In The Chair: Peter Mcconnell
Harvard graduate Peter joined Lucasarts in the Nineties, where he cocreated the IMUSE music system. He has since gone on to compose and produce some of gaming’s most memorable scores
The cocreator of IMUSE and many a hit Lucasarts soundtrack stops by for a chat
When did you discover your passion for music?
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1960, but spent most of my first four years in Basel, Switzerland, where my dad studied theology. Basel is still in many ways an old European city steeped in tradition, especially the German classical tradition. My earliest musical memories are of listening to my father’s reel-to-reel tape player. My favourite tapes were of Mozart and an American cowboy band called Sons Of The Pioneers. Ever since then, I’ve had two musical sides: a classical or art music side and a side that connects to popular forms, like folk or rock‘n’roll.
It must have been fascinating studying under
Ivan Tcherepnin at Harvard. What role did his teachings play in your approach to production? Ivan was one of a kind, the son of a Russian composer and a Chinese pianist who had grown up in Paris, studied under avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and was also a great appreciator of pop music. When teaching, he was as likely to refer to Scott Joplin, Al Green, or the time he saw Jimmy Hendrix light his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival, as he was to quote György Ligeti or Claude Debussy. Ivan had a powerful effect on all of his students. It’s hard to describe; it was almost spiritual. He’d rebelled against some of the more rigorous aspects of his own training, and brought a kind of organic approach to studio work. For example, we learned to value the vibe of a workspace as much, or more than, the gear that might happen to be in it.
After university, you were hired by Lexicon. What sort of work was it?
That was my first real job. At Harvard I had studied physics before switching to music, and that was handy when it came to finding work that was related to audio. Lexicon had invented the digital delay and was the premier maker of digital reverbs. You can still find Lexicon gear at top-end studios like Skywalker Ranch. I wrote user interface code on a number of their products and also implemented a pitch-shift DSP algorithm on a unit called the LXP5. I also had a rock band at the time. It was cool to work on gear that big-time musicians like Pat Metheny or Laurie Anderson were using, but my first love was still the music itself.
You landed a job at Lucasarts through Michael Land, who scored the original Secret Of Monkey Island. How did that come about?
Michael and I had been housemates in college, we played in bands together and I had helped to get him a job at Lexicon after he had gotten his Master’s Degree at Mills College. We had a plan with his high school friend Clint Bajakian to go out to the San Francisco Bay Area and start a band. This was well before the dotcom
After studying music at Harvard, Peter Mcconnell cut his teeth programming reverb code for audio company, Lexicon. He later moved to San Francisco, where he landed a job at Lucasarts. There, he cocreated the groundbreaking IMUSE system, which allowed games to synchronise music with on-screen events, in real time. Peter continued to work on scores for original properties and established franchises alike, with everything from Grim Fandango and Full Throttle to Star Wars and Indiana Jones. After Lucasarts, the father-of-two has continued working across a broad range of genres, picking up 25 Game Audio Network Guild nominations and four awards for his soundtracks to Hearthstone, Psychonauts, Broken Age, the Sly Cooper series and more.
bubble, when such a thing wasn’t completely insane financially. Anyway, Michael came out to the Bay Area first and by the time I got out there, he had gotten this job at Lucasarts. The band kind of fell through, but he was doing really cool stuff at Lucasarts and encouraged me to check it out. Up to that point, my experience with games had largely consisted of spending countless hours playing Zork and a game called Airborne! on the Mac Plus. Seeing what Lucasarts was doing with graphic adventures opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities. And I could get paid for not just doing music tech, but for writing music – that to me was incredible.
How rare was it for someone to possess both your music and programming skills?
I think it was somewhat unusual in those days.
It’s not that there weren’t musicians who could program, because there were – it was common for a working musician to have a day job as a programmer. But audio programming is a special niche, and in my observation it tended to attract very intense engineering types. I had come from a physics and math background before studying music, so I was lucky to have developed both my technical and creative sides.
What was the concept behind the game-changing IMUSE system?
The concept behind IMUSE was what got me excited about working at Lucasarts in the first place. Michael had a vision for creating flexibility in how music was played back live in an interactive simulation, and we found that we made a very good design team in realising and expanding that vision. We had a metaphor: the system should be like an idealised pit orchestra in a musical, where the conductor watches the action on stage and follows it closely. Furthermore, this conductor has a magical ability to direct virtuoso musicians to make smooth transitions to any place in the music at any time, in a way that is, well, musical. The first version of IMUSE took about nine months if I remember correctly. We were very proud of it, and so sure that it would blow everyone away. But it did its job so smoothly that a lot of people didn’t even notice.
How difficult was it to flesh out IMUSE from a groundbreaking concept into a working engine?
It was very complicated to use in the beginning. A lot of the difficulty came with acceptance. ‘The new sound drivers’, as they were called, along with their MIDI files, took up an entire floppy disk in a five-disk game. This was sacrilege! I suggested that we needed to legitimise the ‘drivers’ in people’s eyes, by calling them what they really were – a system, and give that system a name. So, Michael Land and I went out to dinner and came up with the name ‘IMUSE’. After that, people accepted it, but it was still way too complicated to use. It went through maybe five years of iterations to become more useable and less of a burden on the audio programmers.
