Of course the music system doesn’t matter if the music sucks, so first a word about the musical direction.  As with all aspects of the game, our goal is bring you down into the action with soldiers, as opposed to the traditional God perspective of an RTS, so we really wanted to reflect what soldiers really listen to on the battlefield, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, rock.  But the challenge was to take this rock direction and stretch it out and tone it down to encompass the full emotional spectrum of the game experience, which is more than just fist-pumping aggression (though it certainly is that at times). 

So we found a way to build ambient textures out of the building blocks of rock to fill in the gaps between the times when you really need the aggressive stuff.  The mandate is that all of the music should be generated by guitars or percussion, which gives a real consistency to the soundtrack, but in fact the timbral palette is still quite rich, given the range of techniques and effects possible with electric guitar.  When I was out in Seattle working with our composers, Matt Ragan and Alistair Hirst of Omni Interactive Audio (colleagues from my Seattle days before moving to Shanghai in 2004), we raided Matt’s kitchen for utensils that could coax new sounds out of his guitars, and in the end we got a lot of percussive sounds out of the guitar in addition to more straightforward melodic bits, a kind of alternate, guitar-only orchestra.

Music implementation in a videogame is much more complicated than television or film, and it varies a lot depending on the type of game you’re doing.  In most cases you can’t just watch a scene and write music to fit; for one thing, you usually don’t have the luxury of waiting for the game to be done to add the music, since if you did, the implementation process would delay the whole production, and no producer would stand for that!  But more fundamentally, the scenes of a game are constantly changing, based on what the player does, so you need to find ways for the music to adapt to what’s going on without repeating.

Photo: ben pt. 1 courtesy of Zhou Jing.