music to the team and we talk about it. That’s
usually how the process starts.
What kinds of material are you given access
to, to help you figure out what you need in
the music? Do you get to play early builds of
games before you score them?
I often get to play the games and also receive
a ton of videos, concept art, storyboards,
scripts, screenshots, etc. If I am involved
really early on I often use storyboards to
write the music. For example, the score for
Darksiders 2 was mostly written with concept
art and the background story in mind.
Where a film score might be done to pace an
action scene that is choreographed one way
only, open-world games are more dynamic
with what is happening at any given point.
How do you ensure the score will reflect a
mood, emotion or a feel overall, rather than a
prescribed sequence?
For games you have to create much longer
pieces of music to ensure that the music
covers what the game player does and how
long he/she takes to do a certain action.
This means five minutes of game time could
have ten minutes of music composed for it.
But it also means that you can play those
five minutes again and the music will sound
different if you play the game differently.
However, for games like Borderlands 3, we
are also making sure that even if you play
the game the exact same way the music
will sound different, and that’s a new way
for me to compose music for games. When
writing specifically for a game’s music system
[Borderlands 3 uses a custom-made music
system] the challenge becomes not to let the
system sound like it’s dictating the writing
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