Team Role Interview: Music Composer

Team Role Interview: Music Composer Please introduce yourself, your role, and the game team(s) that you have been a part of. I am Peter McConnell and I’ve been a Composer for games since the early 1990s. I most recently worked on Brutal Legend (Electronic Arts, 2009). Over the years I’ve scored numerous titles from LucasArts, Sony, Electronic Arts, and others including Psychonauts (Majesco, 2005), Sly II: Band of Thieves (Sony, 2004), Sly III (Sony, 2005), as well as the score and CD soundtrack for LucasArts’ Grim Fandango. I worked in-house at LucasArts until 2000 when I went independent. How did you get your start in the games industry? Years ago Michael Land, who was running the sound department at LucasArts, needed someone who could both compose and program audio, and in those days there weren’t a lot of folks who did both. He had known me and my work from college and the audio company Lexicon, where we had both worked as engineers. He passed my music demo and programming resume around at LucasArts, and it turned out to be a fit. That was a really lucky break. Over the years my focus shifted to doing just music. While at LucasArts I scored two or three games for Tim Schafer and we developed a working relationship which has continued ever since. So I was called in by Tim and his team to score Brutal Legend. Did you have a sense of the larger picture with Brutal Legend? Was it clear to you how your contribution would be used in the final product? Very much so. Although I was outside the company, I had superb guidance from Tim’s music director, Emily Ridgway. She made each dramatic situation clear, made sure I got the assets I needed, and also provided stylistic guidance for the score. What can the Composer do to ensure that the game you are working on is great? What is your part of the process, and how do you make sure that you’re contributing to a great game? Well, first you have to start with a great idea, a great concept. That’s upstream from me, and there’s not much I can do about that part. But beyond the conception there’s an element that applies to everyone involved, and that is knowing how to allocate your resources. You’ve got to know what to really sink extra time, money, and effort into so that it will shine. And also what not to give too much attention to e that’s almost as important. It’s kind of like that Kenny Rogers song, “The Gambler”: you’ve got to deal with your limitations, and every project has them. Games, great and not so great, are made in the real world, and I have seen projects fail to realize their full potential because people got mired in the details. My part of that picture is to be sure that the highest quality score gets made with the resources available. Beyond the creative aspects of composition, a big part of this is deciding what gets recorded by live musicians and when, how, and with whom that happens. What was the most satisfying aspect of working on Brutal Legend? We recorded a 36-piece orchestra for the underscore of the game at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. This was a great example of putting substantial time, money, and resources into an aspect of the game that really ended up making a difference in quality. Did you feel like you were able to contribute specific ideas to the game? Since the game was focused on music, yes, absolutely. One of the strengths of that particular team is that it plays to the strengths of individual members by inviting creative contributions at all times. Then the Project Leader has the final say so that things don’t get too chaotic.