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wfmag.cc \ 19or years, Jesper Kyd’s
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The end of the year will also see the release of
an expansive, long-awaited vinyl release of Kyd’s
much-lauded work on the Hitman franchise,
spanning his scores from 2000’s Hitman:
Codename 47 through to Hitman: Blood Money.
.yd’s first foray into music came at an early
age, as he regularly wrote original compositions
on the family piano. It wasn’t until Kyd received
a Commodore 64 at the age of 13, however,
that he started to realise the full potential
that computer technology could have for
musical arrangement.
“When the Commodore 64 came around,
there was suddenly a way to put all of those
arrangements together,” he recalls. “You could
have a theme, and you could have something
arranged around
the theme. You
could have a
bass line. You
could make
some percussive
stuff happenȐ And that was the first time that
I felt like I could put everything together into a
cohesive piece of music. It was almost like you
didn’t have to sit and play everything. You could
put it in, and then you could sit back and listen
to it, and that really fascinated me.”
Kyd’s curiosity led him to the international
demoscene, a computer-art subculture focused
on creating collaborative, audio-visual demos.
It was here that Kyd met the future founders
of IO Interactive, David Guldbrandsen, Karsten
Hvidberg, and Jesper Jørgensen, with whom he
would later found the game developer Zyrinx,
which went on to create Sub-Terrania for the
Sega Mega Drive.
THE SETUP
Sub-Terrania’s success prompted the team to
move to America, where they remained for
five years, before returning to &openhagen to
establish IO. Kyd, meanwhile, opted to remain
in New York to focus on his career, but it
wasn’t long before IO approached him with the
opportunity to work on their very first title –
Hitman: Codename 47.
“The only brief I was really given was that
they wanted something unique and original,”
Kyd recalls.
“It was very
much a process
of creative
freedomȐ I had
been working
with these people from the demoscene days,
so I had proven myself and they trusted my
instincts, so in that respect, it was more about
finding out what the 'NA of this game is and, as
a gamer myself, what would I want this game to
sound like?”
Kyd’s work on Hitman: Codename 47 set the
bar for stealth scores to come, particularly as
the game represented one of the very first
examples of truly interactive music. “There was
an interactive music system [Direct Music] built
into that game, and it was a very challenging
programme to work in,” says Kyd. “It was almost
like a database programme, whereas today you
have very creative music programmes“THE ONLY BRIEF I WAS REALLY GIVEN
WAS THAT THEY WANTED SOMETHING
UNIQUE AND ORIGINAL” Kyd, pictured here in the
studio, has crafted scores that
hƃʤe ǁefineǁ the sounǁ oǹ
multiple video game franchises
for the past two decades.wfmag.cc \ 19