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 Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall’s spectacular Video Games Live Concert at the Royal Festival Hall last Monday night was, for hundreds of video game music fans who attended, the highlight of the London Video Games Festival.
With a giant video monitor behind them playing images from the games, the London Philharmonia Orchestra and the London Chorus belted out pieces from a spread of fan favourites ranging from Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy to Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda.
The huge crowd of joyful and attentive fans cheered them all, but just about the biggest cheers of the night erupted when a special suite from the Halo trilogy was played. Halo has come to occupy a special place in gaming culture, described by some as ‘Star Wars to a video game generation.’ Halo 3, the last game in the series, had the biggest launch in video game history when it was released last month.
And just as Star Wars had John Williams’s iconic sound to help send our imaginations to a galaxy far, far away, Halo has the music of composer Marty O’Donnell to propel players into the battle torn sci-fi world of the Master Chief.
Marty O’Donnell was present that night and came onto the stage to thunderous applause. Video game music has come a long way in the last few years and as Audio Director at Bungie Studios, O’Donnell has had a hand in that, putting his distinctive sound into classic games like Myth, Oni and, of course, the Halo trilogy.
UKMusic.com caught up with Marty O’Donnell after Video Games Live for a chat about his career, musical influences and the approach he took when crafting the music for the biggest game of the year – Halo 3.
You’ve had a very diverse career across film, television and video games. Tell us about some of your musical influences and how your career started. Is it true you were part of a rock band when you were younger?
Well, I had a somewhat typical upbringing in the States, I had piano lessons as a child and then when I reached Junior High I wanted to be in a rock band! I was playing the Doors and Led Zeppelin music through high school, mostly in the garage. I’ve always enjoyed pop and rock music, especially fusion and progressive rock. I love the band Gentle Giant - they were a huge influence on me. They were out about the same time as Genesis and Jethro Tull and those are a couple of favourite bands of mine. That kind of music was just something that was always a part of what I did.
But I always kept studying the classical side of music and got a degree from a Conservatory and went to USC for my Masters in Music. So I studied classical and traditional composition and counter point and orchestration. On that side of things, there are influences like Bach, Stravinsky and Brahms.
How did you end up working in video games?
When I went into a musical career I spent the first part of it recording music for commercial television and films, but was also a fan of video games; they were always something that I was just fascinated by. I’d been playing them right from the beginning, watching them progress and getting artistically better and better, especially from an audio standpoint. In 1993 I happened to have a connection with somebody who worked on the PC game Myst and I got to play the beta version before it got released. And in that moment I saw, in my opinion, that there had been a leap in the aesthetic approach to audio and music for video games, so I wanted to see if I could get involved in it at that point. And so I talked to my contact and got introduced to the developers who lived in Washington and ended up working on the sequel to Myst - Riven.
And how did you end up working at Bungie?
Actually, that’s another one of those funny stories. I was at the studio in Washington, working on the sequel to Myst and every day at about 4 o’clock the entire crew there would stop what they were doing and all get online on their LAN internal network and play Marathon. And I saw them playing Marathon and thought, ‘Well, that’s a cool game’.
When I flew back home to Chicago to start working on music for Riven, I found out the Bungie guys - who made Marathon - just happened to be right down the block from me in Chicago. So I dropped them an email saying, ‘Hey, I’m working on the sequel to Myst and whatever you guys are working on, you should hire me!’ And they did.
And the rest, as they say is history…….
Yes! The rest is history! That was 1996 and I met Jason Jones and Alex Seropian from Bungie and I just happened to luck in. They needed an audio guy to work on their new game Myth, so I did some work for them right away and the relationship got going pretty quickly.
How important do you feel music is to the atmosphere of video games, what does it bring to the experience?
I think music, especially in a game that is trying to have a dramatic story component to it, is as important to the game as music is to a movie or dramatic television show. It helps give a game an identity, and at the same time it’s telling something of an emotional story, so that the player has an enhanced emotional experience while they’re playing. I think it’s extremely important.
Tell us a little bit about how you developed the music for Halo 3. How was it different from developing music on the previous Halo games?
Halo 3 was a little bit different than Halo 1 and 2, because I already had this body of work done for the previous games. And I knew that like the third Lord of the Rings movie - not that I’m comparing Halo or myself to the Lord of the Rings movies - but like that movie, Halo 3 is the culmination of and final chapter of a trilogy.
So at that point it’s not necessarily time to introduce entirely brand new themes, emotions and feelings, because it’s the wrap up, it’s the climax. One of the first things I did was go back through all the music from Halo 1 and 2 to identify the themes and pieces that stood out to me as worthy of being revisited and having rearrangements and some new orchestrations done.
Then I tried to figure out where new themes would be appropriate, I was just thinking through the whole thing. I knew I needed to have a combination of things that would be somewhat familiar and have a logical development, as well as some new themes.
What then would you say is the difference in tone between Halo 1, 2 and 3’s music? Is it merely that ramping up to a climax?
I think the most general concept I had, was that whenever you have something that’s a trilogy - 1,2,3 you have a corresponding musical tone or feeling - A,B,C. For the Halo trilogy I thought that I would make sure to be A, B and A-Prime, which means a return to the feeling of A, but blown up a little bit (Halo A, Halo 2 B, Halo 3 A-Prime). I had a lot more new themes in Halo 2 and one of the reasons was in the story you’re going to a brand new Halo in a whole new part of the galaxy. In Halo 3, you’re going to this new place- the Ark, but the cool thing is Halo 1, the original Halo is being rebuilt. So it seemed there was a return and sort of wrap up and that’s what I wanted the music to reflect.
