Audio for games: composers are being asked to come up with movie-like scores while sound designers are providing 5.1 effects

Post, May, 2004 by David John Farinella

Another difference between game and movie music is the music is often used for narrative support and to underpin emotions in films. "In games the player is making the story for themselves, and if you apply music like in a film you start telling them things they don't know yet--they are writing the story in a sense," he says. "That's why the option exists to turn music off in a game, because it's something detachable for them."

As an example, Hannigan points to the game Republic, which is loosely known as a 'God-game' since it enables players to create scenarios for themselves and make their own story. In Republic a player tries to become the president of a fictional Eastern European country by any means possible. "Games like these are not so reliant on telling pre-existing stories or showing the player cut-scenes," he explains. "For this reason, there's little for composers to work with if they are seeking to write music to picture in any traditional sense."

So, in Republic the composer chose to indicate how well the player was doing via background music. "It's a musical state arrived at by making calculations using variables from the game," he explains. "The reason I think the music had some impact on the players of Republic might have been to do with how it provided information for them for which there were no visual cues. In that sense, the music became integral to the game. I have no idea how successful Republic was or wasn't, commercially speaking, but for me it was a welcome opportunity to do something different with music--something usually prevented by the industry. This was partly thanks to Elixir, the developer who wanted to break away from the norm and partly because they provided an excellent audio coder on the project."

Hannigan's gear choices will vary from studio to studio, though he'll turn to the Cubase and Vegas tools more often than not. "I like to work within a PC, since that's where the game is most likely going to be developed and played," he explains.

One of the trends the composer is seeing is "polarization, where you've got the big movie game launches on one hand and hard core games on the other," he says. "When I say hard core games I mean conventional games that aren't mainstream. It's almost like Hollywood where you've got the blockbusters at one end and you've got the art house things at the other end." Hannigan speaks from his experience, since in addition to Republic he's been scoring Catwoman, an upcoming EA release that's tied in to a feature film release.

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JESPER KYD PRODUCTIONS

Jesper Kyd (www.jesperkyd.com) recently completed the score for Hitman Contracts, the third title in that series, as well as the film Night All Day. He took two paths to finish the projects, because "when you're writing for games you've got to be careful to write music that people can listen to many times in a row," he explains.

"Sometimes you're stuck at a certain part in the game where it might take you an hour or two just to complete that puzzle or figure out how to solve that puzzle. So it can't be like film music where if you have a big action scene and the film score is all full of lots of thundering brass and big stabs."