Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 238: Nathan McCree on Composing Tomb Raider Tunes

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Composer Nathan McCree reminisces about his groundbreaking work creating the soundtrack for Lara Croft's earliest adventures, the challenges in revisiting that material decades later, and... The Spice Girls?!

Hey friends, do you like listening to us talk? Well, good news. You have two opportunities to come hear us talk live and in person this summer. On August 10th and 11th, I'll be teaming up with cool people from the Video Game History Foundation, My Life in Gaming and Hardcore Gaming 101 to present a couple panels at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo in Garden City, New York. And if that's the wrong side of the country for you, well, I have good news. At the end of the month, both Bob and I will be putting in multiple appearances at Pax West. Bob will be presenting a live Talking Simpsons panel, while I'll be team. gaming up with U.S. Gamer to contemplate the Metal Gear timeline. After that, Retronauts will be closing out the show with back-to-back Monday afternoon presentations, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast and debating Metroid mania supremacy by weighing the merits of Super Metroid against Castlevania Symphony the Night. It's a whole lot of us, live and in your face. Come see us. Or you can stay safely at home with the idea of having to deal with podcast personalities and real time sounds unreasonably annoying. Either way, there's no stopping the fact that we're going to be spouting a whole lot of words about video game history.

out of our Facebooks. This week in Retronauts, the Ballad of Ms. Croft. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and with me this week, I have a very special guest on the line from the Czech Republic, if I'm not mistaken. That's correct, yeah. Yeah, so this is Nathan McCree, the composer of the first three Tomb Raider games, and actually, why don't you introduce yourself, Nathan? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi, Jeremy, yes. Yeah, you got my name right.

I started out in computer games back in 1993, writing chip music on the Sega Mega Drive. And I did a few titles on that. And of course, then the CD consoles came out in 1994. I think it was the Sega Mega CD, was the first one that I was working on. And of course, that was a big game changer for us, because suddenly, you know, we were able to record anything audio. We weren't limited to just, you know, what the chips could make.

So suddenly we were competing with, you know, music bands and live orchestra recordings and, you know, anything that you could physically record, basically. So, yeah, it was a big changer for us in the games industry. And it kind of paved them up. way, I guess, for me to do orchestral music. I'd already been doing a little bit of orchestral work on the, on the megadrive. But obviously with six-note polyphony on those chips, it's pretty tricky. So once we got into the CD world, it was great, you know, just opened up the possibilities. And we didn't have sample libraries then, didn't have anything like orchestral

sample libraries. So we were still a little bit restricted to the synthesizers of the time and and what they could produce, but there were some pretty decent keyboards out there then. Personally, I was using Roland JV-1080s, which was a rack form of the JV-90, and you could expand that with various sound boards, and I pushed the boundaries there,

and I installed two orchestral boards in each of my unit. So, yeah, it gave me a lot of power, a lot of note polyphony. I think I had 64-note polyphony on each machine. So, yeah, I was able to kind of produce something that sounded pretty close to a live orchestra. So that's kind of how I got started on the road. Right, and you recently kick-started a symphonic version of, like the Tomb Raider Suite, I think is what you're calling it. So you've actually been able to take those pseudo-o-o-o-chestral works.

that you did on PlayStation and PC and Saturn and turned those into an actual performance with an actual orchestra. What brought it that about? What was the process of kind of making that happen and launching the Kickstarter? Well, I actually had this idea back in 1997 because just after ToonModew 1 had come out,

I had a phone call from Decker Records who wanted to release the soundtrack and when I talked to my boss at the time as it turned out he wasn't interested so that whole deal just fell flat on its face but it kind of popped the idea in my head and I thought yeah actually wouldn't it be nice to hear this Tomb Raider music

actually played by a live orchestra you know to get that sort of real emotion behind it so I never kind of forgot that idea and I just kept talking to the people at IDAS and then Square Enix and just kind of asking them, look, let's do this album, let's do this album. I just kept getting nose from them for years and years and years. And eventually in 2014, we were two years away

from the 20th anniversary of the release of Toon Raider. And so at that time, it became of interest to Square Enix. They thought it would be a nice way to finish off their celebrations for the 20th anniversary. So the idea was that we would plan a concert to play the most popular pieces from Tomb Raiders 1, 2 and 3. But those game cues, if you like,

