God of War Composer Criticizes Video Game Audio Standards and Convinces Sony to Redo Game Engine
Other companies told the specialist to just write music, but Sony responded to the complaints and found a way to solve the problems.
Recently, composer Bear McCreary, who worked on soundtracks for various games such as Dark Void, SOCOM 4 U.S. Navy SEALs, and God of War, gave an interview on the Toilet Ov Hell YouTube channel. During the conversation, he shared memories of working with Sony PlayStation.
Bear McCreary himself is a big fan of video games, so during his discussions with Sony representatives, he criticized established approaches to creating game audio. He criticized everything from the perspective of an ordinary gamer:
I came in there with a lot of naive notions. As a gamer, I just walked into Sony and said, “Here’s what I don’t like about video game music. Why is it like this?” And then I just started pouring out my naive thoughts as a gamer — I’ve been playing games my whole life….Why do you hear the same music every time you die, and when you come back, you hear it again? It’s a punishment. It makes me not want to keep playing. It reinforces the feeling of a “game” when the “Game Over” signal sounds, and then you start over…..Why do I hear the villain’s soundtrack before I even see them? And all that kind of stuff.
Bear McCreary explained that when he said similar things to other game companies, they would respond with something like, “Shut up and write music.” Sony, however, did the opposite — they listened to the composer and then said:
Well, I mean, to get around that [limitation], we’re going to have to write new audio software. Why don’t we try?
Before God of War, McCreary worked on SOCOM 4 for Sony. Together, they created a new audio engine for PlayStation games. While working on GoW: Ragnarok, the composer again convinced the developers to work on the engine. He noticed that in the game, after defeating an enemy, the music would abruptly stop, and he wanted it to play out to its logical conclusion and fade out smoothly:
When we started working on God of War: Ragnarok, I was like, “Okay, I like that I hear Kratos’s theme when I’m fighting villains, but when I defeat them, the musical theme cuts off, like it just abruptly stops […] it just doesn’t sound like orchestral music.” And they replied, “Yeah, yeah, that’s a problem. We need to write a new audio engine to fix that.” So they did, and we refined the audio engine again.
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