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MillimeterHappy Marriage
May 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson
Video game production music library proves lucrative.
It makes sense that two of the music industry's least-publicized but fastest-growing segments — video game music and production music libraries — would eventually come together in a new product. Both art forms are on the technological cutting edge: Video game soundtracks have been doing mixes in surround for some time, occasionally using higher bit rates. Production music companies were among the first to widely embrace e-commerce, and they have also championed the improvement of online digital delivery formats.
Composers for such video games as Peter Jackson’s King Kong—Tommy Tallarico, Chance Thomas, Inon Zur, and Jack Wall, among others—are featured in Associated Production Music’s first collection of original video game music, a six-CD series called Endgame.
Of course, video games have long used production music and sound effects libraries to fulfill their music and sound requirements. “We have a long history working with the video game industry,” says Adam Taylor, president of Associated Production Music (APM), the largest company of its kind in the United States. “We're in all the Sims games, the John Madden games, there's a long, long list, and it continues today — we have music in The Godfather game that's coming out. There are certain kinds of atmospheric pieces — maybe its music from another era, or something unusual — where it makes sense to go to production music rather than hiring a special orchestra or whatever that part of the game needs. And then there are games like L.A. Rush and [Blitz: The League] where we have 50 or 60 songs in each.”
However, another trend in the game industry is to spend more money on music and sound, so video game music composers are commanding higher fees, and top sound effects designers increasingly are crossing over into the world of games. There are games that have more than a hundred minutes of original music suffusing the different levels or environments, plus have a soundtrack of popular songs, plus use some production music. There are now composers who are as well-known to gamers as their counterparts in feature films. Don't know who Tommy Tallarico, Chance Thomas, Inon Zur, and Jack Wall are? If you have a teenage kid at home or are a gamer yourself, you might. They've been responsible for the scores of such hit games as Advent Rising, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Myst III: Exile, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and Men of Valor. More and more game soundtracks are being released separately as CDs, and there are even concerts dedicated to video game music. All of which helps explain why APM has jumped into the fray and released its first collection of original music by top video game composers. Its six-CD Endgame set features contributions by the aforementioned composers, as well as more than a dozen others covering every genre of game imaginable, from first-person shooters to sports games to fantasy titles.
“A lot of innovative music is coming out of the video game world,” Taylor says. “You've got a younger group of composers, and you have a new visual medium with different metaphors — the very fact of its interactive structure means that a composer has to think of music differently. And it's not just that they understand interactive technology, they're wonderful composers; many are classically trained. The next John Williams or Hans Zimmer may well come out of video games.”
Scores for such video games as Men of Valor are often developed as the game’s animation is taking shape, unlike film scores, which are usually the last element to be added.
Besides being a top game composer, Tallarico is also the founder and president of GANG, the Game Audio Network Guild (audiogang.org), which is an online information and networking resource. He says of the APM Endgame collection, “[It] is a great way to show what modern-day game composers are made of, because there's been a cloud over the head of video game music. Back in the old days, a lot of the music really was just a bunch of simple bleeps and bloops, because that's all the technology could afford to do, and most of the people making the music back then weren't musicians; they were computer programmers. One of the things that happened in the mid-90s, when CD-ROMs finally hit and budgets for games started getting bigger and bigger, is people started writing more original music for the games, and now we're at the point where we're able to use big orchestras, and the technology got to the place where we could really strut our stuff. It's gotten to where our scores are on par with film and television.
“The truth is, the 30-and-under crowd are much more into game music than they are into movie and TV soundtracks. Think about it: If you buy a DVD of a movie, you might watch it a couple, few times. When you buy Metal Gear Solid, you're going to play that game for 50 hours and you're getting pounded by the music constantly. People really get to know game music well. At our concerts [of live game music], when the music for Halo and Warcraft or Mario come on, people go nuts — they lose their minds.”
