Imaginary Worlds - 8-Bit to Orchestras: Video Game Music Scores

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Creating a musical score for interactive video games is like trying to hit a moving target. Luckily, Hans Zimmer’s studio Bleeding Fingers has developed some clever strategies. I talk with their CEO Russell Emanuel and musicians Thom Lukas and Giovanni Rios about how they create innovative scores for games like Arknights, and why they thrive under creative limitations. Grammy-winning video game composer Winifred Phillips discusses how she builds adaptive scores that shift and respond to unpredictable gameplay. And video game historian and RPI professor William Gibbons explains why the technological limitations of ‘80s and ‘90s games actually fueled composers’ creativity.   This week’s episode is sponsored by The Perfect Jean. Our listeners get 15% off your first order plus Free Shipping, Free Returns and Free Exchanges when you use code IMAGINARY15 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Ugh! Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday! Woo! Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too.

Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Specsavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Earlier this summer, thousands of people packed a venue in Paris to watch a live orchestra.

But the musicians weren't playing classical music. They were playing music from the game Final Fantasy. These types of concerts are happening all over the world. In Tokyo, you can watch an orchestra play music from Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda. At the Royal Albert Hall in London, you can watch a symphony play music from World of Warcraft. It's hard for me to imagine my favorite games without music. Those scores have been like the secret sauce which makes a video game feel immersive. It heightens the emotional connection I feel with the world and the characters. And clearly

a lot of other people feel the same way. But I'm not sure how many people know what goes into creating a video game score. I didn't until recently, until I talked with several video game composers. And being an audio person myself, I ended up totally geeking out with them about process and technique. I didn't realize how many subtle, complex decisions they have to make when building a video game score. And some of the composers that I talked with

work for Hans Zimmer. Hans Zimmer is best known for scoring like everything. Like he scored The Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean, Blade Runner 2049, Top Gun Maverick, Dune, most of the Christopher Nolan movies. He also co-founded a company in Southern California called Bleeding Fingers, along with their CEO, Russell Emanuel.

Historically, the composing endeavor has been a solitary career. Generally, a guy sitting on his own in a studio focusing on a project, and what we wanted to do at Bleeding Fingers was break that mold. We're a collective. We're now 24 composers in a complex in Santa Monica, which is Hans' buildings. The whole focus of our group is to collaborate and we think that our superpower is in that collaboration. Bleeding Fingers has also branched out into scoring video games.

And Russell says game companies give them a lot of room to play with. What's really exciting is they have bigger budgets than major motion pictures. I mean, it's really quite amazing. Really? Oh yeah. I mean, you'd be amazed at what they're... I think they're in many cases still using full live orchestras, whereas many of the bigger productions don't have the budgets to do that anymore.

So a lot of musicians are being employed by video game companies. One of their regular clients is a game called Ark Knights. Ark Knights is often referred to as a tower defense game. That means the fighting in the game involves a lot of strategizing and puzzle solving. It also takes place in a fantasy world with an anime aesthetic. And the game developers keep adding new levels and content. There's a constant reach out from them, you would say almost monthly, where they'll say, okay, now we need to handle this section of the game. So they don't come back every time and say, we want one composer.

They'll talk to us and say, well, here's the scene, or sorry, here's the area of the game. Here's what we want to achieve. Who do you recommend? And they'll ask us to recommend two or three, and then they'll pick from those two or three. The way the composers at Bleeding Fingers are assigned different games or different sequences in a game is unusual for this industry.

