Last time - Halo: Reach - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=142744
This time - “Arrest that man!”
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Marty O’Donnell was an awkward fit at Bungie at the beginning, and not just because his political leanings were rumored to be more to the right than any other employee’s were. He characterized it as a scrappy, frat house-like place where “I was the professional and they were like a bunch of kids” (Bungie folks would call him “the Elder Statesman” to his face as a joke about the age difference). But they had both ridden each other to glory, and O’Donnell was more than just a composer to them. He also oversaw sound design and voices. He is generally credited for coaching the actress who played the famed AI character Cortana on what voice to use after an original British accent was seen as too familiar to an earlier role of hers. He also was an uncredited contributor to a lot of the story elements of the franchise, particularly in the later games.
Even with O’Donnell’s contributions, Bungie hadn’t always been the best with meeting deadlines, and in early 2013 an announcement event for its new post-Microsoft franchise Destiny didn’t even include footage from the game, instead showcasing conceptual elements. What it did have though was excerpts of an eight-movement suite O’Donnell had written with Michael Salvatori and Paul McCartney (!) called Music of the Spheres. Attendees reported it sounded great, but when a trailer finally emerged that summer generic rock music backed it. O’Donnell went public in saying that he had nothing to do with that music and that it was put together by Activision, Bungie’s new distribution partner. Later court documents revealed O’Donnell was grumpier after that, not only about the trailer but also because no one was cooperating with his request to release Music of the Spheres as a standalone album ahead of the game, and his colleagues thought he became less productive as the game’s protracted development process pushed into late 2013 and early 2014.
Flash forward to April 2014 and a shock was revealed: a multi-decade partnership ended in the blink of an eye when Bungie fired O’Donnell. His Halo franchise co-composers Michael Salvatori, C Paul Johnson, and Stan LePard stayed on the Destiny music team, but while snippets of Music of the Spheres ended up on a score album released later in the year the rest of the game’s music went in a decidedly different direction (though some future album releases for the franchise would credit O’Donnell on select tracks, likely for use of his themes). The next 9 years had O'Donnell tied up more in litigation than in composing. First came his suit against Bungie for unpaid vacation time, then another over Bungie revoking his founder’s shares. He won both of those, but one condition of those settlements was that he was not allowed to distribute Music of the Spheres. A 2017 album leak finally put the music out there for folks to hear; O’Donnell claimed he wasn’t responsible. When he uploaded that material in 2019 to YouTube and Bandcamp, Bungie pounced and got him declared in contempt of court, which led to him paying Bungie’s $100,000 legal bill and having to post a video asking fans to delete any material they had downloaded (the website Eurogamer would give its reporting on the matter the hilarious subheader “Music of the Tears”). Not all of this was Bungie-related; he and Michael Salvatori filed a separate suit against Microsoft in 2021 alleging that the two hadn’t been paid appropriate music royalties over the last twenty years, which was settled in 2022.
O’Donnell also co-founded the studio Highwire Games with another former Bungie employee, but (in true Bungie fashion) their first game Golem missed its intended release date by over a year and didn’t make much of an impact when it launched in 2019. A combat game focused on the Second Battle of Fallujah was announced in 2021 but is still in development. Since then, if O’Donnell has surfaced at all it's either been for legacy Halo interviews or - surprisingly - politics. The staunch conservative placed fourth in a Nevada Republican primary for Congress last year and intends to run again in the next cycle. He would be one of the wealthiest members of Congress if elected, even accounting for all those legal fees he paid Bungie. Salvatori on the other hand stuck around with Bungie for another 9 years but was shockingly jettisoned when the studio laid off close to 100 employees in late 2023, though he was credited on the Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape which got an album release in June 2024.
But never mind all that. How was Halo music faring in the early 2010s?
Worse, somehow.
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Microsoft’s 343 Industries did not get off to a stellar start with its ownership of the Halo franchise. This was notoriously the case when the studio released a “Master Chief Collection” of the original trilogy (including the anniversary remaster of Halo 2) in 2014 with a host of technical issues. But things were already askew years earlier with its launch of Halo 4, even with the game raking in money in its initial weeks in 2012. An injection of gameplay elements that would’ve felt more at home in Call of Duty was met with a mixed reception. The campaign was subpar relative to the series’ highs, with a confounding storyline at times. The online population collapsed within a year. Amazingly, the studio even elected to recast the voices for Master Chief and his AI assistant Cortana, something they backtracked on after users reacted poorly to the change during the game’s under-the-radar beta testing.