Tallarico adds that the CD soundtrack for Halo sold more than 160,000 copies. “Video game music is the one thing that's part of the game that can also be another source of revenue outside the game. You can't really say that about the graphics. The programming, the artwork, the design — those stay in the game. But you can sell the music.”
In the case of the Endgame collection, the songs/cues are not familiar ones from famous games the composers have worked on. After all, APM sells its music primarily to people who are involved in radio, TV, film, and multimedia production, so the goal is to offer music that works emotionally with the content of the program, rather than some familiar piece of music that is tied up legally to other entities. “We had a five-member team listening to hundreds and hundreds of tracks in an effort to select the types that we think APM customers need,” Taylor says. Not surprisingly, therefore, many are modern-sounding action, adventure, fantasy, and military styles — many of which feature orchestras, others mostly percussion, and some mainly electronica. A special sports-oriented disc called Overload is a typically hyped-up set of cues. Tallarico is spotlighted on the Classic Games disc, with actual music from existing games, and Wall (Myst III, Jade Empire, etc.) has a CD called World Drama Beats. Might some of the music from Endgame turn up in future video games? “Sure, that's possible,” Taylor says. “But, frankly, that's not where we're targeting it. I think it will have strong general appeal outside of games.”
Ever the booster of his field, Tallarico says, “There's a whole new generation of songwriters and composers wanting to work in video games. But we're also getting a lot of people who are maybe frustrated by film and television, because the reality is you're either on the A-list, which is maybe 15 or 20 people in the world, or you're pretty much working very cheaply or working for the credit. So there's a big line between making $1 million a film and making $10,000 a film; whereas, in video games, even when you come in at an entry level, some people are able to make $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 for a single project depending on the amount of music. Usually the top guys will charge anywhere from a $1,000 to $2,000 per minute of music [used in the game], and games are using more and more music as they get more complex. So if you can do two, three, four projects a year, that really starts to add up. Now we're also starting to see film composers coming over to our side: Howard Shore [an Oscar-winner for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King] is doing a game, and so is Bill Conti — he just did The Godfather game.”
Both Taylor and Tallarico believe that the rise of video games has been an extremely positive force in an entertainment industry struggling on many other fronts, from music downloading to declining movie ticket sales. It's creating thousands of jobs for computer graphics artists, sound engineers, and musicians. When Tallarico wrote the score for the game Advent Rising, he says, “I used a 72-piece union Hollywood orchestra on the Paramount stage, and we recorded 100 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Plus there's other types of music on there. We're giving work to musicians, arrangers, orchestrators, copyists, studios, mastering houses. … It was a big budget, and they're still getting bigger.”
Tallarico notes that writing cues for a video game usually takes longer and is more involved than a typical film score, where the music is often the last element added in the postproduction chain. With games, it's not unusual for the composer to be involved very early in the process. “I've been in there conceptualizing things with the artists before they've worked out the animation,” he says. “I've had games where I've completed music for a scene based on a description and maybe some sketches, and then they've actually animated the scene around my music. It can be quite time-consuming — you can spend anywhere from a year to a couple of years working on one game. Though it wouldn't be constant work, so you can usually work on a more than one at a time.”
A lot of the appeal of composing for games is that they are, by definition, open-ended and situational. “If you're scoring a film,” Tallarico says, “that's a linear piece of media. There's a two-minute piece of film and this sword hits here, and that horse runs by and this guy dies there. It's very restricted in terms of how you have to write the music. But with video games there are all these other possibilities in a scene, so you have to write with more range, and in a sense it's the player who's controlling how the music is going to be used in a lot of situations, depending on what he or she does.
“Composing the music is part of the job; the other is the implementation of the music in the game, which is a fairly complicated and technical process. Some composers just turn their music over to other people to mix it and put it in the game, and that's fine, but I like to be in there making sure the mix is good and it's going into the game the way it's supposed to.”
So, are engineering chops a must for the modern game composer? “It always comes in handy,” Tallarico says. “That said, it's probably less of a necessity these days because the budgets have gotten better and you can pay people to do that.”
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