It's more common for game composers to score a game entirely by themselves because they have all the technology at their fingertips. So I wanted to know, what's it like to compose for video games? Whether you're at a big studio like Bleeding Fingers, or if you're a solo indie composer like Winifred Phillips. Winifred has created music

for the Assassin's Creed franchise. And she won a Grammy for her score for the game Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. She has also composed music for film and television. When you're creating music for a linear piece of entertainment like television or film, it's structured so that it has a very specific beginning, middle, and end. It's telling a story, and the story is preset. It's going to follow certain beats,

and you can plan what those beats are going to be in advance. So you can write music in a much more traditional way with a very set structure and builds and climaxes, and it just makes sense. But when you move into composing music for games, you have to essentially put all of that aside because the flow of events in a game are determined by the choices that the player makes

as they move through the world that the game development team has built. They're in charge, essentially. We're not. So we have to anticipate all of the possible choices they might make and then shape our music around the experience that they're building. It really feels kind of like a collaboration

with an unseen co-composer, someone who is going to shape the experience. And the whole goal is to create music that feels as satisfying as music that's composed linearly, but is also highly dynamic and flexible, gymnastic, can jump in according to the choices of players. So it's a real challenge. It's really interesting work. It's like puzzle solving. Puzzle solving is something that I imagine a lot of gamers can appreciate. I find it helpful to keep thinking about the contrast

between video games and TV or film, because when you're scoring a movie or a TV show, very often a composer is brought in towards the end of the editing process, so they get to see the whole story at once. Giovanni Rios is a musician at Bleeding Fingers, goes by Gio for short. And he says on games like Ark Knights,

he's often brought in much earlier in the production process. And he has to work a lot more from his imagination. We're not really scoring to picture all the time, right? We don't usually have just the picture and the video game and then we're scoring to it. Usually we're just doing pieces of music and then we're sending those pieces of music and then they're working with it while they're building the game.

Tom Lucas is another member of Bleeding Fingers. Your pathetic attempt to defeat me ends here. He scored music for a Transformers game set in the world of Minecraft. I had visuals of how the arena would look like or how Megatron would look like in, you know, the Minecraft style that they did it, but I didn't actually have in-game footage to write music to. So I had more of like visual inspiration to draw from. Winifred always asked the game developers to center any design documents they have.

Those early design documents are priceless to me. They really informed me regarding what the true north originally was for this game and the inspiration that fired up the team. And sometimes we also talk a little bit about music and they might have ideas about what they want the music to sound like, maybe they have put in some temporary music that kind of reflects their early ideas

of what the music should be. And then for other projects that have a history to them, games that are part of franchises, I have the ability to go back and do research into other iterations of those franchises. So that's fantastic. Tom says in some ways the approach to scoring TV or film, it's starting to resemble the job of scoring video games and vice versa. It's funny if you think about it because old school composers were really, you know, the people that sat in front of an empty page of staff music paper and wrote notes in, while

video game composers were coding musical spreadsheets to trigger tiny wave samples. In a weird way, those lines met at a point where we are today, because there's a very technical aspect of what we're doing, but at the same time, the composition process doesn't really have any limitations. Yeah, and it's like you're saying too, traditional, sure, John Williams can just write a score like it's a symphony, but anyone who's breaking into scoring now needs to have a lot of, you know, you really need to have a lot of technological know-how to be able to compose. Yeah, absolutely. You need to be a little bit of a check of all trades. Although Gio finds that frustrating sometimes. He has a music

background. He wants to look at images of the game and write music that reflects how he feels. We're sometimes programming, like in the computer, like sometimes we're programmers, you know what I mean? We're programming like freaking engineers, you know what I mean? Like we're having to, the computer is not working like fine, we have to get in the computer, right? Just to make it work, just so we can just get into what we do and get to our deadlines and everything. And I guess that's stuff that people just don't really understand.

I think we're just playing instruments, recording it and that's it, you know? And it's a bit daunting as well. And as the technology keeps racing ahead, Winifred says the job of being a video game composer has to evolve at the same pace. The game development industry itself is kind of the Wild West because this is a fluid technology and there's so much advancement that's happening from year to year.