they were all quite short, only about 30 seconds or maybe a minute long. So I extended each of those pieces out to in excess of three minutes. and came up with the Toomerate's Suite. So basically you've got the original cues from the games, but they've been extended and embellished. And I had to be careful how I wrote that,

so I didn't want it to suddenly, I didn't want people to suddenly think, oh, you know, there's a new bit. You know, I wanted them to kind of think that this had always been there. So I was quite particular about how I was writing because, you know, my writing style has obviously changed in 20 years. So it was very important for me to kind of not make it overcomplicated

and to try and remember how I would have written it 20 years ago. Right, to kind of put yourself in the headspace of where you were two decades ago. Exactly. So it was quite a lot of fun. So I spent three months in the studio. I'd written the suite, but we were running out of time in terms of recording the album. So I wanted to actually record the album first and then do the live show because then we could sell the CDs at the show

so you make a bit more money. But, you know, that didn't happen. We're running out of time and we were struggling to find a record company to fund the album. So we decided to put the album on hold and just do the live show first because we had to hit 2016, basically. We had to hit the end of the year to sort of tie in with the anniversary. So we got an investor involved for the live show,

and we put that on at the Apollo and Hammersmith in London. We had about 2,000 fans there, and we managed to achieve three standing evasions that night, which was really, really amazing. And that, to me, just confirmed that, you know, there was still interest for this music, and that we should definitely proceed with the album. But having sort of got a bit stuck finding record companies,

I thought, well, let's do a Kickstarter and let's open this up to the fans and let's, you know, let's include them on the journey, you know, maybe in some decisions that we were making about artwork and this sort of thing, you know, let's have a launch party, let's get them to the launch party, let's invite them to Abbey Road, you know, this kind of thing. so that's really where the Kickstarter idea started and we spent probably a good six months planning that and then we launched somewhere around I think it was May in 2017 and it was a huge success we raised 121% of our funding so off to Abbey Road we went and yeah We went into the recording sessions in October 2017. We mixed and mastered it at Abbey Road again in February of 2018. And then finally, having gone through all the bureaucracy of registering the music, which took a hell of a long time,

we eventually released the album on digital outlets in October 2018. And we have CDs and vinyl just about to come out now. So that's kind of where we're at, where we're at. It's interesting you say that, you know, when Deca approached you about releasing the album, you know, the Tomb Raider soundtrack back, you know, when the game was new, that your boss wasn't interested. I feel like the idea of publishing game music as something that people would just listen to took a long time to catch on, you know, in Europe and the U.S. Yeah. Whereas in Japan, like there was, you know, by the time Tomb Raider came out, there was like a decade or more.

of kind of tradition there of people, you know, not only releasing their original game soundtracks, but then having orchestral arrangements or like hard rock bands cover the music or, you know, like the actual composers setting up a gig and recording the music on live instruments. Do you have any thoughts on why that seemed to have caught on, you know, in Japan, but, you know, everyone else was kind of slow to catch on to the idea? I don't know. I don't know why, you know, Japan started doing it first. I mean, I was aware that they were doing it, and I was aware that we weren't doing it. And I was all for doing it, because I thought, well, you know, why not?

You know, apart from getting my own music released, there were plenty of other composers over in the West writing some brilliant game scores. And I thought, yeah, you know, this should be a medium that's released. And in Japan, I think the computer game soundtrack market is bigger than their movie and popular music industry is put together. So, you know, it's huge over there. I was pretty confident that we would eventually follow suit. I think, I don't know, you know, maybe it's just a cultural difference. You know, they're probably more technology-led over there than we are. And maybe it's just about that.

I don't know. I'm not quite sure. I'm just glad that we're finally doing it. It's just a bit of a shame. It's taking 20 years. Yeah, I mean, it seems like if you have a big label like Deca coming to you and saying, hey, we want to put your music out, that's kind of, you know, like that's like a slam dunk. You've got it right there.

So it's a shame it didn't happen back in the day. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I was pulling my hair out. You know, I was like, why don't you want to do it? you know, if Decker Records think it's a good idea, you know, surely it is, you know, we should do it. We should have done it then. And I think we should have, you know, paved the way a bit sooner.

