L.A. Comic Con 2019: Scoring for Video Games Panel

Press Start: Scoring for Video Games was a panel at this year's L.A. Comic Con that included composers of titles such as Journey, Flow, The Banner Saga, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and Killzone: Shadow Fall talking about their work on new games Telling Lies, Erica, Call of Duty: Mobile, BattleTech, John Wick: Hex and Disintegration. They were there to discuss their creative process, how they broke into the industry, and what goes into creating the music for their video games. It was an often informative, sometimes fascinating look at the process of scoring video games, and included clips of several of the games discussed. See below for a few of their comments and videos of the panel.

Walter Mair (Call of Duty: Mobile, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Total Warhammer, Grand Theft Auto) I did work with Activision before in the past on a different game and I was on the radar and just happened to be in Los Angeles because I was trying to come to LA two or three times a year. I was there, I met with the audio leads, we had a quick coffee and they mentioned [Call of Duty: Mobile] ... I hadn't heard back from them for three months, and eventually you get a phone call, an email, that says you're invited to pitch for the game and then you're up against a dozen or more other composers and then you do your best. 

There's always an expectation of the fan base, which is us players, and the game directors, the audio leads, the entire team -- and everyone has a different opinion of what the game is supposed to sound like. And then of course you want to do the best, and do something different. ... Just trying to find something that's new and different or kind of unique for the franchise. So I've been doing this a lot for Call of Duty.

There's one mission in there which hasn't dropped yet, though it's been announced, it's the zombies. And in zombies, you experience a totally different kind of setting. Of course it's gruesome, it's dark, it's dirty, there's a lot of blood in there. ... And the music had to reflect that. Instead of going to add a 60 to 70 to 80 piece orchestra, I decided to just record a few instruments.

[Hear more about Mair's work in Part 2 and following parts, and watch a clip of Call of Duty: Mobile in Part 3.]

Jon Everest (Disintegration, BattleTech) I think I got really lucky with Harebrained Schemes, the developer who made BattleTech, because they kind of gave me carte blanche to approach it the way that I wanted to. I kind of said from the outset I didn't want to be too beholden to the history of BattleTech because I think it would weigh me down a little bit as a writer. So luckily I was able to take it in a direction that I saw fit the game the best.

One of the pitches for me was Game of Thrones in space, which was all I really needed to hear. I used to play BattleTech a lot when I was young. I think it does a little bit of disservice to BattleTech fans to just kind of rehash old things again and again just for nostalgia value and stuff like that so I was happy that nobody tried to murder me over the score.

[Listen to more of Everest's approach in Part 3 and following parts, and see a clip from BattleTech in Part 3 and from Disintegration in Part 4.]

Nainita Desai (Telling Lies) I started off as a sound designer on feature films and I transitioned into working for a games publisher in the UK over 20 years ago doing sound effects for video games. It was a brief period that I flirted with. ... My career digressed into writing music for film and TV. About three years ago I got this BAFTA Breakthrough Brit accolade and it put me on the radar of a lot of people in the industry, and I got this Twitter message from Sam Barlow the director/developer of Telling Lies and he said would you like to write the music for an interactive movie/video game and I thought it was a friend playing a prank on me.

For me it was a dream project because I really truly believe that the future of entertainment is this hybrid form of sophisticated narrative storytelling in video games combined with live action. ... Sam wanted someone with linear cinematic storytelling sensibilities, as opposed to a video game composer who would come at it from a totally different approach. 

The role of the music [in Telling Lies] is more cinematic in terms of I use the London contemporary orchestra and I wanted to get inside the minds of these characters. When you don't have music is as important as when you do have music, and for me silence is music as well. So I decided to write a theme for each character ... In a way I had to sum up a person's character; multifaceted, complex characters in a single piece of music and that was hard. I spent 18 months working on it. It was a long process.

[For more on Desai's challenge in Part 1 and following parts, and see a clip of Telling Lies in Part 1, below.]

Austin Wintory (Erica, John Wick: Hex, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, The Banner Saga, Journey, Flow) Erica took three or four years. It's definitely not less than three; it was a good long while. But it was odd because normally games are not so segmented into pre-production, production, post-production the way a movie is, and therefore it's just a continuous kind of river of development where you're able to participate in varying degrees throughout. But this one, by virtue of it -- also like Telling Lies -- relying on footage shot on a set with props and costumes and actors, it did have much more of a pre-production, production, post-production. So, let's say it was three years, I'd say two years of that was pre-production. So it was like, make tiny little, incremental steps and then suddenly go as fast as possible. ... The complexity of this was astronomically beyond anything I've ever attempted before so it felt like there's no time. You could tell me I have 100 years and I'll feel screwed.

Erica is a filmed game. If it's a coin, I would put Erica very much on the game side but using tricks of film. It's filmed like a movie, it thinks like a movie from a cinematic standpoint. But it definitely is a game, and a pretty sophisticated one in terms of branching narratives. There's just millions of variables that the game is keeping track of. 

It almost killed me, honestly. It was the hardest score I've ever had to write in that regard because it was like something in the neighborhood of 350 cues spanning not even 90 minutes of music I think. ... The analogy I've come up with is that it's sort of like a chain-link fence where every cue is touching every other cue in all directions. ... There's a linearity of sorts but everything had to be built to be so nimble.

[Learn more of Wintory's process in Part 1 and following parts, and watch clips of Erica and John Wick: Hex in Part 2.]

For general convention coverage, including the Hellboy Reunion panel and cosplay, see L.A. Comic Con 2019: Hellboy Reunion, Cosplay & More.

For more photos from the show floor, visit the Photography section of the site.