The system would play music at different speeds depending on a system’s capabilities. What was the relationship between storytelling and music? Timing was a big challenge in the early days. And part of the complexity of the IMUSE system was that it could
either lead or follow. It was possible to have voice and animation triggered by the music, or have the music adapt to the game. Both capabilities are still useful in games, although due to better performance, the music only has to lead when there is an artistic reason to do so, as might happen in a situation in which game characters are playing in a band.
What software and hardware did you produce the Monkey Island 2: Lechuck’s Revenge music on? Monkey [Island] 2 was authored using a Mac Iisi running Digital Performer, driving sound cards on a PC via MIDI, using a PC utility that I wrote. Writing that utility was my first technical job at Lucasarts.
Most of the Monkey Island 2 score was played in by hand, using a controller. How much did this add to the groove?
We authored all of our scores by hand, using a MIDI keyboard and sequencer. I think it’s the only way to go, unless you are working in a techno genre that requires a groove with machine-like accuracy. Precisely because we were confined to synthesised sounds, but trying to refer to traditional live music forms, we wanted things to sound as human as possible. I have always been super careful not to quantise any more than absolutely necessary, sometimes to a fault. Parts of the Grim Fandango score were even written without regard for bar lines, which came back to haunt me when we did Grim Fandango Remastered !
In an age of limited graphics, the music for your Star Wars titles was probably one of the most immersive aspects of the games. Were you able to take many liberties?
We had to take liberties eventually, simply because we only had about three hours of John Williams from which to score a large number of titles. My favourite use of this music was in Force Commander, in which David Levison and I edited snippets of the Williams recordings over an industrial groove. We even recorded a heavy metal version of the Imperial March, with David playing guitar through my Marshall amp setup. It was so loud that we got complaints from offices two floors above ours. After the game came out, there was some concern at Lucasfilm that John Williams might not like the arrangement, and I was called up to Skywalker Ranch and politely asked not to take those kinds of liberties in the future. We also got some hate mail from Star Wars fans – sound familiar? At least one demanded that I be ‘sent to the mail room’. In truth, I was proud of that version of the March, and I thought it worked well as a tongue-in-cheek parody. But that said, you have to tread lightly with music of that stature, connected to a property that fans feel such ownership of, especially when you are part of the company that represents that property. So I was more circumspect after that.
What was the Lucasarts atmosphere like?
In the early days it was kind of like college, only you were getting paid for it. I was told that the initial directive
Part of the complexity of the IMUSE system was that it could either lead or follow Peter Mcconnell
given to the company by George Lucas was, ‘I don’t care what you do, just make cool stuff.’ Creativity and thinking out of the box were highly valued, as was a dedication to excellence. Tremendous effort was spent in the final stages of a title, making sure it was polished and fun to play. But it’s worth noting that, sadly, this approach may have been taken to extremes and was hard to sustain. At the end of the day, we all need to eat.
When working on the Indiana Jones And The Fate of Atlantis and Star Wars games, did you spend much time studying the music in films?
Absolutely. It was one of the great perks of the job. I also did a huge amount of music editing with the existing Star Wars recordings, and that was a tremendous education.
How did you produce music that would sound great across all sound cards? Which did you think was the best?
This was one of the most exhaustive parts of the job. We had separate versions for FM chips, wave table synths (Roland MT-32) and GMIDI hybrid sample-based cards (primarily the Roland Sound Canvas). For Monkey 2, we even had a PC speaker version. Generally, we liked the Sound Canvas best, because it sounded the most like live instruments, although for certain tunes, the warmth of the MT-32 was very nice. But not a lot of users had those high-end cards, and we worked very hard to make the FM versions sound good.
Sam & Max Hit The Road was one of the earlier games to include full music and voiceovers. did the advent of Cd-roms completely change your approach to audio production and budgeting? CD-ROMS were a watershed, because they allowed for live, recorded music. When we first saw what programmer Vince Lee did with recordings of John Williams in Rebel Assault, we knew everything had changed. Sam & Max was done at about the same time. As for the budgets, they are never enough. The sound team is always fighting for its share of storage, CPU and budget and we almost always come last. ‘Twas ever thus. Our big goal was ten per cent. If we could get 10 percent of all three of those elements – storage, CPU and budget – we were pretty happy.
Full Throttle won your first ever award, pc Gamer’s best soundtrack of 1996. did you enjoy working with digital music?
I loved working with digital music and especially with live rock‘n’roll. The Gone Jackals were an incredible band, the real deal. It was a privilege to work with Keith Karloff, their front man, who is a true artist. I think that music has held up even better over time, and Keith still plays shows every week. And even though my ambient music is a majority of the soundtrack, it ultimately serves as a kind of wrapper for the Gone Jackals.
