out of a musical theme for Civilization VI. The
Ode to joysticks
Composer Sarah Schachner on scoring hit games The late instalment in the action role-playing game series, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, is set in 873 AD, with players controlling raider Eivor in the Viking invasion of Britain. Tell us about your choice of instruments… I wanted the atmosphere of the score to instantly transport the player to another time and place, filled with mystery and uncertainty. There are Norse instruments, but they are used in a more modern way. The score not only represents Eivor’s journey, but also the Vikings’ hope for a better life as they move south into the Anglo-saxon regions.
With this series, it seems to be very much about setting the mood of the time and place. How are you bringing a ‘historical’-sounding dimension to this soundtrack? Some of the settings are so far back in history that we don’t totally know what the music of the time would have sounded like, outside of educated guesses and some knowledge of regional instruments. For Valhalla, I used a variety of Scandinavian folk instruments like the tagelharpa and lyre. After Einar Selvik sang on the main theme that I co-wrote with Jesper Kyd, I had him sing on some other tracks I was working on for that authentic Norse sound he brings.
You wrote the music for the Modern Warfare and Infinite Warfare instalments of the first-person shooter Call of Duty. How does it compare?
Call of Duty is cut together like an action film. The story campaign has clear-cut objectives and moves forward steadily in a fairly linear fashion. In an open-world role-playing game like Assassin’s Creed, the player has much more agency over what they do when and there are a wider variety of scenarios that need music. There’s a bigger emphasis on immersion over linear storytelling.
Any Assassin’s Creed highlights? Some of my favourite parts of the game to score are the ‘Reach High Point’ moments. If the player has taken the time to explore and climb up a large building or structure for instance, I get to reward them with a special piece of music as they take in the beautiful view from the top. Getting to punctuate moments like that and deepen the emotional experience is rewarding in itself. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is released on 17 November album was funded by a Kickstarter project, with his fanbase stumping up $221,000 online. ‘What I’ve tried to do is to connect the two worlds, so that the fans of my game scores would turn into fans of my oratorios and song cycles,’ he says.
According to Tin, there is no difference between writing a standalone concert piece and these kind of opening themes which play under the menu of a video game. But once you get into the gameplay, then the parameters change, as the musical narrative is no longer linear: a composer will have to come up with phrases for each different outcome that the player decides on. ‘You have to compose in a very modular way and go where the game goes,’ he says. ‘So you might start a piece of music when a player is just wandering around, exploring the game, and then the moment an enemy appears on screen you shift over to a new music that has to complement the old one but has a greater sense of danger.’ The soundtrack is comprised of tiny musical ideas that are assembled by the game’s audio engine, blended together in response to the player’s actions. ‘It is incredibly technical by nature.’
For composers like Tin, film music offers a familiar musical language that speaks to the players – one that is ready-made for the screen. As in films, music is used to set the scene or atmosphere in which the action, or drama, takes place; and composers will often attach leitmotifs to their characters to capture their development on an adventure or journey. As in film, a video game soundtrack is not designed to be listened to, so much as serve the narrative and image.
It’s no wonder, then, that as the creative scope of gaming has grown, Hollywood composers such as Harry Gregson-williams, Stephen Barton and Tyler Bates and have turned their hands to video game composition.
But it’s a difficult leap to make, not least because of the sheer quantity of music that most big games demand. Nowadays, a game will require around six hours of musical material
– a lot more than the standard 100 minutes you might find on film. And while not all of those themes have to be memorable, the soundtrack has to be instantly recognisable. Consider for example, Garry Schyman’s score for Bioshock, which embraces 12-tone serialist music, or Olivier Deriviere’s brilliantly glitchy orchestral score Remember Me – a game that explores notions of memory: these are the instantly recognisable sounds that developers want.
It’s one reason why Gareth Coker turned to the sound of full orchestra for his recent soundtrack for Ori and the Will of the Wisps, recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Pinewood Voices at AIR Studios in London earlier this year: ‘What you’re finding is that developers want to be able to identify their game within five seconds of hearing it, whether it’s through melody or the types of instruments or the way it’s been orchestrated,’ he says. It’s the same in film: ‘You know what The Lord of the Rings sounds like, whether or not you hear the melody – it has a production style and quality to it that you can identify as The Lord of the Rings.’
Coker says that in writing Ori and the Will of the Wisps he probably subconsciously absorbed the Celtic-sounding Shire themes of Howard Shore’s score for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack – his first concern was to write music that serves the game. ‘I don’t think
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Graphics were getting more advanced and giving gameplay a much greater depth
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any composer sets out thinking: “I’m going to write something that’s got to sound great outside the game.”’ And that’s the same for film, he says: ‘Do you think John Williams scored the Dual of the Fates to be a standalone piece? No, I don’t think so; I think it happens to be a great standalone piece. When you are given something great to work with, it allows you to create the music that supports that and also stands alone. The best movie music and game music cues are born from great ideas in the visuals.’
And that has always been the case, even in the mid-1980s, when composer Koji Kondo came up with a crazed Latin-jazz chip tune for the adventures of Super Mario Bros. But back then, with only limited memory and slower processing speeds, the music and audio was limited. Now the possibilities are endless, which explains the huge diversity of styles in video games today, from the slick and haunting synthy rock of Fortnite to the foreboding brass and percussion of film composer Inon Zur’s first Fallout, the leading franchise of games about the nuclear apocalypse. With such a huge soundworld to explore, it’s only a matter of time, perhaps, before we see a game set in a dystopian near-future in which composers gain financial rewards and global recognition for hunting down motifs, all the while avoiding the fallout from a raging pandemic. Or does that sound too far-fetched?