And then maybe, you know, the West would have started doing this kind of thing a bit earlier. I don't know. You know, I'm just glad that it's happening now. But, you know, it has been something that, yeah, you know, I've been wanting to do for all this time and pushing to try and make it happen. I'm Oh, Ah, Oh,

And Uh, Oh, Uh, Uh, Uh, And eventually, you know, I think, not eventually, but I feel like there's a very strong sort of musical connection with Tomb Raider. I know, you know, a few years after the first game came out, U-2 was using Tomb Raider and their rock.

bands and I feel like the movies that came out were very sort of heavily like the the soundtracks really factored into that and were kind of a big deal on their own so you know do you do you feel like you kind of kicked that off like you started the tradition there of Lara and being associated with great music uh well I guess I would like to think so um you know my my scores for Tomb Raider, I think were unique in the sense that I tried to add emotional content which was not present in other computer games at the time. You know, most of the stuff that was being written was either, you know, bombastic battle music or, you know, dance-based rhythms for, you know, driving games or even you know battle games um there didn't seem to be any sadness loneliness any love

you know there wasn't any of those kind of emotions you know um and i thought well if gamers you know gamers certainly like movies and there's plenty of emotional content in movies you know why shouldn't that exist in games and it was just about finding the right game where emotional content made sense for it to be there. And for me, Tomb Raider opened up that door. You know, here was this beautiful girl who was, you know, very strong in her character, but who was pretty much a loner, you know, I think, if I remember her history correctly, she'd lost her parents in some plane crash or something.

But she was rich, and so, you know, she was. out searching for artifacts pretty much on our own, you know, battling, you know, anybody that kind of got in her way. So there was a sense of loneliness in Lara and, of course, beauty, and, you know, any human being has reflections on their past and, you know, what's happened and where they are now. So I thought, well, you know, here's an opportunity for me to kind of tell those emotions in this story and because there were so many hours particularly in the first two-maida game

where you were kind of wandering through caves with pretty much nothing going on you were just trying to find your way out I thought well you know here's a chance for us to perhaps describe what Laura might be thinking while she's running around

while she's sort of looking for the exit you know she's not being distracted by you know enemies or you know big explosions or stuff like that she's literally just kind of searching for some door or some exit to get into the next level so you know the opportunity was there so i just decided to kind of go for it and and see if it would work um so it was very much an experimentation and um yeah thankfully i i think uh i think it did work yeah i think uh summing up the the the audio quality The musical quality as loneliness is really pretty spot on.

You know, I've always felt like it, especially the first game, has a very, very wistful soundtrack. Like, there is this kind of melancholy about it. It's definitely the first action game I ever play that opened up with, like, obo as the lead instrument. That is an oboe, right? Yeah, yeah. Or like a synthesizer of a whole, isn't it? Because oboes are often used to sort of play, you know, melancholic melodies. so yeah straight away you're in there

yeah so it does have you know a really interesting tone to it and you know that was one of the first PlayStation games that I bought and it really it really was very striking like it made a very strong impression on me just because it was so different than you know what I played on like Super Nintendo

or Sega Genesis or whatever you know those were generally either like you said sort of bombastic or they attempted to be like big movie style scores or had like dance or heavy metal styles to them. And then you get to Tomb Raider, which is just so much quieter and more contemplative.

And, you know, I was also very aware about giving the player space to think. And if you bombard them with busy music, there isn't any room to think, you know, and you need to leave room for sound effects. you need to leave room for the environment and so I was very aware of that and the orchestrations that I made were consequently quite minimal

just to leave the whole experience with as much space as possible and that draws the player draws the experience, it draws them into the game and you feel you know part of that world that that was really my main goal not just behind the music but also about the design

for the sound effects you know that's what I wanted because when I first saw those environments it was like wow this is great this looks fantastic you know and it's great to be able to you know walk around in this virtual world

and you know I spent hours just you know looking around those games not so much of Tune Radio but particularly with Toon Motor 2 and 3, I had more access to the game. But, you know, there was, my impressions from Toon Radio 1 was that there was a lot of space in there and a lot of time to think. So I wanted to exaggerate that, if you like. Yeah, the sound design overall is very reminiscent to me of, you know, a game like MIST or something like that,

which is a very, very slow-paced, no-action, adventure game. that was very heavily reliant on ambient sound more than, you know, the music. And the music was used more kind of as punctuation. And you expect that from adventure games at the time. But, you know, this is a game where you're carrying around, you know, twin double eagle or desert eagle pistols and fighting dinosaurs and weird monsters from, you know, a thousand years ago or whatever. It's a very different play experience than missed.

