First-Person Shooter Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Soundtrack

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Soundtrack, Mikael Karlsson, 2010

Battlefield: Bad Company’s soundtrack had turned heads through the involvement of classical composer Mikael Karlsson. As a successful writer of modern (sometimes avant-garde) classical music and with an impressive body of well-received orchestral works, ballets and operas under his belt, Karlsson seemed like an unusual choice to score a first-person shooter. The link between Karlsson and the Battlefield franchise was Stefan Strandberg, sound director at game developer DICE. Friends during their study years in Stockholm, they reconnected when Karlsson moved to New York and a demo tape of his made it into the hands of Strandberg.

Ultimately though, the Battlefield: Bad Company score album felt underwhelming. Its compositions were usually too short to develop meaningfully. Additionally, the music wasn’t as adventurous and refreshing as the references that Karlsson and Strandberg quoted in interviews (Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, Bartok) would suggest.

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Dead Space 2 Soundtrack

Dead Space 2 Soundtrack, Jason Graves, 2011

“The Same. But Different. Yet Better.” According to Jason Graves, those were the words that he stuck above his monitor when composing Dead Space 2. Considering the success of Dead Space’s aural aspects – two BAFTAs and a degree of media attention few game scores ever achieve – Grave’s goal was no doubt an ambitious one. Then again, no matter how ferocious Dead Space’s soundtrack was, there was room for improvement. Graves’ breakthrough work was the equivalent of a horror movie that tries to scare its audience with jump scare after jump scare. And at some stage, watching monsters leap at the protagonist for yet another “boo!” effect gets old.

Fortunately, Graves fixes this and other issues on the Dead Space 2 soundtrack. It is still unmistakably the soundtrack for a very scary game. But at the same time, through a more varied approach to creating unease and immersion, Dead Space 2 clearly surpasses its predecessor. It delivers a surprisingly multi-faceted exploration of the dark corridors of both a haunted space station and of its protagonist Isaac Clarke’s disintegrating mind.

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Descent Soundtrack (Mac)

Descent Soundtrack (Mac), Johann Langlie / Brian Luzietti / Larry Peacock / Jim Torres / Tim Wiles, 1995

Among the titles that ushered in the new era of 3D gaming during the mid-1990s, Descent sometimes gets a bit overlooked. Two years after Doom, Descent took the depiction of three-dimensional spaces in video games to the next level. Through the framework of a space flight simulator, Parallax Software gave players six degrees of freedom to shoot their way through a series of off-world mines. Another first was the use of (almost) exclusively 3D graphics to depict the game’s world, instead of bitmaps. It was no wonder that Descent was able to pull off such technical feats – its co-creators Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog had previously worked on another revolutionary 3D title: Ultima Underworld. Critical acclaim and strong sales figures rewarded Parallax Software’s daring, leading to a number of ports and sequels – and enough fan devotion to crowdfund a prequel decades later!

Tracing the creation of the Descent soundtrack is a mildly confusing affair, thanks to the game’s various ports. The original PC release came with a MIDI soundtrack composed by Ken Allen, Brian Luzietti, Larry Peacock, Leslie Spitzer, Jim Torres and Tim Wiles. Some of these artists had previously worked on other titles by publisher Interplay, while other composers don’t seem to have had much of a career in games outside of the Descent franchise. The score was heavily influenced by industrial music bands of the day like Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly, with this particular genre reaching its peak of popularity in the mid-1990s. The Mac and PlayStation ports released later on used CD audio, including arranged versions of some of the PC MIDI compositions, as well as licensed tracks by Nivek Ogre and Type-O Negative.

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Enemy Zero Soundtrack

Enemy Zero Soundtrack, Michael Nyman, 1996

Few video game auteurs have left an oeuvre as intriguing – and divisive – as Kenji Eno. Eno fittingly came to prominence during one of experimental game design’s heydays – the mid 1990s. His company Warp became best known in the West for its D series of horror games: D, Enemy Zero and D2. Only very loosely connected with each other, these games proposed innovative gameplay and story ideas – arguably to various degrees of success. However, these titles did ultimately cement Eno’s name in game history for their unbridled audacity.

