A Symphony of ShadowsInterface
wfmag.cc \ 21It was a fusion of genres that few video
game composers had dabbled in before, and
effectively offered .yd the chance to write his
own rulebook. ȊAt that time, there wasn’t a lot
of music being written where orchestra and
electronics were being blended together,”
he says. ȊThere weren’t a tonne of references
out there that I could go and listen to... I felt very
much on my own throughout that whole thing
andȐ I think the way I look at it is, I took a lot
of risks and a lot of chances, and I had a lot of
fun with that. I think that reflects in the music
I really was able to get inside the head of >Agent@
Ȑ It kind of Must flowed, because
I knew at that point exactly what I
was doing.”A NEW SET OF TARGETS
Following the release of Blood
Money, the Hitman series went on
hiatus for several years. Kyd didn’t
return to the franchise again, but
he wasn’t quite done with the
stealth genre. Ubisoft Montreal
were already hard at work on a
new IP, and it had all the hallmarks
of a great Jesper Kyd project
written all over it.
“I was pitched this idea in a
hotel room at E3,” he recalls. “They
showed me the concept art, and I
was like, ȆThis is cra]yȐ <ou can go
anywhere in the environment that
you want? You can scale buildings?’
Nobody had done that before.
At that time, the only thing that
even came close was Grand Theftlaid by Silent Assassin’s unique sound and was
heavily inspired by what was happening in
America at the time.
“I remember writing a lot of the music
right after 9/11 happened,” Kyd recalls. “I was
in Europe at the time, trying to get back to
0anhattanȐ It was very diɝcult to get back, but
we were finally able to get back in, and you see
this stuff, and you can clearly see how this city
Must changed overnightȐ 6itting and having to
write a score about Manhattan being invaded by
a foreign power, it all kind of connected in my
head, and I was able to use a lot of what I was
feeling to put into the Freedom Fighters score.”
THE CLEAN-UP
Hitman: Contracts, the third title in the series,
was released in 2004. It saw Kyd experimenting
further, shifting away from choral sounds to
electronica and something altogether more
sinister. “The brief really was how dark this
game was going to be,ȋ he says.ȋ>Agent@ is
stuck in a hotel room, wounded, and having
these flashbacks of his life while the )rench
police are approaching his apartment. It’s a very
dark premise. There really is kind of no hope
when you’re thrown into that world, and that’s
something that we really wanted the score
to reflect.ȋ
As the game itself reworked several
environments and missions from Codename 47,
Contracts served as an opportunity for Kyd to
revisit themes and ideas that he’d been unable
to explore due to technical limitations at the
time of Codename 47’s production. “I’d always
wanted to go back and create an updated sound
of Codename 47, so I really wanted to bring in
everything that this electronic sound could be
for Hitman, and that’s why I felt that that was
my goal.”
As .yd’s final entry in the franchise, the
soundtrack for Hitman: Blood Money served
as a culmination of the various palettes that
Kyd had been playing with throughout the
franchise, blending elements of orchestral
and electronic music to create one of his most
distinctive scores to date. “I wanted to combine
Contracts’ electronics with the orchestra of Silent
Assassin to create the ultimate version of what
the Hitman score should sound like,” he says.
ȊWhen Blood Money came around, it was more
like, take everything I’ve learned and find a way
to blend them together.”
CREED’S DNA
“Ubisoft gave me three key words,”
says Kyd. “‘Tragic’, because of the
time period; ‘war’, because there
was a lot of war going on back
then; and ‘mysticism’. ‘Mysticism’
is something that I really grabbed
onto and that became the DNA
of my sound for Assassin’s Creed
in general, and the three future
Assassin’s Creed games that I
worked on. It really became a big
building block.” The Symphony of the
Shadows is a unique concert
devoted entirely to Kyd’s
work from both Assassin’s
Creed II and the entire
Hitman franchise.