But I think the use of that sort of minimal. very restrained musical style does a lot to kind of put you into the same exploratory puzzle-solving headspace as something like mist or you know the journey and project or whatever those those those PC pre-rendered screen-by-screen adventure games but in a completely different context right right you know I mean and I think with the you know the fact that it was a sort of a puzzle game intrinsically there was still that sense of adventureing. So you know

again it's about giving the player space to think and particularly with the puzzle solving and there were some really really tricky puzzles you know you don't want to be distracted by some music hammering away in your ears you know you you need to sit back and go

right how am I going to do this what have I got to do and you know you spend a lot of time in that game looking around looking at ledges and and gaps and thinking how am I going to get across this ravine where you know where is the way forward so that that's really what I wanted to try and maintain yeah I think you know the the fact that there is so much silence in the game makes makes the music much more impactful when it does appear it feels like oh something significant has just happened right something significant has

just happened. You know, like, listening to the symphonic suite, you know, getting to certain tracks, like, I'm immediately taken back, even though it's been so long since I played the original Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider, too, like, I'm taken back to where I, you know, where in the game that I was when I heard that music and what that music communicated, like, oh, this is the part where Mara finds the Coliseum, this is definitely the part where she fights the dinosaurs. It's very sort of, like, yeah, like, it really has impact. and really sticks with you. Right.

Yeah, so, you know, I spent quite a bit of time talking to the level designers and trying to find out, you know, the arc of the story with each level. You know, what – and I'd start by saying, what happens in this level? What does she do? What's the goal? Oh, well, she does this. And then eventually she finds this, which unlocks that. She gets this, and then she can open that door, and out comes a monster.

And then if she kills him, she gets through to the next level. So, okay, so just in that kind of one sentence, you can pinpoint the climaxes in that level. She finds the key. You know, she unlocks that door. She gets through this section here. She meets the monster success, you know. So you can, from that, you can draw a little graph, you know, of, well, the key wasn't the highest bit, but it's certainly higher than just, you know, the bit before finding the key, you know. So you draw a little graph and you go.

got peaks and troughs. And then what I did was just try and describe those peaks with bits of music. So you get these little climaxes and wow, something important happens in the game. So wow, there's a bit of music there. And that just reinforces that special moment. And I think these are why, this is why those pieces remind you of those specific places in the game because certainly in Toonrador 1, the tunes weren't reused very much. So, you know, when they happened, they happened only once and that's it.

But, you know, I took on a similar approach with Tune Rader 2 and Tune Rader 3. I just had a little bit more time, so I wrote more music, and there were more peaks and troughs. You know, whether they're better or worse, I don't know, I guess it's up to the players to decide. I think they're all different, they all have their merits. We're going to be able to be. So you know, out working on, you know, chip tunes with the Sega Mega Drive. Can you talk about the process of working in that context versus, you know, versus working on a CD-ROM game? I mean,

you mentioned that you had, you know, more, more voices, like more abilities to sample and that sort of thing. But I'm just curious, like, in terms of methodology of composing the music and writing it, like, how differently did you have to think with the chip tune music? And what was what was the kind of the process of moving away from that and over to CD-ROMs-like? So, I mean, with the chip tunes and the games that we were writing, that sort of music for, the games were very different, certainly the ones that we were making at core design anyway. There were very much platformers. So, you know, the music tended to be theme tune, score screen, loading screen, you know, level one, level one completion, okay, and they were your tunes.

