Scoring in the virtual world

The art of writing music for computer games is different from that of film soundtracks, but like their movie forebears, game scores are now finding their way into the record stores, writes Guy Clapperton

IN THE 1950S and 1960s, the likes of Bernard Herrmann and John Barry emerged as serious composers due to their work in the movies, and you could buy a film soundtrack on LP, including suites of incidental music. It was a measure of how writing film scores was becoming appreciated as a genre in its own right by both movie-makers and audiences - and evidence of the vital role scores could play in films.

Computer and video-game music might not have reached the same level yet, but soundtracks are starting to get separate releases. Not only that, but composers with established reputations are starting to write them. Take Heavenly Sword, a game for Sony's Playstation 3: rather than opting for stock music, the game's creators brought in the award-winning musician and composer, Nitin Sawhney; instead of suggesting he knock something out cheaply on a computer, he was encouraged to use orchestras in London and Prague.

Sawhney is no stranger to movie soundtracks, but writing for the game market is different. He got into it through the actor Andy Serkis, who did voice-work for the game.

"I don't really play games very much, and it wasn't originally something I'd considered an area I could get into - but I've learned a lot since then," says Sawhney. "You've got a lot of films like Sin City, 300, A Scanner Darklyand even the Lord of the Ringsstuff where there's a lot of crossover and cross-fertilization between the games world and the film world. The processing power in video games has increased astronomically over the past few years, so they're able to incorporate a lot of incredible visual effects and amazing performances."

Enhancing the musical score was a logical next step, and the English-based game developer, Ninja Theory, was up for something orchestral and epic.

The challenges of writing a game score are quite distinct from those of creating a movie soundtrack. In a movie, the writer, director and composer collaborate to create the appropriate mood. The story is linear and the creators can structure their efforts in a particular direction.

In game-play, though, the lead character might be killed at any moment; there can be unexpected changes of scene and atmosphere.

In the case of Heavenly Sword, the makers decided they still wanted the score to flow from one scene to the next despite the lack of a fixed narrative. For Sawhney, writing the music was less like composing than walking through a tree diagram.

"You have to create small sequences of music for each possibility [within the game]," he says. "And you have to make sure, in terms of key and modulation and so on, that they're compatible, so you can stop at any point and cross over to another scene. Also, you have to provide the individual stems of music, so if they want to fade a part down but keep the percussion going, they can do it."

SAWHNEY WAS INVOLVED early in Heavenly Sword's development cycle, but the music is not usually so well planned. Game developers looking for a famous name to give the soundtrack a boost usually have to act more on a wing and a prayer. When the Japanese game developer, Capcom, was working on Devil May Cry 4, it knew what music it wanted: something by the popular Japanese band, L'Arc-en-Ciel. The game's producer, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, explains that the theme song the band wrote (which only features on the Japanese version of the game) came about almost by chance.

"I'd heard that the members of L'Arc-en-Ciel were fans of the Devil May Cryseries and they'd been enjoying playing the games a lot," Kobayashi says. "So they already had deeper understanding and interpretation for DMC's world, as well as its game-play, and we didn't need to put so much effort into explaining what DMC's story expresses in order for them to compose music for it."

Okay, but they must have at least played Devil May Cry 4before writing? "Unfortunately, we couldn't get a chance to invite them to our office for them to actually play the game, but we provided them with the movie to show Nero's story and action, to give them better ideas about DMC4."

For some musicians, such as Nathan McCree, writing for games is a springboard. "My degree was in computer programming, and I got a job as a programmer," McCree says. "I was working on a music sequencing programme for the Sega Mega Drive. I finished ahead of schedule, wrote some music on it, and showed it to the boss. We changed my job overnight."

He went on to write the music for the Tomb Raider series, and now runs a company supplying specially composed music for games.

Even though his living depends on writing original music, he is agnostic about the use of stock music to fill out game soundtracks. "It's game-dependent," he says. "For instance, in a racing game, you're not necessarily describing the mood as it goes by from second to second, but with something like an adventure game, when the adventure unfolds and the user is unpredictable, the music has to work and be cut-able into sections that work back to back, front to back, and so on."

It's the same skill, McCree insists, as any composer needs. "Whenever you're writing a piece of music, you're telling a story; there's a start, a middle and an end," he says. "Obviously, with a story-based game, you're trying to describe the game and characters, leave little clues in the music as to what's happening next."

So will music obsessives come to treasure the works of game composers in the way cinema-lovers already value the music of Ennio Morricone? Best, perhaps, to wait and see if the Barbican puts on evenings devoted to the music of Nathan McCree before answering that.

- Guardian service