Your soundtrack for Grim Fandango is a masterpiece – drawing upon so many influences with such fluency. What was your usual process for setting the tone, with Tim Schafer?
Tim was very much influenced by film noire in Grim, so he sent me his collection of Humphrey Bogart films to watch – and I watched them over and over and then obtained scores from Casablanca and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre from Warner. Tim also sent me a collection of Mexican folk music called Son, which helped to influence some of the folk elements in the score. In addition, I was profoundly influenced by a jazz course I took in college, as well as by the San Francisco Swing Revival that was going on in the late Nineties. There was a district in San Francisco where you could hear swing in one club, acid jazz (which was bop influenced) in another, and then go around the corner to a taqueria and hear a mariachi band play. It was like having the whole Grim score right there in one neighbourhood.
You reunited with Tim Schafer on the brilliantly scored Broken Age, to great acclaim – what do you make of the adventure game revival?
Broken Age felt more to me like a continuation than a reunion, since I have been fortunate to score all of Tim’s games from the beginning. That said, it was a welcome return to the adventure game genre. I’ve always been interested in story-driven experiences, whether they are in adventure games or in a platformer like Psychonauts II.
Listening to the soundtrack for Psychonauts, how significant a role does parody play in composing for videogames?
For me it plays a huge role. Psychonauts is a particularly clear case because the whole premise is a parody of the ‘spy team’ or ‘superhero team’ genre. But with a very few exceptions, videogames are essentially referential. Sometimes this has been to imitate other more established forms, like film. But at their best, games refer to other cultural elements as part of their basic nature: to gather familiar or fantastical experiences together and make them interactive. That gathering and re-experiencing itself can be seen as a kind of parody.
Could you tell us how the Game Audio network Guild was formed and how it has changed the industry?
Full disclosure: I’m a founding member of GANG and was active in its launch. I think all of us game audio professionals owe a debt of gratitude to the organisation and to Tommy Tallarico, who was the original driving force behind it. More than any other group or person, GANG is responsible for audio being taken seriously by
CD-ROMS were a watershed, because they allowed for live, recorded music Peter Mcconnell
the industry. This has translated into higher production quality, bigger budgets and better paychecks for all of us.
How much easier is it to produce music for games now, with software and hardware improvements, than in the mid-nineties? Are you ever nostalgic for the ‘good old days’?
It’s much easier now to get a ‘good sound’, of course. But getting the sound you want should always be at least a little bit hard, no matter how impressive your resources. I do all my work except for major live recordings in my home studio, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, especially because I get to be near my family. And honestly, I do not pine for the ‘good old days’, except that it was great fun to work with that group of people. In fact, in the ‘good old days’ we couldn’t wait until we could record a live orchestra.
What sort of home studio setup do you have?
I work in a room outside my house that was originally built by a musician as a flute rehearsal studio. It’s small but has nice high ceilings and a good sound. I also like the vibe because it’s right in the yard where my kids play, and we have a lot of nature around us. I author in Pro Tools on a souped-up trashcan Mac with a ton of sample libraries running in Vienna Ensemble Pro. I also have some vintage outboard gear from the Eighties and a wall of guitar amps (Fender Super Champ head, Mesa Boogie Mark III and a 1971 Marshall JMP-1, with a nice big Mesa cabinet), along with a small collection of guitars and other instruments. I can get a wide variety of electric guitar and violin sounds with that rig. It always helps to have the right gear for a particular sound, and it’s worth it to have to put some effort into getting the right sound. I used to work pretty intuitively with gear, and I hated opening a manual. But over the years, I have found great value in mastering my tools. Otherwise they will master you, and get in the way of being creative.
If you could go back and remaster all your old soundtracks with full orchestras, would you? And as someone who has constantly strived to advance the tech, does the current indie embrace of mock-retro music sounds seem a little ironic? I’d welcome the opportunity to remaster anything, frankly, just because from a purely musical point of view I’d love to hear some of that old stuff played by real people. But that’s on a musical level, apart from the game experience. For titles like Day Of The Tentacle, for example, I think the original experience – complete with graphics, music and gameplay – is all of a piece. And it would undermine the charm to try to make it slick by modern standards. My family and I recently visited the Museum Of Computers And Games in Wroclaw, Poland, while I was part of the Game Music Festival 2018. We got lost in the sights, sounds and pure fun of Pong, Pac-man, Mortal Kombat and Mario Rainbow Road. Not once did I think, ‘Man, someone should remaster these!’ So I don’t think it’s ironic at all that there is a growing fondness in the indie world for retro sounds. Especially at a time when massive resources are poured into triple-a soundtracks to sound epic, when that sound may not always be called for. A good melody is a good melody, and sometimes has extra charm as a chiptune.
What are you working on at the moment? Psychonauts II, and we plan to work with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on that, as we did with Broken Age and Grim Remastered. I’m also finishing an orchestral score to an indie sci-fi horror film called Intersect, which is scheduled for release sometime next year.
Many thanks to disney and GOG for providing the games featured in this article.