The advent of virtual reality has introduced wonderful new technologies with binaural sound and ambisonics that have opened up new ideas for what music and sound can do. Yeah, that's so interesting to even think about that. Like if you have a bunch of people that are writing novels or making films, the idea of what a novel is or a film isn't constantly changing, but because games are so,

technology and games go hand in hand and it is a technology that is racing ahead that the idea of what a game is now, you know, keeps changing. And so that is really interesting. Yeah, that is so true. But it's part of what makes it so interesting. As a game composer, it's hard to get stale, because we're always being asked to do something that doesn't resemble the work we've done before. Even just structurally, I mean, even if you are known for just a particular style of music, you might be asked to do that style of music within the confines of a very different inner

dynamic structure. And it challenges you to look at the ways you composed and to invert them or to adapt them in technological and creative ways you hadn't even thought of before. One of my favorite aspects of video games is being able to customize your avatar to the tiniest detail. But when I go shopping for clothes, sometimes I feel like everything in the store

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with the promo code Imaginary15. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. To get a better sense of the field, we need to go back to the beginning of video games, to the era of bleeps and bloops. Video game music has always been defined by technological limitations. Although, those limitations have sometimes inspired very creative solutions. William Gibson is a dean at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He's written and edited several books about video games. And he says we can trace the history of video game music back to Space Invaders in 1978. You know we don't think about that having a composer because it's really only four notes,

but it's Tomohiro Nishikado is the guy who's credited with these four notes and it was just this sort of repeating bass line. So it's this bum bum bum bum thing and it would repeat and the thing people remember I find about Space Invaders is that it would get, it starts really slow and then the more you play, the more you're shooting these spaceships down, the faster it gets. And it gets so stressful by the end and it goes so fast that you can't even make out the individual notes anymore. It's just this sort of hum. And one of the things I always find so interesting about that, and it highlights to me a lot about early video game music, is that that was totally unintended. It had to do with the way

the memory was working on the game. You know, when it originally starts off, there's all these, it's using all this processing power to create these spaceships. And then the more spaceships you destroy, the less it's having to use the processing power and the more it speeds up. So the ships get faster, the music gets faster because it's doing less processing. They could have looked at that as a mistake or a limitation, but instead they were like, wow, this is great. Back then, video games were mostly in arcade cabinets that you had to play standing up, and the technology inside the cabinets

wasn't standardized yet. Each of these different arcade games is working with sort of different chip sets. What we think of as chip sets now. And so, you know, they're thinking, wow, okay, well, what can we do sound on this one? What can we do in sound on this one? You really couldn't be just a traditional composer

who'd gone to conservatory and you've studied music. You really had to also understand the really complicated technology of programming back then. So it's a really limited number of people who could do that. But it's funny, given the limitations, why was early video game music so good and so memorable? Like I could probably do the music to Pac-Man or Donkey Kong right now. Yeah. You know, like I remember it that well. Why was it so good? No, great question. I think that early game music, all the way through the 80s,

is some of the most memorable music on the planet. And to me, there's two reasons for that. One is that it's not competing with anything else. So if you think about watching a movie or a TV show, you know, the music's competing with all the sound effects that are going on. The music's competing with dialogue, especially. So a lot of times, you know, the music's competing with all the sound effects that are going on, the music's competing with dialogue especially. So a lot of times, you know, composers writing for other media, they have to stay really in the background or it gets too distracting. But games, you know, maybe

you're reading text on the screen, but there was no voiceover. So the music could be a lot more in the foreground. They weren't worrying about being too distracting. And the other thing I think is repetition. I remember doing the math, I was doing a project with a colleague on the original Final Fantasy on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and we thought, okay, how many times if you were just playing through this game, would you hear this background music repeated? Because due to memory and due to the fact that you don't really know exactly how long players are going to take, you have to loop it, right? So it gets to the end and it loops back to the beginning, it gets to the end and it loops back to the beginning.