and because the way kind of chip music works you can loop these tunes seamlessly so I know we can do that with game music now but there was a time when we couldn't actually so with chip tunes you could loop tunes seamlessly so it's like great so here we are level one off we go here's the music and it just keeps going and going and going and going and it never stops all the time you're trying to get

through this level and that's a bit monotonous and there's no wonder people used to you know switch game music off because it never bloody stopped um and as soon as you finish one level then you get onto the highest the score screen then then then there'll be another tune and then ding the loading screen and be another tune and then back into level two you know it was just constant and monotonous um so that's kind of how we structured the music certainly on the on the games that that I was writing for in 1993 and early 1994. I tried to sort of adopt that similar kind of structure for the early CD games,

but it wasn't possible because the music was being streamed off the CD, and when you got to the end of a tune, the CD head had to skip back to the beginning of the tune, and there was a few hundred milliseconds of the CD head moving back so you'd actually get about a third of a second of silence in between the end of the tune and it's starting again. So I couldn't make it seamless. So what happened then is a way to get around that

was just sort of slowly fade the tune out and then it would start by slowly fading in. So the experience was that you wouldn't really, really noticed the music slowly disappearing and you wouldn't really notice it slowly starting. It would just sort of gradually come in and gradually go out. So that was my initial way of looping a CD tune. And then I thought, well, actually, it might be better to script a piece of music to last exactly the right amount of time for a particular level.

If I know how long it's going to take the player, then I can write the music to match exactly. And one of the games I did this for first was a game called Solstar, where it was a space shooter. And basically on rails, we knew exactly when the level started and we knew exactly when it finished. Right, right. If they died halfway through, okay, fine, they died, and we start the level again, you know. But I knew exactly when they were going to finish that level. So it was like, okay. So then I talked to the designers and I go, right, what?

What happens then in this level? Well, we've got this wave of Badi airships that come in first, and then we get the second wave that come in at this time, they finish at this time, then we get the third wave and the fourth wave, we get some bombers that come in on the sixth wave, then we get the big mothership that happens at the end, and then you finish the level.

It's like, okay, great. So I write down all the times, and then I write a piece of music to describe that. And then off we go. We start the level, we play the tune, synchronize the start, And off we go. Now you've effectively got a movie sequence that the player is interacting with. Okay? We know it lasts seven minutes, for instance, or seven minutes, 30 seconds. You know, you write a piece of music to fit.

So that was the next sort of progression, if you like, of me trying to use CD music to its best effect. it wasn't until I think many years later when I think the MP3 technology came in and what we're doing then it was basically loading in the music into memory and then you could seamlessly loop the tune in memory you see you weren't actually reading off the CD while it was playing

so you know that we then got back to the chip music kind of construct where you could have constantly looping music But I think by then, you know, people's opinions had changed and we'd started to realise that, you know, music looping forever was not the best way to describe a computer game, thankfully, because I don't think it is either. So that's kind of the differences that we went through in the early days.

And then, of course, you know, it got a lot more complicated after that once we started using you know game sound engines like f mod and ys and exact and all this kind of thing where we had and have interactive music functionality where you can change the layers of music

that are playing according to what's happening or you can change the part of the tune so you can jump from one section of a tune to another depending on what happens if a monster jumps out of you you can jump to a different part of the tune and this sort of thing. So now it's a lot more complicated. And I think the job of a games composer has changed again.

And now it's about writing music in as many fragments as possible so that it's as universally usable as possible. I think that's kind of where we're at at the minute. But for me, you know, it's writing music is always about, for me, it's all been about telling a story. So, you know, my melodies and harmonies. I always imagine there's some story going on and I try and say something with the music

rather than just have, say, a texture with a load of beats that's going on in the background. You know, I'm not a big fan of that sort of music. I like music to have a melody because I think that's what music is about. Music is a language and it can say something, so you should say something with it. so of all the different processes you've used to create music is there one that is most comfortable to you or you know the that you feel you can best express yourself in or do you feel like it's your job to you know make the best of the tools you have and express something regardless of what you've been you know kind of given to work with well it's um in the games industry it's about using your technology to its maximum um

It was always about that in the early days with chip music. It was about how can I make this sound great with only six notes or with only four notes. Now it's, well, how can I make this sound great with the technology to be able to record anything, any live instruments whatsoever, and the functionality of interaction, the interactive music systems. coupled with, you know, real-time effects, processes and all that sort of thing. You know how some, one of the techniques people have used for quite a number of years now is when there's an explosion nearby, they give you the, I forget the word now, is it tinnitus, tinnitus, where you get the ringing in your ears and then they, what they do is they EQ all the sound, they EQ all the top frequencies out so you can only hear the, you know, the sort of sub-base sort of sounds. They EQ that out and then they slowly bring the EQ back in again,

so you're hearing recovers. So there's all sorts of techniques that we can do using the game engine software. And it's about that, I think, in games. It's about utilising the tools you've got to maximum effect, to try and replicate reality. and yeah, just improve the overall sonic experience. Well, I think it's a delicate thing as well. You know, you can overdo it.

