Medal of Honor Soundtrack

Medal of Honor Soundtrack, Michael Giacchino, 1999

It is hard to find a historically more significant or more influential Western game score than Michael Giacchino’s Medal of Honor. True, the Medal of Honor soundtrack was not the first orchestral game score to convincingly emulate film-scoring conventions. But several powerful factors turned Medal of Honor into a force that changed the course of game music history – and it was not simply the fact that Giacchino’s work was attached to an immensely successful game.

First and foremost, there is the soundtrack’s sheer artistic quality. The strongest earlier examples of Western live orchestral game music – Heart of Darkness, Total Annihilation, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – had already delivered some outstanding music. However, the Medal of Honor soundtrack surpasses them all in both breadth and consistency (early Japanese orchestral game scores by the likes of Yoko Kanno, Jun Nagao, and Takayuki Hattori are another matter). What is more, the score’s thematic sophistication set a new benchmark for live orchestral game music. Giacchino writes no fewer than three main themes that run through the entire soundtrack, using them judiciously and always in the service of the music’s storytelling. On top of that, he introduces a new secondary motif on almost every track, builds the cue around it, and then masterfully weaves in the three principal themes.

Of course, it is hard to ignore just how much the Medal of Honor soundtrack resembles John Williams’ action scoring from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this case, though, that comparison is an enormous compliment. Giacchino manages to write orchestral action music of a quality comparable to the maestro himself. That applies both to the intelligence of the score’s thematic construction and to the sheer aural exhilaration it provides.

What is so pivotal to the success of Medal of Honor is how fully it realises its storytelling ambitions. The score creates gripping narrative arcs both within individual compositions and across the album as a whole. The intelligent use of recurring themes is obviously central to that achievement. However, two further elements help Medal of Honor function like a first-rate film score.

First, there is Giacchino’s expert command of dynamics. Certainly, Medal of Honor derives much of its reputation as an orchestral powerhouse from adrenaline-charged pieces like “The Radar Train” and “Rjuken Sabotage”. These remain some of the most irresistibly propulsive action cues written for any video game. What allows the soundtrack to sustain its running time so well, however, is that Giacchino is equally adept at writing quieter music that still keeps the listener on edge. The result is a superb pattern of tension and release. A cue like “Securing the Codebook” moves seamlessly from quiet snare drums to a ruthless statement of the Nazi theme. Similarly, the subdued “The U-Boat” is given enough space to paint a strikingly vivid image of its claustrophobic setting.

Second, Giacchino develops his compositions extraordinarily well, superbly binding together their many changes of mood, dynamic level, and orchestral texture. Like the best orchestral game music, these pieces never lose focus or direction. Nor do they ever feel like a merely competent patchwork of musical gestures. The Medal of Honor soundtrack is a resounding demonstration of how orchestral game music can follow a flawless internal logic. As a result, Giacchino’s cues emerge as fully fledged compositions that function effortlessly outside the game as rousing musical statements.

It is precisely this near-perfect emulation of cinematic role models that helped Medal of Honor – and orchestral game soundtracks more broadly – break into the wider musical mainstream. Many within the music industry and listening public finally realised that, yes, game music could be as good as film music. Of course, that had already been true for years before Medal of Honor. However, it took a conservative revolutionary like this score to introduce outsiders to the medium. It did so by taking the conventions of a more familiar genre and applying them to game music in flawless fashion. In that way, game music became acceptable to more conservative tastes that had struggled to appreciate the electronic sound world of most earlier video game scores.

The irony, of course, is that while film music so obviously inspired the Medal of Honor soundtrack, Giacchino’s work sounds like no Hollywood war film score would have in 1999. The fact that a World War II first-person shooter could be scored like a rollicking adventure film shows that, for all its perfect imitation of cinematic grammar, a considerable gap still remained between the aesthetics and tone of games and contemporary cinema.

That does not change the fact that the Medal of Honor soundtrack transformed the industry’s perception of live orchestral game music. Once a rare extravagance, it would gradually become a de facto standard. Very few other scores did as much to bring game music into the musical mainstream. And fewer still had the substance and quality to justify such an elevated status.