Back in high school - long before Eric and I co-founded Sonic Bloom - we were video game and film nerds. Sure, we watched movies and played games for enjoyment, but we also shared a core group of friends that viewed both as creative media to be appreciated as an art form. With film in particular, we would spend countless hours diving deep into storytelling, cinematography, scoring, and pacing. We would talk about how camera shots complemented the mood the director was trying to convey or how the story would echo ancient lore. We cared about continuity, practical effects, and just how much could be done on a shoestring budget. Something that was near and dear to us was just how much a good score or a well-placed track could amplify the mood and atmosphere of a scene.
What Kenji Yamamoto was able to do on the SNES is simply amazing. One of the first games to set the mood and ambiance of a game so effectively.
We also recognized that games, while endlessly enjoyable, mostly lacked the depth of story and emotional connection that we treasured in films. While we chalked much of this up to limitations of the technology at the time, it seemed that in many cases game developers simply weren’t aiming for such depth. That said, games like Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 6, Myst, Silent Hill, and Ico seemed to whisper to us of what could be. These games managed to tell compelling stories and build worlds oozing with character not by exceeding the limits of the technology, but by stretching them as far as they could go. Their efforts presaged a future we could almost see, fueling late-night conversations about how games could improve to reach ever closer to the craft of cinema.
Nobuo Uematsu and the team at Square Soft managed to tell an epic fantasy with amazing musical scoring and inventive new ways to tell stories.
As we graduated college and found ourselves working in the game industry, games were just starting to blossom from experiences centered around sophomoric teen fantasies into vehicles for deeply inventive stories. The crafts of storytelling, framing, and pacing were all maturing beautifully in games, helping to drive these advancements. At the same time, it became apparent that one craft wasn't seeing the same level of improvement: cinematic scoring. Yes, games have amazing orchestral scores and they are often performed and recorded by the same groups as those producing film scores. However, they are more often than not implemented as rousing fanfare that accompanies cutscenes or drives a basic mood than as a force that compliments and reinforces the player's direct contributions to the story. There is a solid reason for this, too. While film has a predetermined timeline that a composer can write a score for, no such timeline exists in games; the music has to contend with player agency. A player can choose to stare at the landscape instead of running down a path towards certain doom, robbing the composition of the ability to swell the orchestra towards impending calamity. As a result, quality cinematic scores are typically relegated to points of the game that are "on rails" (and not controlled by the gamer). When the player gains full control of the action, such music gets ducked into obscurity; returning to the background role of "mood setting" instead of actively participating in storytelling.
The Uncharted has set so many milestones for good reason. However, musical scoring is not its strong point during action scenes.
The gap between game action and cinematic scoring prevents games from achieving the feeling of emotional fullness that cinema is capable of. This hasn't stopped game developers from trying, however. The awesome team at Monolith Productions tried to tackle this with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. In their system, music would attempt to follow the action with stingers and musical accents that followed after on-screen action. The creative team at CD Projekt Red tackled a sort of reactive audio system that would time enemy attacks to points in the music in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. These are fantastic steps towards realizing a gameplay experience that sounds like it’s actively being scored by a composer. They tease us with hints of what could be; what games could feel like if cinematic scoring were able to accompany onscreen action. They tease what game scores could be if they were empowered to ebb and flow with the unpredictable actions of players. This is what we strive for as a company and as a lifelong infatuation with storytelling through interactive media.
Shadow of Mordor has excelled at creating music that adapts and expands based on contextual events happening during action scenes. You can hear it respond to independent actions taken by the player.
Music is hugely important to the game experience and the game industry's ability to tell compelling stories. As we enter a new generation of gaming, full of graphic enhancements, hi-def haptic feedback, and 3D audio, let us not look past what music in cinema can teach us about the potential for music in games. We should expect that epic battles in games be met with equally memorable scoring. Happily, we aren’t far from achieving that. As we have learned in the film industry, music is key to a strong emotional connection with stories and characters; it is key to selling anticipation and the inevitable release when the final hit lands on the lumbering enemy. it is key to achieving the same level of craft that cinema achieved decades ago. In this new generation of games, let us finally transcend all the technical limitations on our creativity to show what interactive games and narratives can really do.