You know, and this was the thing that I was very conscious about with the Toonrower games is you can give people too much to listen to. And if you do that, then what happens is eventually a player will experience ear fatigue where it just becomes such a distraction. They can't actually focus. on what they're trying to do in the game. You know, the audio becomes a blocker to their sort of concentration.

And, you know, people will get physically ear tired from, you know, playing games and turn it off because it's just, I can't listen to it anymore. You know, it's just too much. And I think with a game like Toomoda, where you are spending the best part of a whole day, you know, just running around, trying to find out what it's supposed to be doing,

you have to be really careful not to burn people's ears out. So, you know, leaving that space in there is really, really important from that ear fatigue. Right, that's kind of the whole loudness wars thing that the music industry was talking about about a decade ago where everything was just kind of normalized to the point where every album was just a wall of sound from start to finish and there was no dynamic to it.

Right. So, you know, I guess you're saying that games kind of already went through that back in the chip tune days and had to kind of grow out of it already. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, definitely. But I think that it's still in danger of doing that. I think some games these days are still far too noisy. It's just like, oh my God, you know, I could only spend five minutes playing it.

I've got to turn it off. It's just too much. You know, and I think that's where designers go wrong as well. Because people design games without talking to the audio department. And it just seems crazy. You know, audio needs to be in those design meetings right in the beginning of the, you know, design process of games, you know, it's no good a designer going, well, we want this battle game, we're going to have, you know, these explosions going off, and they've got to

fight these soldiers and they've got to do this and they've got to do that and blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, for like 16 hours. And it's like, they don't talk to the audio guy and then they bring the audio guy in like two years later, oh, can you, you know, stick some audio on our game. It's like, well, this is just going to piss people off because all, we've got is 16 hours of explosions and machine gun fire. You know, nobody is going to want to sit there for 16 hours and do that and listen to that. And this is a mistake.

You know, if they include audio designers or directors, you know, at the beginning of the design process, then we will be able to say to them, okay, we need a break from this. We can't keep bombarding their ears full of all this stuff. We need some passage of, you know, rest or some sort of. some walk from this location to that location where they can take a breather, where they can have a break. Maybe we can just hear a few birds or some water trickling by some stream or something. You know, you have to give their ears a break.

You just can't fill it full of action for 16 hours. It's a mistake, I think. So we've talked a bit about how, you know, game audio technology evolved over, you know, the past 20 years. But you mentioned that you as a composer have changed a lot since. you worked on the first three Tomb Raider games, I was wondering if you could kind of talk about how your own approach to writing and, you know, just creating music has evolved, you know, maybe alongside technology, I don't know,

but since you, you know, worked with core designs on the Tomb Raider trilogy. Well, you know, I think I've just learned a lot. So I don't get, I don't get stuck so much, I suppose. You know, in the early days when I'm writing a tune and, and, you know, I would think, well, it needs to change now. I need to go somewhere else. Quite often I'd spend a few hours trying to find what that thing, what that new things that I'm supposed to be going to is.

Now I would spend less time trying to find that new thing. You know, I would know more from the mistakes that I've made in the past, what does work and what doesn't work. So I think I'm, I'm, kind of faster to get the result I'm looking for and you know I build my orchestral textures

much faster because I know more about what works to say a particular thing you know when I was younger I didn't know how to make it sound sad or I didn't know how to make it sound really really jolly you know of course

there's the obvious thing with major chords and minor chords but when you're dealing with an orchestral texture with 120 different sounds, knowing which sounds go together to sound frightening or which sounds go together to sound pleasant, that just comes from experience. So I think, you know, my writing has just become more efficient. I'm just better at it.

