Outcast Soundtrack

Outcast Soundtrack, Lennie Moore, 1999

Being a pioneer is rarely easy, and the effort may go unappreciated at first. Such was the fate of Outcast, a sci-fi action-adventure game that was revolutionary in more than one respect. Its three-dimensional open world, which players were free to explore, preceded similar titles such as Grand Theft Auto III by several years. Then there was Outcast’s voxel-based graphics engine, which produced a stunningly realistic extraterrestrial world, perhaps more successfully than any game before it. That visual splendour came at a cost, however. Back in 1999, only the most powerful PCs could run the game properly. Naturally, that limited its financial prospects, and both a Dreamcast port and a planned sequel remained unreleased. Even so, Outcast built up a legacy among players strong enough to warrant a remake, Outcast: Second Contact, in 2017.

A conspicuously bold title in every respect, Outcast also benefited from what was still a rarity in 1999: a fully live orchestral game soundtrack. A professed admirer of John Williams and Alan Silvestri, director Franck Sauer placed an advert in several film-music magazines in 1996, looking for a “Hollywood film composer”. The job ultimately went to Lennie Moore, for whom Outcast would become the beginning of a fruitful career in game music. A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Moore had already worked on scores for film, television, and commercials, with the documentary Trinity & Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie standing out in particular. That film had also brought him into contact with the forces that would realise the Outcast soundtrack: conductor William Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

The brief Moore received for Outcast was undeniably challenging. While Red Book audio would allow the music to shine in fully orchestrated glory, it also posed technological problems. How could the score progress in step with the player’s actions if the laser took too long to move seamlessly from one track to the next? Artistically, too, Outcast’s creators set the bar unusually high: each location was to receive a non-looping piece of roughly seven minutes. In 1999, that kind of duration was virtually unheard of for level themes, and it remains unusual even now. Interestingly, one of the few game scores to rival the breadth of Outcast’s compositions, Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales, was likewise performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

Moore rose to the challenge magnificently, crafting one of the finest live orchestral music written for a video game, even if the Outcast soundtrack as a whole is not quite as consistently strong as its contemporary Medal of Honor. As one might expect, Outcast is best understood as a hugely ambitious act of world-building, and Moore’s music fits seamlessly into that scheme. At the centre of the score stand monumental, long-spun pieces that paint the game’s locations with immense elegance, sophistication, and scale. Without straining for effect or constantly resorting to volume, Moore achieves an impact that is at times biblical and at others deeply intimate, but always capable of conjuring environments that feel extraordinary.

The sense of awe running through the entire soundtrack is established almost immediately on “Ranzaar”. Open-world scores often struggle to sustain strong melody, but Moore finds a comfortable balance between atmosphere and melodic substance. The cue’s heart-rending, dignified brass theme anchors a composition that makes full use of its extended duration to evoke its wintry region in mesmerising detail. The use of choir suits the location perfectly and pushes the music’s scale into the operatic. Yet Moore also introduces subtler surprises into his superb orchestration — witness the cascading woodwinds beneath the melodic build-up from 5:00 onwards, creating constant, almost intoxicating motion and colour.

This combination of epic scope and minute attention to timbre and melody is omnipresent. “Shamazaar” opens with the choir-heavy solemnity one might expect from a region full of temples. Yet the glistening violins beneath the choral lines lend the cue a subtle twist, balancing grandeur with a sense of wonder and giving rise to music of unusual emotional complexity. The overflowing warmth of “Shamazaar” is countered by “Okaar”, Outcast’s most bracing composition: seven minutes of intricately layered percussion polyrhythms and probably an over-reliance on the game’s enigmatic four-note main motif in the strings. Elsewhere, Moore’s command of long-form development remains exemplary. “Motazaar” is more fragmented than its companion pieces, using textural writing to create a potently mournful, anxious mood. Then, amid all the brooding, Moore unveils a melancholic melody of genuinely classical proportions, unfolding over two minutes and steadily accruing stature and drama.

Having painted Outcast’s locations in such vivid and varied detail, Moore needed a way to bind these colourful compositions into a convincingly coherent world. Most composers would approach that problem through thematic writing, and Moore does introduce a main theme that appears in almost every cue. It is a curious theme, however: much shorter than his other melodic ideas and resistant to harmonic resolution, it functions less as a marker of clearly legible emotion than as an ambivalent source of tension and unrest. What shapes the Outcast soundtrack even more strongly than this main theme, though, is Moore’s decision to ground the score in an unusual six-note hexatonic scale (C, D#, E, G, Ab, B), with the cues modulating between the tonalities it generates.

The resulting compositions form a consistent whole with remarkable subtlety and naturalness, without relying on more overt connective devices. Thanks to the peculiar properties of Moore’s hexatonic scale, the Outcast soundtrack inhabits a coherent and rarely explored harmonic world that organically ties its pieces together. At the same time, the score’s chromatic density is distinctive enough to set it apart from its peers. In other words, Outcast’s harmonic complexity is central to its success as an act of world-building. At times, the idiosyncratic harmonies Moore deploys are enough to carry a cue on their own. “Talanzaar” is a prime example, deliberately scaling back the orchestral intricacy to let the strings carry thick unison melodies, their harmonies perfectly underscoring the oppressive, heady atmosphere of the desert setting.

The soundtrack’s other principal component is its four shorter battle tracks. Of these, “Daoka” is the undisputed star, a furious hornet’s nest of frantically whirring string and woodwind ostinati, whipped into still greater frenzy by brash brass and percussion accents. If “Daoka” is a showpiece for an orchestra pushed to furious speeds, final cutscene cue “Marion” allows the choir to take centre stage. Moore cleverly repurposes the main theme to create a sense of finality and significance, drawing out its fatalistic undertones in an adagio composition that carries the soundtrack’s monumental impulse to its logical conclusion. It is another moment equalled by very few game scores.