I greatly welcome the opportunity to write this foreword to The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music. The essays in this collection share ideas about this dynamic, shape-shifting, all-embracing discipline from multiple perspectives. That sharing is a communal, creative effort. In many ways, it is what video games themselves are all about.
Music is a key moment where the creative vision of player experience crystallizes. Whatever the genre of game, music can characterize avatars, it can enhance settings, it can deepen emotions and shape the pace of games.
Game music is an experience. It is not linear. Every change comes from a hook in gameplay, a decision of programming, a variation in the system based on the player’s input. To create a consistent player experience, both diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the role of music within the larger soundscape, demand a through line deeply grounded in our response and engagement with the game. Research, creative expression and the ongoing search for ways to connect with our players: all are synergistic and raise issues of identity and psychology. One of the great, continuing pleasures of developing and playing video games is that this work is never done. This is what has most inspired me in my work on the Assassin’s Creed brand, specifically Syndicate (2015) and Odyssey (2018).
Game music is a truly collaborative creative endeavour, which draws deeply on a range of people’s skills. The music team works with world designers, animators, game designers, gameplay programmers and audio programmers, without speaking of the composers, musicians, arrangers, lyricists, researchers and the rest of the audio team (dialogue and sound effects) with whom they must liaise. The larger the scale of the game, the greater the challenges to consistency in the game architecture into which we all feed. But on smaller games too, the ultimate design of music is determined by the particular player experience a team collectively foresees. It is an emotional and creative vision that must first be defined.
For my part, that collaborative process begins with our early concept art, narrative outlines and gameplay ideas. These provide touchstones to discuss with the rest of the development team – the evocations, moods and themes that are the building-blocks of our living and breathing world. These in turn suggest paths of ever-deepening research.
For both Syndicate and Odyssey, we wanted a holistic design of music. We wanted diegetic and non-diegetic music to be symbiotic. Music speaks constantly of shared community – it is born of art and architecture, of commerce, beliefs, logistics, wider cultural life, even the weather of its locale. For Syndicate, that locale was mid-Victorian London, engine of innovation and modernity, and of the great social and psychological disruptions that go with them. A Londoner myself, I needed to hear experimentation, immediacy, aggression and something of that psychic dislocation in the style. Austin Wintory tuned into this. Aided by critical musicologist Prof. Derek Scott and traditional music producer Dave Gossage, we curated a selection of songs which captured the atmosphere of each district of London. For instance, light opera, military music and hymns for Westminster; pub singalongs and folk music for Whitechapel. From each selection, we further chose one song as the key motif for that district. Westminster became ‘Abide with Me’, and Whitechapel became ‘My Name It Is Sam Hall’. Austin wove these motifs into the underbelly of the score, such that each melody echoes subtly throughout its district. Score and source fully intertwined.
Against this use of popular music for atmosphere, we used commissioned ballads to deepen the drama of the game story itself. The game’s progression demands critical assassinations, so the band Tripod in Australia and Austin wrote original murder ballads, attuned to the personality of each victim, modelling them on popular Victorian storytelling songs. The intimate dance of death further informed the score – we hear small chamber ensembles, solo string instruments attached to characters, the light ‘springiness’ of waltzes and mazurkas, the immediacy of scherzo sketches.
For Odyssey, the world was larger and more complex.
The commissioned score took over two years to develop. The musical duo The Flight are multi-instrumentalists and producers as well as composers. We had to discover Ancient Greece together. Consequently, the research effort demanded was great. Little music survives from the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. We looked at ancient vases and sculptures for visual clues, and to ancient texts for lyrics and poetry. We wanted an intimate, handmade, acoustic feel. We found one sonic signature in the Aulos, a key instrument in ceremonies and festivals, reconstructed from archaeological findings. In exploring how this instrument was played, we came to appreciate its relevance to a modern audience. To do this, we combined voices and other instruments in such a way as to appeal to modern musical aesthetics and used this instrument at significant moments in our non-diegetic underscore.
The diegetic music also took two years to develop and followed multiple parallel tracks. For historical materials, I drew on the work of individual experts – musical anthropologists, archaeologists, highly skilled craftspeople who reconstruct ancient instruments, local Greek practitioners. On the one hand, we created facsimiles of ancient Greek songs based on texts of the period, such as the sea shanties for which melodies were devised by Dimitris Ilias of Chroma Musica and Giannis Georgantelis. On the other, we themed our choice of story songs, which reflect the specific narrative and character arc of the game, around the notion of odyssey. The lyrics for these were written by Emma Rohan, with music composed by Giannis Georgantelis. All this also fed back into the commissioned non-diegetic material.
Finally, there is the life of our game music outside the game. This is a new collaboration in itself. The music experience we deliver lives on through players’ imaginations, in the many cover versions and reinventions players spawn. They reinterpret and share their work in the even wider context of social media. Many reworkings exist of the murder ballads and underscore from Syndicate. The first cover of the main theme track from Odyssey was uploaded before the game itself was released. This is a greater celebration of game music, seen also in the recent Assassin’s Creed Symphony series and many other live music events. This community that has developed around game music is huge, ever-evolving and constantly energizing. It is perhaps appropriate that my brief remarks end with them.