And, yeah, you know, you learn, you learn, you learn, new ways of harmonising things you learn better ways of saying things subtly you know I think when you're

when you start out writing music everything seems to be the same volume you know you because you're just thinking about notes really more than anything but I think as you progress you start to think

more and more about dynamics and subtlety and how, you know, something very, very quiet can make a real difference and a much better difference than if it was loud and the same volume as everything else. You know, when everything's at the same volume, there's no clarity. You know, you have to make some things very quiet and some things loud in order to, I guess, yeah, have that clarity, have that sort of space in the music to see and hear something playing. And yeah, I think that's kind of how it works. You just get better at refining your ideas, I think.

All right. So the work you've done on the symphonic suite with, you know, an actual orchestra, is this the first time you've worked with a full orchestra before? Is that something you're kind of an old hand with now? Well, it's the first time, I suppose, that it's been my project. You know, I did score a couple of the pieces, actually from Tomb Raider, for the video games live show, the first show that Tommy Tolerico did back in 2005. And that was probably,

I think that was probably the first time that I'd sort of worked on something where it was going to be performed by a live orchestra. You know, since then it's just kind of just small things here and there. Yeah, so this is probably the first one where it's been, you know, 100% me all the way. so it has been a big learning curve but it didn't seem something that I was estranged to in a way I think because I'd done those other sort of small things along the way

I kind of knew what the process was and I knew which bits I couldn't do so I knew where I needed to get other people in to kind of fill the gaps in in my knowledge. So that was quite important. But I felt really confident all the way that I could pull it off and I could do the job. So I wasn't really nervous about anything.

I think the most nervous part in the whole process was me actually getting up on stage at the Apollo and thanking everyone to come, who came to the concert. That was probably my most nervous moment. But I had all my family sat there as well. So, and it seems like it would be a career highlight for sure. Well, definitely, you know, there was 2,000 fans in front of me. There was a royal Philharmonic concert orchestra behind me and my family, you know, waiting to hear what I had to say. So, yeah, it was, it was a special moment, one that I will never forget.

So besides that, is there any particular, like, one track that you've worked on through your career, you know, one bit of music that you think, like, this is really great? I really feel like I captured something here and that you would hold up as, you know, one of the best things you've ever done? Well, I guess it would... I mean, it's quite a difficult question because I've written over 600, 650 tracks or something. Now, so there's lots of things that I'm proud of and lots of things that I think were a bit rubbish as well.

I think invariably, you know, you can't write brilliant stuff all the time. So I'm not happy about everything that I've done. But one thing which I was really chuffed about was when the Spice Girls contacted me shortly after I'd finished ToonMody 3. And they asked me if they could use

some of the Tune Maudy music for their next show that they were doing in 1999. And I said to them, well, look, rather than use music that's all attached to something that's already been written. I said, how about I write you something in the style of Tomb Raider? But it's got a little, you know, Spice Girls twist to it. And they thought this was a good idea, see?

So that's exactly what I did. I wrote the first kind of minute of the piece sounds a little bit like the Tomb Raider 2 theme tune. And then it morphs into something which sounds a little bit like the Skidoo from Toon Motor 2. But all the way through it, you've got this melody, which is one of the Spice Girls tracks. So I put all that together and it turned out great.

It was a synthesized orchestral thing, but with a dance beat behind it. And we put it all together, and the lighting director for their show, synchronised a laser display with pyrotechnics in sync every second to this piece of music and of course I was invited down to the show at Earl's Court Stadium in London with I think there

I think there was 22,000 people there had a front row seat and the lights went down and my tune started and 22,000 screaming girls jumped out of their seats going mental and off my tune went with all these lights and explosions going off and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen and yeah a proper uh proper heart stopping moment for me it was it was really quite a fantastic thing to have been a part of so that's probably something I would say that I'm

I'm very very proud of and it's and it did sound great I have to say is is that something they've released on record, or was it just part of their live show? No, it was just a live show. I think they did eight concerts in the UK. I think it was four in Manchester and four in London, if I remember rightly. I might be wrong on that, but I think that's right. And, yeah, it was broadcast live on Sky Tele. So there are some recordings of it on the internet,

but I think the broadcast started. I don't know, about 30 seconds after the actual intro music started. So there isn't the full piece there. But somebody did actually post the full studio version on YouTube of that track. So you can get it. It's on YouTube. What's the track called? It's called Marshlander.