It’s interesting to think that playing through Halo 3 takes you musically through the whole trilogy.
I think I’d like to go back and actually play through Halo 3. I haven’t done it since they shipped it, and I’ve done that on purpose. I wanted to take a break and a vacation from it. Now I want to go back home and actually play through it and see if it all just coalesces the way I hope it does.
Films and games with futuristic or space themes tend to have grand operatic music, and Halo has that, but the sound of the main Halo theme is like a military jig and almost Gaelic in nature – what inspired that?
(Laughs) Yeah, you know it’s funny, I swear. Composer Mike Savlatori and I work together on a lot of stuff and he’ll always identify things that sound like me and say, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds like you Marty’ and he always makes fun- ‘there you go with the Irish jig again!’ I don’t know why but it’s just what came out. A couple of years later Riverdance became really popular in the States and people thought I had done something similar to that! Maybe it’s because I have an Irish background! Maybe it’s just Irish DNA!
You’re Audio Director in charge of overall sound design at Bungie. Does that affect how you approach projects, how do you balance sound and music?
When I first started off in commercials, films and television, we’d be the guys hired to do music. I’d go to the final mix and see that somebody else had done all the sound design, and somebody else had done all the voice work, and another guy was gonna mix it all together. And every once in a while I’d see I had done something musically that climaxed at the same time as sound effects climaxed, which was also at the same time the announcer or narrator was saying something important; usually the music was the thing got buried the worst, it was just right way down there. So there was always this desire on my part to be in charge of the entire audio palette and landscape of anything I’m working on. Because I felt like I had good ears and understood how it all could work together better. And if I thought something needed to be climactic and music would be the best climax, then I could pull sound effects out of that and I could edit the narrator around it.
The more I worked on film and television the more I kept trying to get more control over the entire audio picture. And I found that in movies and television, that’s not a role anybody normally has. There usually isn’t an audio director of a project; there are several specialists who just get hired for certain things. That was a continuing frustration for me. So when I got into the game business I saw that a lot of those roles had not been crystallized yet, and I thought well, that’s a perfect opportunity for me to be able to say, ‘I’m the guy who should be in charge of all of the audio. I can over see and direct all of that, even if I have a lot of other people working with me. ’ And nobody argued with me!
I was able to say, give me your audio and I will make it as good as it could possibly be, and I won’t have to fight with the guy who recorded the voices, the sound designers or the music guy! So there’s one ‘audio vision’ for the game, which I think is a good way to go.
The Halo 3 soundtrack will be released on the 22nd of November and there are plans to include a fan submission on the album. How will that be chosen?
The submissions from fans are mostly being handled by Nile Rodgers, the distributor of the other two Halo albums. I’m going to be able to hear the final submissions and we’ll all vote on the one that makes it on the album.
And how will the Halo 3 soundtrack differ from previous Halo albums?
This will be a double CD, as there was enough music from Halo 3 that it deserved two CDs. There were two separate CDs for Halo 2 but the first album didn’t have all game music, it had more ‘inspired by’ stuff on it. (Featuring artists like Steve Vai, Incubus and Breaking Benjamin.) This time it’s only music from the game and it should be a little bit like a musical recreation of your game play experience in Halo 3. At the end of the whole thing there are a couple of bonus tracks that we put on there - music that isn’t in the game, but was written for the game.
The addition of a fan track is a nice nod to the Halo fan community. What advice would you give to aspiring composers and musicians who want to make their way into the games industry?
I would say, number one, and I know this sounds silly, but you really should continue to take music lessons - if you’re young, don’t quit! Play in a band, write music, read music, learn everything you can, every place you are. If you want to get into the games business, you should be playing games and studying games. But if you want to be on the music side of the games industry I think you absolutely need to be of the highest professional calibre and working at the highest level. So, for music, you have to be formally educated in music and if you’re looking to be in audio you need to be working in a recording studio and you need to understand all the technical stuff. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you just do as a hobby someplace and fall into. It’s just too high level now; you really have to take a very professional approach to it.
One of the great things about Video Games Live was that it felt like a tribute to video game composers and musicians, especially when all the composers present came up on stage. Do you think the mainstream perception of video game music is shifting as the medium evolves? And has the status of video game music composers changed amongst your peers in film and music?
Yes, and I think there are good examples of that, like Michael Giacchino, who started as a video game composer. He’s an excellent video game composer - he did ‘Medal of Honor’. Director Brad Bird happened to be a big fan of Medal of Honor and asked Michael to record for the Incredibles movie. So Michael has been doing TV shows, movies and still does video games. I think at this point in time, the age of film directors is such that they’re comic book fans, they’re video games fans and I just don’t think there’s as big a disparity, especially amongst people who are working in the entire entertainment industry.
They see it as much more of a level playing field, and that just means that all game developers have to make sure that they step up their production value to be as good as, if not better, than movies and television. And we’ll just have to wait for everybody else to figure out there’s no difference; as a matter of fact we’re better!
Being part of Halo has put you at the heart of a cultural phenomenon, so what’s next for Marty O’Donnell? Are you involved in the top secret Halo project Bungie is working on with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson?
Yeah, I’m fully ensconced at Bungie and Bungie is now independent, we own ourselves and we’re excited. We have a great relationship with Microsoft going forward and we’ve got some projects in the works, one of which is the Peter Jackson project and I’m involved with all of that.
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us Marty.
Interview By: Sam Bandah
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