The music was another case where things went askew - and was commented on in that aforementioned beta testing. The studio originally went with record producer and songwriter Neil Davidge who was best known for his work with the English band Massive Attack but in scoring was a relative neophyte; he’d composed for a handful of smaller projects and was an additional contributor on Ramin Djawadi’s Clash of the Titans replacement score but was untested as a lead writer on a project of this scale. In some ways Davidge (likely assisted greatly by orchestrator Matt Dunkley) exceeded expectations, with some in-your-face fusions of orchestral and electronic production (Awakening, the original piece he wrote for the studio) and other astonishingly beautiful sections like the end of Green and Blue. There are moments of edgy coolness at a level of layered sonic sophistication that O’Donnell’s style never came close to.
But explicit recurring themes were at a minimum; Davidge jettisoned everything O’Donnell and Salvatori had done for the franchise to date but didn’t replace it with anything equally distinctive. Absent clear musical signifiers, a lot of action and suspense passages play more like constantly chugging noise, the score abandoning the prog rock and synth pop legacy of the franchise in favor of something closer to Davidge’s roots in trip hop and industrial fare. Davidge later admitted that he struggled for a while to figure out how to adapt to game scoring, in part because he often had to work off of scene descriptions and art stills instead of finished footage, resulting in three of the seven hours of music he came up with not even making the game (some of those still ended up on the album releases though). He later claimed to have substantially reworked O’Donnell’s ideas in several of his compositions, but as none of this is transparent on the albums it’s worth speculating if those were some of the discarded pieces. He also conceded that working in London while the rest of the game’s developers were in Seattle created communication issues that were tough to overcome.
While Davidge has continued scoring films and television, Halo 4 remains the only video game he’s ever worked on. His take on it, two hours of which was released across two soundtrack volumes, is ultimately a score that misses the forest for the trees by excelling in select moments while having no overarching narrative. It just might be the best bad score ever.
If you wondered why there was one track on the first soundtrack volume that seemed different from this, it’s because into the fray had stepped Kazuma Jinnouchi, who was hired as an in-house composer at 343 about a year before Halo 4 came out (he and audio director Sotaro Tojima had previously worked together at Konami). The game makers had a sense that what they’d put together was not delivering “strong music pieces which the Halo fans really love,” and Jinnouchi was tasked with trying to solve that. His seven-minute 117 piece, the only track on the original soundtrack release credited to him, was an impressive solution, delivering a noble tune that fit within the legacy aesthetic of the franchise. Jinnouchi even managed to sneak in an epic reference to O’Donnell’s original theme in its action variant in that track. The other 30 minutes credited to him on the second soundtrack volume combine additional variations on the 117 idea (including the hammering Mantis), muscular orchestral material, and even a dreamy and determined arrangement of O’Donnell’s Never Forget tune.
While abbreviated, Jinnouchi’s contributions were also a tantalizing suggestion of future possibilities. One got the sense that if Microsoft / 343 had more time they might’ve had him replace the entirety of Davidge’s contributions. What would happen if they gave him enough time to score an entire game?
The Davidge tracks: **½ - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5GvbHRC3D0Nui8lnJC0wl5
The Jinnouchi tracks: ***½ - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Xewoe2G8lxnAdhZA9UWDc
Halo 4 overall: ***
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343 also put together a decently-received web series Forward Unto Dawn originally released as five 15-minute episodes on various places prior to the release of Halo 4, with the show later ending up on DVD and Netflix. Nathan Lanier, only in his mid-30s at the time with a resume largely made up of scores for shorts and independent films, was given the scoring assignment, and close to an hour of his music made an album released in 2013. By and large it’s stock chugga-chugga action material and suspense ambience on a limited budget, though given that this was more a live-action promotion than standalone content it would’ve been unfair to expect much more; the director later joked that at $10M across the 75 minutes of runtime they were either “the best-funded web series of all time, an mid-road TV pilot, or a super-low-budget movie.” There are a handful of tracks that make intriguing if subtle use of a rhythmic motif from Davidge’s piece To Galaxy (a track that only partially shows up in Halo 4, and even then just in a multiplayer menu), but nonetheless the inoffensively predictable album seems to exist only for completists.
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn: ** - https://open.spotify.com/album/5QaiPJKkEujdDDAE4zx3Zm
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Next time: “A lot less ammo will go to waste if you aim with the right stick while firing.”
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