And so you might listen to the same little bit of music in a town or a dungeon thousands of times during the course of this playthrough. And that's exactly what happened to us with this early video game music. We heard it so much on repeat that it's still living in there and there's still that nostalgia for it. So anytime you get a new Mario game or a new Zelda game or a new Final Fantasy, there's always these callbacks to what we listened to in the 80s because it's still there. Will says another reason why music dominated those early games was because the games were

in public spaces. When players would walk into an arcade, there were dozens of games competing to lure them in with sound effects and music. Even today, hearing that wall of sound in an arcade feels so nostalgic for me. I think once things moved into the home though, you know, there's a moment in games where the music

didn't loop very much, right? There's a few years where there was music, but it wasn't what we call wall to wall. There were spaces of silence. And I think what happened there is that people found that was very off-putting when they were playing at home. You know, you would have a little snip of music and then it's just dead silent and you're just pushing the buttons and you sort of can feel the isolation of that versus being in an arcade where you're surrounded by people, it's not a big deal if there's moments of silence. So I think more and more in the 80s,

we started to see this sort of wall to wall. There's always music going because it sort of keeps you engaged sonically and also makes you feel a little bit less kind of lonely in your basement playing video games. I mean, were they aware that the music was going to go with the sound effects? Because I mean, you know, you think of like the Pac-Man as its own distinct sound.

A lot of these games have their own distinct sound effects and the music like it's in our mind, it's hard to sort of separate them. They must have had to practice that or how did that work? Yeah, I think so. You're really working with a complex set of oral inputs, right, you've got the music going all the time, but a lot of times in games, the sound effects are giving you really important information.

You think about the beeping when you get down to one heart in Zelda, right? That's an important sound effect that's giving information or when you've got to run from a certain monster or in Tetris when you're about to die because the music speeds up, right? It's giving you really important information for how you're supposed to play. And so if you think about, again,

if you think back to say the Nintendo, right? You had five audio channels on the 1980s Nintendo, and that included sound effects, right? So if you were using all five for music, then you wanted to add sound effects on top of that, something had to give. So a lot of times you'll notice, I'll use Zelda as an example because I did it, once you start having that beep when you're down to one heart, some of the music drops out to accommodate that. And it was only the really talented, I think, programmers and composers who were able to handle that give and take so effectively.

When did that change? Will says in the 90s, a lot of games started running on a musical instrument digital interface, also known as MIDI. One of the most important things about MIDI is that it standardized the technology across gaming systems. And it also allowed for people who didn't have maybe the same level of technological coding knowledge to put music in. So you started to have more people who were primarily composers as

opposed to primarily programmers who could do that. It also allowed for more adaptability in the sound then. So if you think about LucasArts, for example, was a company that developed their own adaptive software for the music, which would make it pretty easy for composers to write music that would change, let's say, based on location. So if we think about some of those 1990s point-and-click games that they did, they could create these really interactive, meaningful

soundscapes that would change based on the player's activity. Games also migrated to CD-ROMs, remember those? And eventually DVDs and digital downloads. The amount of information and data expanded enormously, giving composers even more flexibility. Composing for gameplay is still a big challenge because gameplay is unpredictable. Composers have to figure out a way for the music to be nimble and reflect what's happening on screen in real time. So video game composers often record instruments on separate microphones, or each element in the score is created separately on a synthesizer or a computer. And then those layers are stacked on top of each other,

horizontally, like a slice of lasagna. The industry term for a layer of sound or music is a stem. For example, let's say you're mixing a musical score on a computer. Imagine the top layer is the stem that just has piano on it. The second layer, or stem, only has strings. The third stem is the percussion, and the bottom stem has the horns.

You can adjust any one of those instruments or sound elements separately without affecting any of the others in the mix. This layering system is crucial for scoring gameplay. Geo at Bleeding Fingers will set it up so that certain stems are stripped away or added depending on what the player does. If you're doing a piece of music, certain layers work with certain scenarios within, you know, in play games. So you have to be mindful that if I take these couple of layers out of the music, you know, it needs to work with what's going on. So let's say you're doing this adventure piece, right?

We tend to go all out and do the full piece. But then, you know, with stems and like with different layers, you have to make sure that like, let's say there's a big grandiose section and the piece full on works perfectly fine. But then it comes down and the player, you know, is walking around. So you got to make sure that you take out some stems and then that piece also works with the in-game person, you know, walking. There's another tricky aspect to creating layers for game music. Let's say you're composing a musical score, not one for gameplay, and there's a percussion track.