It’s certainly not Enemy Zero’s story line that is its most innovative component. The game’s narrative – a spaceship is overrun by murderous xenomorphs – takes entire portions of Alien and mixes in bits and pieces of other sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner. Far more interesting is the game’s central game play mechanic. The rampaging aliens are invisible and the only way to find and shoot them is to rely on a sonar-like system that indicates their location through changes in pitch and frequency. It was an ingenious idea that some reviewers found was implemented less smoothly than it should have been, making for one hell of a difficult game.

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GoldenEye 007 Soundtrack (Nintendo 64)

GoldenEye 007 Soundtrack (Nintendo 64), Grant Kirkhope / Graeme Norgate, 1997

It’s no exaggeration to say that GoldenEye 007 was a game changer. By the mid-1990s, games based on movies had (justly) developed a disastrous reputation, and the fact that GoldenEye 007 was released a full 18 months after the movie didn’t help matters. And of course, this was a first-person shooter designed for a console, rather than for a PC – back then the natural home for FPS titles. But in the end, none of this mattered. GoldenEye 007 went on to sell more than eight million copies, becoming one of the most successful games of its console generation. Its reception among reviewers was just as enthusiastic and there’s no doubt GoldenEye 007 has left a lasting legacy – who could forget its legendary multiplayer mode? Not bad for a title developed by an inexperienced team that spent a full three years completing the game.

Like the game as a whole, creating the GoldenEye 007 soundtrack was no easy feat – after all, this was one of Rare’s first Nintendo 64 titles. Initially, Graeme Norgate was tasked with writing the score, having previously worked on Rare’s Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Land. However, Norgate was also working on Blast Corps at the same time and it became obvious that additional resources were needed. Thus Grant Kirkhope – while still working on Donkey Kong Land 2 – was drafted to join Norgate on GoldenEye 007 (he left before completion of that project to work on Dream). The challenge for both composers was to write music for a console that for the first one and a half years of the game’s development didn’t exist yet.

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Medal of Honor Soundtrack

Medal of Honor Soundtrack, Michael Giacchino, 1999

It’s hard to find a historically more significant, more influential Western game score than Michael Giacchino‘s Medal of Honor. Sure, the Medal of Honor soundtrack wasn’t the first orchestral game score to convincingly emulate movie scoring conventions. But there were a number of powerful factors that turned Medal of Honor into a force that changed the course of game music history – and it wasn’t just the fact that Giacchino’s work was married to an immensely successful game.

First and foremost, there is the soundtrack’s sheer artistic quality. Its strongest predecessors in the genre of Western live orchestral game music – Heart of Darkness, Total Annihilation, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – had already delivered some outstanding music. However, the Medal of Honor soundtrack surpasses them all in terms of both breadth and consistent quality (early Japanese orchestral game scores by the likes of Hiroshi Miyagawa, Yoko Kanno and Kohei Tanaka are a different story). What’s more, the score’s thematic sophistication set a new benchmark for live orchestral game music. Giacchino writes no less than three main themes that run through the entire score. He always uses these melodies judiciously and to further the music’s storytelling capabilities. On top of this, Giacchino introduces a new secondary motif on almost every track, builds the respective composition around this motif, and then masterfully weaves in the three major themes.

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Medal of Honor: Frontline Soundtrack

Medal of Honor: Frontline Soundtrack, Michael Giacchino, 2002

Both Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor: Underground had made a point of treating World War II not as a fun shooting spree (well, mostly). Instead, they approached the subject matter with an unusual degree of seriousness and respect. Medal of Honor: Frontline went further still, basing its story line on a failed Allied offensive: Operation Market Garden. This allowed the game’s developers to aim for an even greater sense of gravitas, born out of defeat and tragedy. Medal of Honor series regular Michael Giacchino responded similarly to the game’s comparatively downbeat subject matter. For Giacchino, Frontline is the ideal opportunity to once more expand the Medal of Honor franchise’s emotional palette. The result is one of the most operatic, grand Western game soundtracks ever written.

