Making games is no layman’s task, but making music for games has to be equally applauded. After all, what would a game be without all the BGM, which makes the entire gaming experience more enhanced and surreal?
Jack Wall, the composer of the first two Mass Effect games and the four Call of Duty Black Ops games, recently revealed the nitty-gritty behind composing music for games, via an interview. During the interview, he spoke about what was it like to compose music for Mass Effect and Call of Duty, and the kind of challenges he faced.
Prior to Mass Effect and Call of Duty, he worked on titles such as Jade Empire and Myst. Notably, Wall has more than two decades of experience in the games industry.
Jack Wall on composing Mass Effect music
For the uninformed, the Mass Effect was set around 200 years in the future. Thus, there was no reference point available, Wall shares. As a result, Wall created the game’s futuristic music in a way that was influenced by looking backward.
Wall says:
“Casey Hudson [Mass Effect’s director] decided he wanted that sort of Blade Runner sound or synthesizer orchestra sound. I’ve never done that before, and so it’s pretty much all synth, especially the first one. Then in the second one, we had gotten into using samples and orchestra and stuff like that. We just wanted a unique sound. I think it worked really well for the game, I’m pretty proud of that. The references were Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. You know, people who did music with synthesizers back in the ‘80s for movies. There’s a tonne of them.”
Wall added that he later went back and listened to all those things, and emphasized how Tangerine Dream had a heavy influence on it. Wall believes his challenge was to take pretty cool music and then figure out how to make that work in the game’s world-building.
Wall was also asked about the most iconic and the most epic ‘suicide mission’ in the game. The rising and falling score preserving a razorwire tension throughout, is what makes the mission worthwhile. Replying to this, Wall said,
“I don’t remember [the suicide mission] right now. I just remember the very end of it, where you’re trying to escape and get out of there before it all blows up. It was so nerve-wracking to get done because we had a very limited amount of time.”
Wall suggested that getting the game done was an intense experience. However, he added that he does not really remember what was on his mind while creating music leading up to their final mission, but he implies that he does everything the same way. He aims to tell the story and create moments where players can come down, and it’s just tense.
Jack Wall thinks Russian is hard
Apart from the suicide mission, Wall recalls another pressurizing situation. This was creating the music for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War. One of the challenges was writing and recording for an orchestra during the pandemic. Wall had to task himself with writing the theme in Russian language to match the Cold War theme.
Now the bigger challenge was that Wall did not speak Russian. Thus, he had to write in English, and then have it translated and transliterated to compose the melody. He further shares how due to the pandemic, a majority of this work was done over phone calls and video conferencing.
Talking of his struggles with Russian he says,
“Oh my God, Russian was really hard. It’s not one of the Romantic languages, so you can’t look at a word and say, ‘Oh, I know this kind of means that’, or know how to pronounce that. So I had to hire a translator, and we went through a very long, very arduous process. [We came up with] a pronunciation guide for English singers, and it was especially challenging because of COVID-19, so they could not get in the same room.”
He further shared the struggle of finding 32 singers and making sure all of them were able to record themselves at home by themselves. They then had them do two different passes, namely one on the mic and one off-axis.
Once that was done, eventually someone had to do the editing to make sure it all sounded good together.