The drums on the percussion track don't kick in until halfway through the song. So that stem might be totally silent and blank until the moment the drums start. Winifred says if she's layering stems of musical instruments for a video game, she can't have a stem that's like silent for half the time and then the instrument kicks in halfway through. A stem needs to make noise right away the moment that it's triggered. But that can create another potential problem when it comes to composing. The idea of overwriting was something that I grappled with quite a bit. And if you don't really think that through, the music can feel overwhelming,

just as if you were listening to an orchestra and every section just started to play some really busy solo all at once and it was just a cacophony. And you really don't want that. All of the layers have to work together even though they all have to work alone. So I started thinking about it in terms of how puzzle pieces fit together.

And I also did a lot of call and answer gesturing between stems where one stem would be essentially stating half of the melody and then another stem would be answering with the other half. So when you listened to them on their own, they had a melody that felt satisfying to listen to, but when you listen to them together, they completed each other. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express.

Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrails.ca There's another approach where you don't break down a piece of music into its individual instruments or components. Sometimes Winnerfrid will compose a piece of music that is meant to be heard in its entirety, all the instruments blended together at once, but she will slice the piece of music into sections. For instance, this is music that she composed for the game Little Big Planet. Now you're slicing it kind of like a loaf of bread. You're cutting it into pieces and you can separate those pieces and juggle them around.

Like a string of pearls, you could string them in different orders, essentially building different mini compositions that are a reflection of the whole. That's so interesting. So that's kind of like the idea of like songs in an album versus like a piece. Like let's say you're listening to, you go online,

you're listening to, let's say, your favorite soundtrack to a movie. And here's the main theme. And the main theme is five minutes long, and there's ups and downs and different parts of it. But you actually have composed it in such a way that it's the equivalent of like, let's say you go on Spotify,

you click on your favorite album, but then you just do shuffle. And all the songs are being played in different orders than they were initially intended, but it all works. You can actually take all the components of that one theme, let it shuffle around, and it will work in any direction. Is that what you're saying? That is very close to what it feels like, except it could be structured so that each one of these sections is internally loopable. So the introductory section can repeat over and over again until the

player achieves some objective and then the music moves on into the build-up that leads to the main theme. So now we're in that build-up section and you get that sense of increasing anxiety and that section could also loop until the player reaches the next objective and And then all of a sudden, the game engine triggers the main theme to begin. And you have that perhaps bombastic statement of musical force that greets the player when they've perhaps faced a new boss enemy character who's especially challenging and it creates a sense of more epic stakes. But if a player is stuck on a level,

they may hear that loop for hours or days or weeks, depending on how hard it is to get past that level. I asked you if you ever worries whether a player might be stuck on a level that's really difficult, but then they start to associate his music with feelings of frustration and annoyance. For sure. For sure.

Oh, and I think about it because like when we're writing it, we're listening to our music like a billion times, you know, and sometimes it's like you think about it, you're like, oh man, I wonder if this is going to be super boring. You know? So yeah, you definitely think about it, but like, hopefully we are doing our job in terms of telling the story and we're not in your face all the time. So I guess that's when that's when the player is like, you know, not really noticing the music, he just in the world.

Right. So that's, that's our job. But in the eighties and nins, didn't we like hearing the same musical themes over and over again? Winifred says, yes, but. Sometimes that doesn't translate into more modern games where you're going for a more modern aesthetic because the players don't expect that kind

of repetitive musical content in those games. When you are leaning into the retro aesthetic, the idea of music that's of repetitive musical content in those games. When you are leaning into the retro aesthetic, the idea of music that's highly repetitive is fitting. It's what people are used to and they love it because it's a part of childhood or a part of history and it's something that can make you smile. But when you start looking at more modern games and if you try to approach them with the same idea

of a highly repetitive score like that, it can hit the wrong notes. So you kind of have to grapple with it and see how you can create a really memorable motif or melodic theme, but still not have that melody out, stay its welcome. Technology has advanced to the point where there aren't many technological limitations left to composing in video games. And that's a good thing.

