One of the most well-known score themes of the 21st century came to its composer while he was in the car.
Marty O’Donnell - USC trained, former prog rocker, established writer of advertising and game music - had scored several earlier games for the studio Bungie, most with his colleague Michael Salvatori. But for the studio’s new in-progress project, a combat game set on a mysterious alien world, he was tasked with writing something that “should give a feeling of importance, weight, and sense of the ancient to the visuals,” which was giving the composer “fear and trepidation.” And he had a weekend to come up with music for an upcoming presentation. Somehow he hummed the tune, a kind of Gregorian-style chant taking some inspiration from (of all things) Yesterday by the Beatles that evolved into a percussive action piece, in a car ride to his studio and later recruited several other commercial music composing buddies to provide monk-like singing. “We really didn’t have any time to second-guess.”
The theme would debut as part of the trailer shown at the 1999 Macworld Conference & Expo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ
Fascinatingly, nearly every aspect of that trailer would be jettisoned over the next two years as the game evolved from an open world concept into a first-person shooter, yet O’Donnell’s music would remain. Furthermore, Bungie was dealing with significant financial pressures, and Microsoft stepped in with an acquisition in June 2000; this was fortuitous not just for a software company that needed a tentpole game for the XBox console set to launch in 2001 but also for Marty O’Donnell who had switched from being a contractor to Bungie’s audio director less than two weeks before the acquisition.
The choral element and the main theme in both its spiritual and action-packed variants were retained, but the full composition done by both O’Donnell and Salvatori went in vastly different directions, spanning influences across prog rock, 70s and 80s synth pop, the more electronic scores of James Horner and Joe Hisaishi, drums at the intersection of tribal and martial, Arabic chant, and a dash of classical music. O’Donnell would later call it “Samuel Barber meets Giorgio Moroder.” While musicians were hired to play for the aforementioned Macworld trailer and a few live instruments were recorded for subsequent tracks, nearly the entire score was done on keyboards, synths, samplers, and MIDI devices. To the credit of both composers, they were able to coordinate all these elements in a way that makes sense; the score generally avoids feeling scattershot despite its myriad influences. Moreover, the music was undeniably effective in context, lending a sense of mythic grandeur and tech-savvy coolness to the combat and the environments.
There was a mad rush to complete the game, to the point that its 33 cutscenes weren’t available to score until three days before the game was due (day two was September 11th, 2001); O’Donnell later characterized July, August, and September as “one long hellish blur.” And no one really knew if it would be a success or not; the game’s showcase at the 2001 E3 gaming conference was a near-disaster, and O’Donnell for his part figured he’d just move back to Chicago when things were done. But while Halo wasn’t a runaway success from the get-go when it went on sale in November 2001, within five months it had sold one million units and established the Xbox as a viable gaming platform that could compete with Sony’s and Nintendo’s. That success didn’t immediately lead to a soundtrack album though; Bungie had put out some albums for its earlier games, but Microsoft was suspicious of the commercial potential for a game score CD.
It was only thanks to Nile Rodgers that this eventually changed in summer 2002; the musician, songwriter, and record producer (and avid gamer) had started a new game music label Sumthing Else Musicworks a few years ago and was looking for new material to release. The 65 minutes that made the album does lose some of its power when heard standalone, particularly the suspense material which has a cheap TV-movie-of-the-week feel to it. And heard today it does feel like an unrefined pass at concepts that O’Donnell and Salvatori would later get the budget to arrange in more impressive forms. But at the same time there’s a kind of dreaminess to some of the synth-heavy passages that didn’t persist to the same Moroder-esque level going forward, plus there are a few one-offs that weren’t revisited later in the franchise (namely a swamp evocation that suggests someone may have had Trevor Jones’ similar music for The Dark Crystal on the mind). The whole thing is a little raw at times, but it’s indisputable that O’Donnell and Salvatori generally nailed the concept from the get-go.
Score in game context: ****
Original score recording on album: *** - https://open.spotify.com/album/4eOwVM6B9yJCwk030GGYRI
Overall rating: ***½
-------
Following the end of Bungie’s tenure with the franchise, Microsoft’s in-house studio delivered a “remastered” anniversary version of the game a decade after its original release and commissioned Pyramind Studios to provide new arrangements of the original tunes (O’Donnell, Salvatori, and Bungie were off trying to make a competing game). Pyramind COO Paul Lipson and three other composers had to transcribe everything since MIDI recordings of the original game’s music didn’t exist. Despite the services of a symphony orchestra and a vocal ensemble (instead of the overdubbed voices O’Donnell and his buddies provided ten years earlier), the whole thing - branded a “remix” but essentially a re-recording of the original score - certainly sounds more robust in context but also has a weird lifelessness to it when heard on its own. Lipson & co. basically got the sound mix up to Halo 3 standards but didn’t bring much new to the table. They probably weren’t asked to, so it seems unfair to punish the team for doing their job, but nonetheless the album can’t help but feel unnecessary - not bad in any way, just overly familiar. Years later O’Donnell commented on how they had recorded elements different than how he wrote them, with the string part broken out into different sections of the ensemble instead of having the same players do the whole rhythm, which in his mind robbed the action variant of the main theme of its “aggressiveness and confusion.”
2011 anniversary re-recording on album: **½ - https://open.spotify.com/album/0rfm9799u3MynzweWN140v
-------
Next time: “For a brick, he flew pretty good!”
