Jeremy Soule Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Soundtrack

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 2002

The Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets soundtrack is easily the best of Jeremy Soule‘s five scores for the franchise. It also benefits from a better album presentation than Soule’s other Harry Potter soundtracks. Only eight minutes of notable material are missing from the album release, which thankfully excises a lot of ruminative underscore. In fact, Chamber of Secrets is Soule’s most satisfying fantasy soundtrack. Yes, that’s a big claim to make, considering his work on franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Guild Wars. But Chamber of Secrets achieves a consistency of quality that Soule’s more bloated scores don’t accomplish. He doubtlessly deserved his 2004 win of the BAFTA Games Award for Best Original Music for Chamber of Secrets.

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IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 2009

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey arrived at the tail end of the World War II game genre’s huge popularity. As such, game music fans had witnessed many different approaches to underscoring this most devastating of armed conflicts. Especially Michael Giacchino‘s oeuvre had been a potent display of how to put war into music in various ways.

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Secret of Evermore Soundtrack

Secret of Evermore Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 1995

It’s fair to say that a game like Secret of Evermore would meet with less hostility these days. The thought of a Western console RPG is no longer an affront to gamers raised on Japanese genre products. Back in 1995 though, what many Square fans in the Western hemisphere wanted was a localised Secret of Mana 2 / Seiken Densetsu 3. What they didn’t look for was a down-to-earth alternative to JRPGs’ heroic melodramatics. Especially if it was littered with fictional pop culture references and had a metaphysical, light-hearted tongue-in-cheek approach.

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Total Annihilation Soundtrack

Total Annihilation Soundtrack, Jeremy Soule, 1997

There’s no doubt that real-time strategy games peaked in popularity during the second half of the 1990s. Their commercial success was kickstarted by the hugely popular Command & Conquer and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. For a few years, RTS games were all the rage (not that the genre is dead now). As a result, a glut of similarly-themed products soon hit the shelves. Differentiation – either by quality, innovation or style – became paramount for more ambitious developers.

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