Or should be. Tom Lucas at Bleeding Fingers says, That itself could be a limitation. There's this saying in German, I have no idea if it translates or if people say it here, but sometimes it's hard to see the forest because of all of the trees. Yeah, sorry, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. People use that here too. Ah, yeah, okay, yeah. In fact, if Tom is working on a game that doesn't have any limitations,

he might put limitations on himself. For instance, when he was working on a level of the Ark Knights game. That level is taking place in like a 50s Hollywood film stage. And so the music should reflect that golden era of Hollywood type of composition, but also type of sound. So they really wanted to go with that vintage and feel, which is hard to do nowadays because music doesn't sound like that anymore. So if you're all of a sudden, there's this challenge,

and now you need to think, okay, well, in this case, how do I actually manage that it doesn't sound new and modern, but it actually sounds like it comes from that era? So I was reading articles on how they recorded music back then and listening to a lot of music from that era. And in this case, I remember thinking back in a day when track count was very limited, there was only sometimes one microphone picking up the whole orchestra. And by cleverly spacing the musicians, it still had that depth to it. And I have a little tape machine back there to Nagra. When I was done, I just put the whole music through it,

and it actually helped with making it mono because it it only outputs mono. To be honest, I certainly love to be limited every now and then because now the possibilities are just literally endless. Again, Gio Rios. With the Ark Knight group, to be honest, like they're super specific and that puts you in a box, like in terms of genre, in terms of like what they're looking for. They're super detailed when they tell you we want this, this section, we want this and they explain it, which I certainly love because I know exactly what they want. And that puts me in a box and it's's awesome because that's when when you're in a pinch

and when you're in a box, you have to think quick and it needs to be precise and it needs to sound exactly like what they want. Sometimes we do get those that kind of know the direction, but they don't know how to explain it. That's when our different hats come in, in terms of like being like a psychologist. You know, I mean? Like everything, you know, you have to get it out of them. Being constrained a bit, it's super helpful to get to the finish line for sure.

But there is one more threshold looming on the horizon. Like a lot of creative industries, AI is probably going to have a big impact on gaming. Will Gibbons, the video game historian, has been wondering, What's going to happen when we start having effective structures that can kind of compose in real time, right? So maybe instead of composing as a standard composer, you're sort of setting up the rules and training the AI in a certain way. And then it really can kind of shape itself around your own experience. And that's, it's exciting, but it's also, I think, scary for the industry to think about, you know,

are we going to go into an area where it's sort of post-composer or post-musician? To my surprise, the composers that I talked with were all pretty unfazed about AI. In fact, they seemed excited that AI could speed up the technical functions of their job. Could AI do their job? In theory, yes, but it could never compose with a sense of taste or make judgment calls about how to balance different elements in a musical mix. In fact, Will is hopeful AI could be a useful tool which allows game music to be even more interactive. In a game like Grand Theft Auto, right, you get into the car and you can listen to the radio stations and that's a large part of the entertainment of the game. What if the music of the radio station wasn't locked in place

to the year the game came out or the last time it was updated. Can you create these live service games where the soundtrack is constantly updating, right? You know, where new music can just constantly go into the radio stations in a game like that, or where they can, you know, sort of keep uploading the eternal soundtrack that it's never finished. It just keeps changing over the life of the game. A song can play in the background on the radio or in a grocery store, but we're not passive listeners when it comes to video game music. It seeps into our consciousness because gameplay is so immersive and interactive. The music belongs to each of us in our own way. It becomes part of our personal story of how we made it through different levels of our lives.

That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Tom Lucas, Gio Rios, Russell Emanuel, Winifred Phillips, and William Gibbons. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. Phillips and William Gibbons. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included

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