Where Frontline truly sets itself apart from previous Medal of Honor franchise scores is on its slower, downright elegiac compositions. These take the score’s theatricality to melodramatic heights that rival the game-music-as-opera surges of Heroes of Might and Magic II. “Arnhem” is one such piece, taken to emotional extremes by a full choir, to absolutely heart-rending effect. Based on a gently rocking, almost lullaby-like four-note motif, “Arnhem” is a stunning creation whose emotional impact is nearly overwhelming, climaxing in two massive choral outbursts. Patriotism had always featured in this franchise, but on “Arnhem”, it doesn’t come from a place of solemn pride. Instead, it is born out of sorrow and the desperate will to survive.

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Medal of Honor: Underground Soundtrack (PS1)

Medal of Honor: Underground Soundtrack (PS1), Michael Giacchino, 2000

Medal of Honor strove hard to create a first-person shooter experience that left an impression on players beyond the mere satisfaction of shooting bad guys before they could shoot you. However, the fact that the game progressed the FPS genre in terms of subject matter wasn’t its most revolutionary aspect. Instead, that particular achievement would have been the wide-spread critical recognition of game music’s quality outside of the gaming community. Michael Giacchino‘s Medal of Honor score fashioned itself on John Williams’ action scoring of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Astonishingly, it matched the elevated standards that come with such role models. As a result, bloggers, film score collectors and music fans in general – many for the first time – took note of the music produced for a video game.

Even more than Medal of Honor, Underground aims for historical authenticity (and thus reverence). Its main character Manon Baptiste is based on real-life French resistance fighter Hélène Deschamp Adams – who also served as a consultant on Underground. These efforts highlight the game designers’ increasing ambition to enrich action-driven gameplay through the retelling of one individual’s personal story. As a consequence, the Medal of Honor: Underground soundtrack shows greater interest than Medal of Honor in illuminating its protagonist’s psyche.

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Perfect Dark Soundtrack (Nintendo 64)

Perfect Dark Soundtrack (Nintendo 64), David Clynick / Grant Kirkhope / Graeme Norgate, 2000

If you want to kick off a debate amongst seasoned console gamers, try “Is Perfect Dark better than GoldenEye 007?” According to reviewers, the answer is usually ‘yes’. After all, this is the game that gave Rare the opportunity to finetune their approach to developing a first-person shooter, after they had created a genre classic with GoldenEye 007. Arguably pushing the Nintendo 64 to its limits, Perfect Dark provided such a wealth of content and degree of polish that it was hard to see how a console shooter in 2000 could be any better. Then again, GoldenEye 007 had arguably been the more groundbreaking title, popularising console FPS games. As a result, Perfect Dark didn’t have quite the same impact, as it was ultimately an immense refinement rather than another quantum leap.

Naturally, for the Perfect Dark soundtrack, Rare would call upon the same talents that had created the music for GoldenEye 007 – easily the best score for any Bond game. Complications were afoot though. Initially, the task of writing the Perfect Dark score fell to Graeme Norgate, who was working on Jet Force Gemini at the same time. Norgate began to lay the groundwork for the music, choosing a palette of instruments and completing a number of compositions. However, mid-way through the three-year development process, Norgate and half of the development team left Rare to form Free Radical Design (best known for their TimeSplitters trilogy).

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Shien’s Revenge Soundtrack

Shien’s Revenge Soundtrack, Akihiko Mori, 1994

In retrospect, the Super Scope seems like one of the more bizarre peripherals designed for the SNES – particularly considering how hard Nintendo tried to cultivate a family-friendly image during the era of the 16-bit console wars. Exactly how many parents would have been pleased to see their offspring in front of the TV with a bazooka-like contraption is anyone’s guess. Arguably though, if there was a genre that benefited from the Super Scope’s controls, it was rail shooters, with their static field of view and necessity to quickly and precisely move the cursor around the screen.

One of the better received rail shooters on the SNES was Shien’s Revenge (despite what must rank as possibly the most boring cover art in the console’s history). Sending players through various locations and time zones, Shien’s Revenge’s colourful visuals managed to stave off some the monotony caused by the repetitive gameplay. For the game’s score, developer Almanic approached game sound company MINT. And this is where things become a bit confusing when we try to identify who composed the music for Shien’s Revenge.

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