Scoring for games: Tips on making music for video games

by Nick Krewen, Summer 2007

Want to break into the video-game-scoring market? So does everyone else, and no wonder. The US$7-billion interactive-entertainment-software industry has grown by leaps and bounds as gamers embrace their computers, PlayStations, Xboxes, Wiis, cell phones and other hand-held wireless devices, which offer new opportunities for composers who salivate at the challenge of a fairly new medium — and, of course, the potential income.

Stuart Chatwood is one of the few lucky Canadian composers to break into this fiercely competitive field. The multi-instrumentalist first contributed a song to Electronic Arts’ Road Rash in 3D as a member of The Tea Party in 1996, but since then, he has supplied six editions of Prince of Persia with his own compositions for Ubisoft International.

“I was writing a fair bit of music that wasn’t suitable for The Tea Party,” Chatwood recalls. “I was just cataloguing ideas and giving them cinematic titles. I loved film soundtracks, and I knew at some point I’d have to move into a scoring scenario for these pieces to see the light of day. I didn’t consider composing for games before 1996, since at the time, they were quite primitive-sounding. This changed when PlayStation 1 came out. All of a sudden you had CD-quality music. It took a few years, but in 2001, I was contacted by a friend in Montreal about getting involved in the new versions of the Prince of Persia series. I was thrilled, and I’ve continued to work on all six versions of the game since then.”

Derek Brin partnered with fellow composer Nayan Williams to work on Brainbox Games’ Marine Heavy Gunner: Vietnam. He advises scorers to approach video-game developers as often as video-game publishers. “Sometimes the developers are different from the video-game companies. The developers are the foot soldiers creating the games and the engines,” says Brin. “Even though it sometimes won’t end up in the video-game, they’ll still pay people to create temp music.”

Brin recommends you do your homework: research the company before you approach it, establish contacts whenever possible and when submitting a demo, “make sure it has video-game music on it — even if you weren’t hired to make it.”

Of course, composing an interactive video-game score requires a different mindset than more traditional composing. “Like a movie, a game develops themes throughout, and these need to be addressed,” says Chatwood. “The traditional songwriting equivalent would be a concept album. You’re not worried about radio airplay, three-minute hit singles and the like. Your goal is to complement the on-screen action and convey an emotion. Also, at times the music is in the foreground, but more often than not, it contributes to setting the pace and drama of the scene, and as a result, you have to learn when to lay back.”

Brin says a composer has to write with an awareness of the various “trigger points” activated by a player as the player progresses through the game. “Sometimes you compose in sections, where you build up the music and a song is composed in five or six different sections,” he explains. “As the player reaches certain points, the computer triggers one of these six sections. When he reaches the point where the computer knows he’s going to get shot at, the computer might trigger piece number two. It’s based on certain expectations of things that are coming up. So you create what they call ‘high-intensity,’ ‘mid-intensity’ and ‘low-intensity’ pieces to accommodate these triggers, and then the programmers place music according to what they’re putting up against the player.”

Chatwood often inserts what he describes as “forks” into his work to avoid “repetitive and extremely annoying” repeats. “If people knew how much of this smooth, linear soundtrack score was chopped up, they’d be amazed,” he says. “For example, you could write three intros to a piece that randomly trigger, have six sections that loop randomly, then have three outcomes for that trigger, depending on the screen action.”

When composing for a video-game, Chatwood says he scores a scene after looking at visuals ranging from storyboards and blocks of animation to “a beautiful hi-resolution full-motion video.” Brin says that some of the bigger manufacturers supply specially modified Xboxes containing the game so the composer can test out his or her score.

Other considerations: exceedingly tight deadlines, which can range anywhere from a few days to a few hours, according to Chatwood. “I’ve spoken with a few TV composers in Hollywood who lay out a schedule of writing 20 minutes of finished music each week, and I feel quite lucky that most games’ timelines function on a composer creating five to seven minutes of music a week. But this includes creation, arranging, performing, overdubbing and sub-mixing.” Chatwood says the average amount of music he usually provides for games is around 70 minutes. “Everyone would prefer more, but ultimately it’s a budget consideration,” he says. “The right recipe is a large budget, a talented composer and a smart programmer.”

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