Okay. All right. And the name... So people can check that out. Yeah. It's called Marshlander. The name comes from the fact that I was brought up in a county in England called Lincolnshire, and people from that place are called Marshlanders, because there's lots of

marshland there, basically. So I thought, yeah, why not? Let's call it Marshlander. All right. So just to kind of wrap this up, you know, now that you've pretty much put the bow on the Tomb Raider symphonic package and, you know, the... physical versions that are going out soon. Do you have any more, like, personal projects in the work,

or are there any dream projects you'd love to tackle sometime in the future? Yeah, you know, I would like to do a similar treatment that I've done for the Toonrader suite for several of my previous game soundtrack, certainly some of them from core design and some from years after that. The ones from Core Design would be something like Soul Star, Heimdel 2 and the Swagman I think those three soundtracks are

worthy of a live orchestral treatment so that's something that I would like to do and if it means we go down another Kickstarter route then maybe I need to test the water a little bit just to see kind of what interest is there But I'm kind of hoping that, you know, off the back of the Toon Raiders suite, people will start to be interested in some of my other game soundtracks. Because, you know, I personally, I think some of them are better than the Toonrader soundtracks.

But because those games weren't as popular, I guess, the soundtracks haven't had the same kind of coverage. so it would be nice to bring those into the limelight as well and do something with those so that's something which I'm going to try and pursue over the next few years most definitely well that sounds great and then finally if people missed out on the the Kickstarter for the Tomb Raider suite

is there a way they can buy the digital files or even the physical versions you know kind of after the Kickstarter campaign sure so the digital download is now available on all digital outlets so you know iTunes Amazon it's on all the streaming platforms as well Google Play Spotify so you can get the you can get the album through those channels you can also get it from our website which is www.com we will be distributing the dual case CDs in

just a couple of weeks time, or I think beginning of February is our next shipment. So the physical CD will be going out. We'll also be selling that on our website. I'm not quite sure how we're going to be distributing those physical products elsewhere yet. I don't know. Amazon, you know, is the obvious one, but Amazon tends to be only cost effective if you're shipping, you know, a lot of units. So it might be that we use some business. a little bit more accustomed to game soundtracks

like laced records or black screen or something like that. So we're still securing those distribution deals at the minute but certainly immediately you'll be able to get the CD from our website and we have a shop on our website which is payable through PayPal I think at the moment and then the vinyl the vinyl's are coming out in about two months time

and again the same kind of situation with that we'll be looking at a sort of a smaller distribution network but immediately it'll be available on our website as soon as we get those pressed and then we have a deluxe tin CD which will be coming out about a month after that and the same situation with that so that's where you can get it from at the minute

Yeah. So if you feel like dabbling in a bit of nostalgia, please go ahead. All right, Nathan, thanks so much for your time. And, yeah, good luck with your future projects. Thank you. So just a wrap, would you like to tell everyone where they can find you personally online or, you know, your website and so on and so forth? So, sure. The website is, like I said, www. Tomb Raider Suite.com. You can get us on Facebook, Tomb Raider Suite. Twitter, Tomb Raider Suite, Instagram, Tomb Raider Suite, again. I also have personal accounts, Nathan McCree on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.

And there's my profile on LinkedIn. And we're also on YouTube as well. I have a personal account on YouTube where most of the Tomb Raider Suite videos are going. So, yeah, you can find us pretty easily if you just search on Google. All right. Great. And of course, Retronauts, you can find at Retronauts.com. And on iTunes and other podcast services, just look for Retronauts. We're on social media, et cetera. And we are Patreon-supported, patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you subscribe three bucks a month, you get early access to higher quality audio files with no ads. It's exciting and great. So check that out.

You can find me, Jeremy Parrish, and Twitter as GameSpite. And check out my YouTube channel where I've been going through NES and Super NES and Game Boy and other video game systems chronologically. It's very, very methodical. So check that out on YouTube. Anyway, we'll be back again in

a few days with another Retronauts episode and a full, no, with a full episode in a few days and another bite-sized episode like this one in two weeks. Look forward to it. Nathan, thanks again and talk to you again some time. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you.